The History and Historiography of Science (2024)

1. Much of this essay focuses on trends and scholarship south of the Sahara and leaves largely to one side historiographies relating to medicine and technology, as other authors address these subjects in their chapters. It also relies predominantly on secondary literature in English. My heartfelt thanks to Tom Spear for inviting me to write it in the first place, and to several colleagues and students—David Schoenbrun, Michael Gordin, Jonathon Glassman, Andrea Rosengarten, Jessica Biddlestone, and an anonymous reviewer—for their astute feedback. Time and my own limits have prevented me from addressing all their excellent points; the flaws remain mine.

2. Paulin Hountondji, ed., Endogenous Knowledge-Research Trails (Oxford: CODESRIA and Anthony Rowe, 1997), 14; and Goudjinou Metinhouse, “Methodological Issues in the Study of ‘Traditional Techniques’ and Know-How,” in Endogenous Knowledge, ed. Houtondji, 43–62.

3. Michael Polanyi is credited with introducing the concept of tacit knowledge to refer to forms of know-how that are often passed along as they are practiced: Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). For a discussion of Edward Evans Pritchard’s influence on Polanyi’s theories of doubt and “objectivism,” see John Mack, “Telling and Foretelling: African Divination and Art in Wider Perspective,” in Insight and Artistry in African Divination, ed. John Pemberton III (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2000), 34–44. For a range of studies dealing with embodiment and environments, see Trevor Marchand, ed., Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relation Between Mind, Body, and Environment (London: Royal Anthropological Institute, 2010). Also see Karen McCarthy Brown, “Systematic Remembering, Systematic Forgetting-Ogou in Haiti,” in Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New—Second Expanded Edition, ed. Sandra Barnes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 65–89.

4. Her leading example of this danger is the social theory of Anthony Giddens: Jane Guyer, “Traditions of Invention in Equatorial Africa,” African Studies Review 39 (1996): 1–28, p. 3.

5. I explore these concepts in more detail in section two.

6. Guyer, “Traditions of Invention,” 3. See, for instance, Patrick McNaughton, The Mande Blacksmiths: Knowledge, Power, and Art in West Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Amanda Logan and M. Dores Cruz, “Gendered Taskscapes: Food, Farming, and Craft Production in Banda, Ghana in the Eighteenth to Twenty-First Centuries,” African Archaeological Review 31 (2014): 203–231; Judith Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); James D. La Fleur, Fusion Foodways of Africa’s Gold Coast in the Atlantic Era (Leiden: Brill, 2012); and John Janzen, Ngoma: Discourses of Healing in Central and Southern Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

7. Most scholars who use this label seem to mean those regions of the world once called the “Third World,” but they also include all groups of people who have suffered or failed to benefit from “globalization.” See Alfred Lopez, “Introduction: the (Post) Global South,” The Global South 1 (2007): 1–11; and Vijay Prashad, The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (London: Verso Books, 2012).

8. Because I do not discuss the history of 20th-century technology explicitly, this is a good place to mention the terrific work of Gabrielle Hecht, Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

9. For a variety of perspectives on the invention of Africa, see Valentin Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Annie Coombs, Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture, and Popular Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994); and Philip Curtin, The Image of Africa: British Ideas and Action, 1780–1850 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1973). For an earlier contribution on history and philosophy of science since 1935, see Ali Mazrui and Jacob F. Ade Ajayi, “Trends in Philosophy and Science in Africa,” in Africa Since 1935, vol. 8: UNESCO General History of Africa, Ali A. Mazrui, ed.; C. Wondji, asst. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 633–677; and on the way research in African Studies has affected disciplines, see Robert Bates, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, and Jean O’Barr, eds., Africa and the Disciplines: The Contributions of Research in Africa to the Social Sciences and Humanities (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

10. A review of companion volumes to the history of science reveals the magnetism Europe and Europeanists still hold over the field, even as more recent surveys emphasize “global” sites and circulations and explore the outsized influence of U.S. actors and institutions for the 20th century onward. Medical histories tend to be more cosmopolitan and regionally balanced, but even surveys in medical history often omit topics relating to public healing and popular therapeutics that are central to African and diasporic pasts (and presents). See, for instance, Robert C. Olby et al., eds., Companion to the History of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1990); John L. Heilbron, ed., The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and Bernard Lightman, ed., A Companion to the History of Science (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016).

11. David Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). As Livingstone notes (p. 13), his book focuses primarily on “science as we think of it in the West,” but adds “that should not be taken to imply that these are the only practices that warrant the name science.” It’s the step of integrating spheres and synthesizing narratives that remains a sticking point of the field. Also see, Peter Burke, A Social History of Knowledge II From the Encyclopedie to Wikipedia (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012).

12. Helen Tilley, “A Great (Scientific) Divergence: Fault Lines in the History of Science,” Isis (forthcoming 2019).

13. Karin Knorr Cetina, Epistemic Cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); and Karine Chemla and Evelyn Fox Keller, eds., Culture Without Culturalism: The Making of Scientific Knowledge (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

14. Ali Mazrui, “The Re-Invention of Africa: Edward Said, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Beyond,” Research in African Literatures 36 (2005): 68–82, on p. 73. I largely omit from this essay Islamicate scientific traditions within Africa, but see Daniel Stolz, The Lighthouse and the Observatory: Islam, Science, and Empire in Late Ottoman Egypt (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Ousmane Oumar Kane, Beyond Timbuktu: An Intellectual History of Muslim West Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016); Rudolph Ware, The Walking Qur’an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); and Jane Murphy, “Islamicate Knowledge Systems: Circulation, Rationality, and Politics,” in The Wiley Blackwell History of Islam, ed. Armando Salvatore (London: Blackwell, 2018), 479–498.

15. Scholarship exploring circulating knowledge in the history of science could be put profitably in dialogue with anthropological and archaeological work on knowledge in motion; for example, James Secord, “Knowledge in Transit,” Isis 95 (2004): 654–672; and Marwa Elshakry, “Knowledge in Motion: The Cultural Politics of Modern Science Translations in Arabic,” Isis 99 (2008): 701–730, compared to Andrew Roddick and Ann Stahl, eds., Knowledge in Motion: Constellations of Learning Across Time and Place (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2016).

16. The “places and spaces” of science included in Lightman’s companion volume are the university, the observatory, the court, academies and societies, museums and botanical gardens, domestic space, commercial science, the field, and the laboratory: Lightman, ed., A Companion to the History of Science. Good models for considering mobile spaces come from studies of sciences of “the field” and of those vectors that allow ideas, things, and people to circulate, such as ships, railways, cars, caravans, airplanes, telegraphs, satellites, phones, and so on.

17. These professional categories are admittedly inadequate since they are English equivalents, but in the spirit of dialogue across continents and regions they will do for now. For citations dealing with alchemy, artisans (and other craftspeople), and invisible technicians in early modern Europe, see below.

18. In his 1925 book, Edwin A. Burtt wrote of a metaphysical and intellectual revolution in science and is sometimes credited with originating the term “scientific revolution,” but that distinction goes to Koyré who used it in his 1939 book Études Galiléennes and then more widely in the 1940s, and to Herbert Butterfield who popularized it in his 1949 survey: see Edwin A. Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Science (London: Kegan Paul, 1925); Alexander Koyré, Études Galiléennes (Paris: Hermann, 1939); Alexander Koyré, “Galileo and the Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century,” Philosophical Review 52 (1943): 333–348; Alexander Koyré, From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1957); Alexander Koyré, Metaphysics and Measurement: Essays in Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968); and Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science, 1300–1800 (London: Bell, 1949). Also see Edgar Zilsel, The Social Origins of Modern Science (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2000), a compilation of his essays; A. Rupert Hall, The Scientific Revolution, 1500–1800 (London: Longmans Green, 1954); and Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).

19. The literature on these subjects is vast; in addition to texts already cited, see Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, The Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986); Roy S. Porter, “The Scientific Revolution—A Spoke in the Wheel,” in Revolution in History, ed. Roy S. Porter and Mikuláš Teich (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 290–316; David Linberg and Robert Westman, eds., Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990); I. Bernard Cohen, ed., Puritanism and the Rise of Modern Science: The Merton Thesis (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990); Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Guide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); Steven Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1996); Peter Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences: European Knowledge and Its Ambitions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). Pamela Smith, The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Deborah Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); and Lawrence Principe, The Scientific Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

20. Anthony Grafton with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1992); Richard Grove, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism, 1600–1860 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Richard Drayton, Nature’s Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the “Improvement” of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000); Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations in the History of Science in the Iberian World (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Neil Safier, Measuring the New World: Enlightenment Science and South America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008); Hal Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007); Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); James Delbourgo and Nicholas Dew, eds., Science and Empire in the Atlantic World (New York: Routledge, 2009); Simon Schaffer et al., The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence (Sagamore Beach, MA: Science History Publications, 2009); Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (Austin: University of Texas, 2010); and Daniel Margócsy, Commercial Visions: Science, Trade, and Visual Culture in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

21. William Whewell coined the term “scientist” in 1834 in an anonymous review of Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences; it gained a wider audience only after he used it in his history of the inductive sciences in 1837. For an explication of the terms science, scientific knowledge, and scientist, see Sydney Ross, “Scientist: The Story of a Word,” Annals of Science 18 (1962): 65–85; for a broader analysis see Richard Yeo, Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993). On the concept of “Western science” see, Marwa Elshakry, “When Science Became Western: Historiographical Reflections,” Isis 101 (2010): 98–109. On popularization of science, see Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); and on the enduring boundary work that went into policing who counts as a “scientist” and what constituted science, see Melinda Baldwin, Making “Nature”: The History of a Scientific Journal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

22. On historicity from a variety of relevant vantage points, see Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Post-Colonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Neil Whitehead, ed., Histories and Historicities in Amazonia (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003); and Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis, eds., History, Historicity, and Science (New York: Routledge, 2016).

23. You would hardly guess from consulting recent origin stories and “global” surveys that there existed rich literatures on science, technology, and medicine in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and the Indian and Pacific oceans. This scholarship has helped explain how these regions mattered to key developments in the history of science. When ignored, it tends to lead historians to generalize about “global” dynamics in misleading and distorting ways. I have already cited companion volumes for the history of science in endnote 2; for the sparse or uneven treatments of these parts of the world, see David Wooton, The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution (New York: Harper Collins, 2015); James McClennan and Harold Dorn, Science and Technology in World History, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2015); and Jon Agar, Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2012).

24. Steven Feierman, “African Histories and the Dissolution of World History,” in Africa and the Disciplines, ed. Robert Bates, Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, and Jean O’Barr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 167–212; Frederick Cooper, “What Is the Concept of Globalization Good For? An African Historian’s Perspective,” African Affairs 100 (2001): 189–213; Achille Mbembe and Sarah Nuttall, “Writing the World from an African Metropolis,” Public Culture 16 (2004): 347–372; Megan Vaughan, “Africa and the Birth of the Modern World,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 16 (2006): 143–162; James Ferguson, Global Shadows: Africa and the Neoliberal World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), especially chapter 2 on globalization; Gareth Austin, “Reciprocal Comparison and African History: Tackling Conceptual Euro-Centrism in the Study of Africa’s Economic Past,” African Studies Review 50 (2007): 1–28; and David Serlin, “Confronting African Histories of Technology: A Conversation with Keith Breckinridge and Gabrielle Hecht,” Radical History Review 127 (2017): 87–102. For an additional discussion of these trends and how they are being inverted, see Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, Theory From the South: Or How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (London: Routledge, 2016 [2012]).

25. Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality (Chicago: Lawrence Hill, 1974); and Martin Bernal, Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization, vol. 1: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegalese philosopher, physical scientist, and historian, worked out these ideas before Bernal’s Black Athena appeared in two books in French that Diop published with Présence Africaine in 1955 and 1967.

26. My invocation of reorient is indebted to Andre Gunder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), who is making a strong case that European preeminence in economic history has been exaggerated.

27. Readers who wish to get more quickly to the thematic discussion of topics that cover a longue durée can move to the next section; this section offers food for thought, especially for those just beginning to think about the history of science.

28. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place; Crosbie Smith and Jon Agar, Making Space for Science: Territorial Themes in the Shaping of Knowledge (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); Adi Ophir and Steven Shapin, “The Place of Knowledge: A Methodological Survey,” Science in Context 4 (1991): 3–21; Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983); and Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: the Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of the Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14 (1988): 575–599.

29. Among others see, Neil Kodesh, Beyond the Royal Gaze: Clanship and Public Healing in Buganda (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), especially chapters 1 and 5; also Jane Guyer and Samuel Eno Belinga, “Wealth in People as Wealth in Knowledge: Accumulation and Composition in Equatorial Africa,” Journal of African History 36 (1995): 91–120.

30. Historians and sociologists of science have long been preoccupied with how professional, institutional, and disciplinary borders (and objects) are policed and regulated, for example, Thomas Gieryn, “Boundary-Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists,” American Sociological Review 48(1983): 781–795; Thomas Gieryn, Cultural Boundaries of Science: Credibility on the Line (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); and Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer, “Institutional Ecology, ‘Translations,’ and Boundary Objects,” Social Studies of Science 19 (1989): 387–420.

31. Nancy Jacobs, Birders of Africa: History of a Network (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); and Lyn Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology: Fieldwork, Networks, and the Making of Cultural Knowledge in Central Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001).

32. I am here paraphrasing and extending a point Megan Vaughan made about medical professionals: Megan Vaughan, Curing Their Ills: Colonial Power and African Illness (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1991), 25.

33. For an extended rumination on matters of mixture, impurity, and contamination, see Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: Norton and Company, 2006).

34. Fassin’s analysis of the moving parts of the controversy—historical, political, economic, epistemological, and professional—and his insistence on avoiding theoretical traps serve as a useful model: Didier Fassin, When Bodies Remember: Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa (Berkeley: University of California, 2007), especially chapters 2 and 3.

35. Fassin only touches on this point, which is more fully developed in Karen Flint, Healing Traditions: African Medicine, Cultural Exchange, and Competition in South Africa, 1820–1948 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008), 187–191.

36. I have myself received this question periodically in the United States, and such questioners tend to suggest that African history must be sufficiently different from, say, European or U.S. history to justify its existence as an object of study. For a recent exploration, see Valentin Mudimbe, On African Fault Lines: Meditations on Alterity Politics (Durban: University of Kwazulu-Natal Press, 2013).

37. Janus, Lagos Standard (June 19, 1907), 4. The search for commensurable concepts around disease can be seen in Edward Green, Indigenous Theories of Infectious Disease (London: AltaMira Press, 1999).

38. For trading zones, see Peter Galison, Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). Galison is building upon literature from anthropology about trade and exchange.

39. We should hardly be surprised that as disciplines, experts, and institutions proliferate, it generates new kinds of professionals and new classes or categories of knowledge; my thinking here has been influenced by Ian Hacking, “The Looping Effects of Human Kinds,” in Causal Cognition: A Multidisciplinary Debate, ed. Dan Sperber et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 351–383; and Ian Hacking, Representing and Intervening: Introductory Topics in the Philosophy of Natural Science (Cambridge, UK: University of Cambridge Press, 1983). Hacking taught philosophy for three years, between 1967 and 1969, in Uganda at Makerere.

40. My language here is indebted to David Schoenbrun, “Conjuring the Modern in Africa: Durability and Rupture in Histories of Public Healing between the Great Lakes of Africa,” American Historical Review 111 (2006): 1403–1439. These issues form the subject of my current book manuscript, with the working title The Wisdom of the Peoples: African Decolonization, Global Governance, and Cold War Constructions of Traditional Medicine.

41. Helen Tilley, “Global Histories, Vernacular Science, and African Genealogies,” Isis 101 (2010): 110–119; and Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory: Empire, Development, and the Problem of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).

42. Scholarship on entanglements in material cultures, therapeutics, and science is vast. I take the idea of braiding from Projit Mukharji, Doctoring Traditions: Ayurveda, Small Technologies, and Braided Sciences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

43. Murray Last, “The Importance of Knowing about Not-Knowing: Observations from Hausaland,” in The Social Basis of Health and Healing in Africa, ed. Steven Feierman and John Janzen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 393–408.

44. Steven Feierman has raised these issues persistently in African history: Steven Feierman, “Healing as Social Criticism in the Time of Colonial Conquest,” African Studies Review 54 (1995): 73–88; Steven Feierman, “Colonizers, Scholars, and the Creation of Invisible Histories,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Victoria Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 182–216; and Steven Feierman, “Marginality and Invisibility in African Medical Practice,” unpublished paper for “Knowledge, Domination, and the Public in Africa,” March 2011, Dahlem Conference, Berlin, Germany.

45. It is worth pointing out that scholars in African studies and science studies have developed literatures on these subjects often without much dialogue; for additional references in the history of science, see contributions to Robert Proctor and Londa Schiebinger, eds., Agnotology: the Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); and Koen Vermier and Daniel Margocsy, eds., “Special Issue: States of Secrecy,” British Journal for the History of Science 45 (2012): 153–280.

46. This section covers a modest number of works by historians and anthropologists to illustrate a set of wider points about enduring patterns. I have elected to include certain material—on fractals—that has not yet become integral to African history because I think it is a conversation worth having. For further background on some of these issues, see the special issue by Kai Kresse and Trevor Marchand, eds., “Knowledge in Practice: Expertise and the Transmission of Knowledge,” Africa 79, no. 1 (2009): 1–167; Ron Eglash and Audrey Bennett, eds., “Special Issue: Fractals in Global Africa,” Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture 6 (2012): 4–172; Jane Guyer, “Traditions of Invention in Equatorial Africa,” African Studies Review 39 (1996): 1–28; and Jane Guyer, “Africa Has Never Been ‘Traditional’: So Can We Make a General Case?” African Studies Review 50 (2007): 183–202.

47. In addition to sources already cited, see James Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2011); Judith Carney, Black Rice: the African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Londa Schiebinger, The Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017); and Andrew Sluyter, Black Ranching Frontiers: African Cattle Herders in the Atlantic World, 1500–1900 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012). For an Indian Ocean example, see Megan Vaughan, Creating the Creole Island: Slavery in Eighteenth Century Mauritius (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

48. Pablo Gomez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).

49. Eugenia Herbert, Red Gold of Africa: Copper in Precolonial History and Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 32.

50. Jan Vansina, “Linguistic Evidence for the Introduction of Ironworking into Bantu-Speaking Africa,” History in Africa 33 (2006): 321–361, quotations on p. 354; also see pp. 335–336.

51. Mathew Schoffeleers, “Folk Christology in Africa: The Dialectics of the Nganga Paradigm,” Journal of Religion in Africa 19 (1989): 157–183; and Stephan Palmié, “Thinking with Ngangas: Reflections on Embodiment and the Limits of ‘Objectively Necessary Appearances,’” Comparative Studies in Society and History 48 (2006): 852–886.

52. Peter Schmidt, “Science in Africa: A History of Ingenuity and Invention in African Iron Technology,” in A Companion to African History, ed. William Worger (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), 267–288; and Peter Schmidt, Iron Technology in East Africa: Symbolism, Science, and Archaeology (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

53. I am indebted to David Schoenbrun for this point, which deserves more attention than I can give it here.

54. On the historical use, including strengths and limitations, of the qualifier “vernacular” see Suzanne Preston Blier, “Vernacular Architecture,” in Handbook of Material Culture, ed. Christopher Tilley et al. (London: SAGE, 2006), 230–253. As she points out (p. 231), “Those who study these architectural exemplars . . . must seek to understand an array of factors—local theories concerning the natural world, taxonomies of thought, ancillary arts and ritual—among other factors.”

55. Steven Nelson, From Cameroon to Paris: Mousgoum Architecture In and Out of Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). To extend the metaphor of texts, it bears noting that scholars’ different tools yield different interpretations.

56. Trevor Marchand, The Masons of Djenné (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). Also see James Morris (photographs) and Suzanne Preston Blier (text), Butabu: Adobe Architecture of West Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

57. Jean-Louis Bourgeois, “The History of the Great Mosques of Djenné,” African Arts 20 (1987): 54–63 and 90–92. Bourgeois explains how Malians became convinced that the mosques’ designs were inspired by French engineers rather than indigenous experts, a view that had its roots in an effort led by Sekou Amadou in the 1820s and 1830s to conceal its true history, which allowed French rulers in the 1890s to build upon misinformation: “As time went on, history rewritten probably shifted from conscious deception to unconscious self-deception—from Africans’ saying that the French built the mosque to their believing that they did” (p. 62).

58. For an analogous example dealing with pottery and the women who produce it, see Olivier Gosselein, “The World Is Like a Beanstalk: Historicizing Potting Practice and Social Relations in the Niger River Area,” in Knowledge in Motion: Constellations of Learning Across Time and Place, ed. Andrew Roddick and Ann Stahl (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 2016), 36–66. My thanks to David Schoenbrun for this reference.

59. Trevor Marchand, “Negotiating License and Limits: Expertise and Innovation in Djenné’s Building Trade,” Africa 79 (2009): 71–91, quotations on pp. 74, 76–78. Labelle Prussin, one of the forerunners of African architectural studies, made similar points following her fieldwork in the West African savannah about designers’ technical precision; Labelle Prussin, “An Introduction to Indigenous African Architecture,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 33 (1974): 182–205.

60. I choose these dates based on Bourgeois’ judicious historical reconstruction; he lists 1818 as a point when the main mosque was known to have been refinished: Bourgeois, “The History of the Great Mosques,” 54.

61. Shadrek Chirikure, “Motion with Caution: Jan Vansina and the Last Two Thousand Years of the Southern African Past,” History in Africa 45 (2018): 113–129, esp. 123–125.

62. The literature on Great Zimbabwe is vast and still growing; I am using “Shona” here advisedly, as the label for one of the three broad linguistic groups in the region did not consolidate until the 18th century. These details come from Peter Garlake, Early Art and Architecture of Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), chapter 7, “Great Zimbabwe and the Southern African Interior”; and Herbert, Red Gold of Africa, 107.

63. Garlake, Early Art and Architecture of Africa, 151 and 153–154.

64. Gloria Emeagwali and Edward Shizha, eds., African Indigenous Knowledge and the Sciences: Journeys into the Past and Present (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2016), x.

65. Thomas Huffman quoted in David Beach, “Cognitive Archaeology and Imaginative History at Great Zimbabwe,” Current Anthropology 39 (2009): 47–72, on p. 49.

66. For a history of colonial misinterpretations, see Henrika Kuklick, “Contested Monuments: The Politics of Archaeology in Southern Africa,” in Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, ed. George Stocking (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 135–170.

67. Thomas Huffman, “The Soapstone Birds of Great Zimbabwe,” African Arts 18 (1985): 68–100; Thomas Huffman, Snakes and Crocodiles: Power and Symbolism in Ancient Zimbabwe (Johannesburg: Witswatersrand University Press, 1996). There is a long-standing interest in forms of patriotic science, and I am just extending this point here; for an influential example, see Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), especially chapter 4.

68. Beach, “Cognitive Archaeology,” 60.

69. Terence Ranger, “Nationalist Historiography, Patriotic History and the History of the Nation: The Struggle over the Past in Zimbabwe,” Journal of Southern African Studies 30 (2004): 215–234; and Edward Matenga, The Soapstone Birds of Great Zimbabwe: Symbols of a Nation (Harare, Zimbabwe: African Publishing Group, 1998).

70. Joost Fontein, The Silence of Great Zimbabwe: Contested Landscapes and the Power of Heritage (London: University College London Institute of Archaeology, 2006); for an overview of relationships between cultural and intellectual property, see Rosemary Coombe, “Frontiers of Cultural Property in the Global South,” in The Routledge Companion to Cultural Property, ed. Jane Anderson and Haidy Geismar (New York: Routledge, 2017), chapter 19.

71. Michael Gordin, Scientific Babel: How Science Was Done Before and After Global English (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); and Michael Gordin, ed., “Focus Section: Linguistic Hegemony and the History of Science,” Isis 108 (2017): 606–650.

72. In Scientific Babel (p. 295), Gordin plays down the role of British and U.S. empire-building to the rise of “global English,” pointing out that English’s spread largely took off following the Second World War and that non-native speakers’ choices to publish in English also played a crucial role. I take his points but see imperial structures (including those that fed into international organizations and scientific congresses) as necessary and formative. English-speaking empires seeded a language for science in the very laws and institutional infrastructures of colonial states. The British Commonwealth today—excluding the United States and its former imperial holdings—comprises 53 member states and totals close to a third of the world’s population. Political independence led people to challenge linguistic dynamics, but few states reverted to a different language for science, no matter how hard advocates pressed them to. For a significant case study on languages of science in South Asia, see Andrew Amstutz, “The Language of Science: Urdu and the Making of Muslim Politics in Modern South Asia” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2017); on colonialism and African languages, Johannes Fabian, Language and Colonial Power: The Appropriation of Swahili in the Former Belgian Congo, 1880–1938 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); and Sara Pugach, Africa in Translation: A History of Colonial Linguistics in Germany and Beyond, 1814–1945 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012). And on the question of “national” languages, see Andrew Simpson, ed., Language and National Identity in Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).

73. A search for cognates takes us quickly into other ordering concepts, so that knowledge slots into a wider framework. Another dimension of this has to do with languages of science instruction, which has experienced both winnowing and expansion over the last century.

74. I base these translations on Church Missionary Society, Dictionary of Yoruba Language (Lagos, Nigeria: CMS Library, 1913); and Roy C. Abraham, Dictionary of Modern Yoruba (London: University of London, 1958). On systems of ethics among onísègun (a set of healers), including the way they distinguish between knowledge (imo) and belief (igbagbo), see Barry Hallen, The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Discourses about Values in Yoruba Culture (Bloomington: University of Indiana, 2000).

75. Garlake, Early Art and Architecture of Africa, 135–136.

76. Suzanne Blier, Art and Risk in Ancient Yoruba: Ife History, Power, and Identity c. 1300 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

77. Henry John Drewel, John Pemberton III, and Rowland Abiodun, “The Yoruba World,” in Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought, ed. Allen Wardwell (New York: Center for African Art and Harry Abrams, 1989), 13–44, diagram on p. 14.

78. For an example in medical anthropology, see Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); for a recent review that exempts medicine, but includes STS, see Martin Holbraad and Morten Axel Pedersen, The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and for a study of ontology and African healing, see Stacey Langwick, Bodies, Politics, and African Healing: the Matter of Maladies in Tanzania (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011).

79. Different kinds of shape-shifting, with deities and spirits, respectively, are on display in Jean Allman and John Parker, Tongnaab: The History of a West African God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); and David Gordon, Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012).

80. Sandra Barnes, ed., Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New; Second, Expanded Edition (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).

81. Sandra Barnes, “The Many Faces of Ogun: Introduction to the First Edition,” in Africa’s Ogun, ed. Barnes, 18.

82. Sandra Barnes and Paula Girshick Ben-Amos, “Ogun, the Empire Builder,” in Africa’s Ogun, ed. Barnes, 57.

83. Henry John Drewel, “Art or Accident: Yoruba Body Artists and Their Deity Ogun,” in Africa’s Ogun, ed. Barnes, 238.

84. Robert Armstrong, “The Etymology of the Word ‘Ògún,’” in Africa’s Ogun, ed. Barnes, 29–38.

85. John Mason, “Ògún: Builder of the Lùkùmí’s House,” in Africa’s Ogun, ed. Barnes, 353.

86. Ron Eglash, African Fractals: Modern Computing and Indigenous Design (New Brunswick, NJ: University of Rutgers Press, 1999).

87. The operative word here is “calculations,” as Eglash’s most significant example rests in binary divination practices; as he and other specialists in mathematics are aware, many other base systems (3, 4, 5, 10, 12, 20) also exist across Africa. See Claudia Zaslavsky, Africa Counts: Number and Pattern in African Cultures, 3rd ed. (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999); George Joseph, The Crest of the Peaco*ck: Non-European Roots of Mathematics, 3rd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Helen Verran, Science and an African Logic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), chapter 3 (on base-20 systems among Yoruba); and William Bascom, Ifa Divination: Communication Between Gods and Men in West Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), on the way Ifá divination techniques rest on interpreting patterns based on a binary system (marks of I and II) to generate 16 figures and 256 verses (2 to the power of 8, or 16 to the power of 2).

88. Eglash, African Fractals, 99–101. Eglash, and others, trace Leibniz’s interest in binary systems to Ramon Llull (ca. 1232–1316), whom Leibniz acknowledged in his 1666 dissertation. Llull’s base-2 system derived from geomancy that had roots in the African continent, given his multiple visits. On Leibniz’s binary mathematics, see Florian Cajori, “Leibniz’s ‘Image of Creation,’” The Monist 26 (1916): 557–565.

89. Leibniz to Duke Rudolph, January 2, 1697, quoted in Cajori, “Leibniz’s ‘Image of Creation,’” 561–562. Leibniz saw “primitive states” or concepts as being like prime numbers, indissoluble and therefore closer to God; for an explication, see Dennis Plaisted, “Leibniz’s Argument for Primitive Concepts,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2003): 329–341. On Leibniz’s ethnographic interests, see Han Vermeulen, Before Boas: The Genesis of Ethnography and Ethnology in the German Enlightenment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), chapter 2. On Leibniz and China, see Franklin Perkins, Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004). By the late 17th century, Leibniz described God as unity and everything beyond God as “nothing or privation,” which he later described as “unity with zero, that is the positive with the privative.” See Maria Rosa Antognazza, Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 359 and 435.

90. Alfred Bower Taylor, Report on Weights and Measures (Boston: Rand and Avery, 1859), 34–35.

91. R. C. Oliver quoted in Helen Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory, 247, and chapter 5, “A Racial Laboratory.”

92. There is a vast literature on colonial rule and education in Kenya as well as Gikuyu/Kikuyu groups; for one intervention that highlights the fight over pedagogy, see Theodore Natsoulas, “The Kenyan Government and the Kikuyu Independent Schools: From Attempted Control to Suppression, 1929–1952,” The Historian 60 (1998): 289–305; and for a study of literacy and cultural knowledge production, see Derek Petersen, Creative Writing: Translation, Bookkeeping, and the Work of Imagination in Colonial Kenya (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2004).

93. Saul Dubow’s studies of southern Africa offer a wonderful point of departure for understanding histories of racial science, on the one hand, and how cultures of science helped craft racial identities of belonging (and exclusion), on the other: Saul Dubow, A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa, 1820–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); and Saul Dubow, Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995). On “racial” thinking (as distinct from “science”), see Jonathon Glassman, “Ethnicity and Race in African Thought,” in A Companion to African History, ed. William Worger et al. (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2018), 199–224.

94. Interestingly, both Jane Guyer and Ron Eglash write about “information societies,” but for different reasons and in different contexts. Guyer, “Traditions of Invention,” 2; and Eglash, African Fractals, passim. Although it might seem anachronistic to use such a phrase, there is a need to capture how people transmitted complex information relating to political and social genealogies, details about the natural world and health, and literary corpuses across generations.

95. Philip Peek, ed., African Divination Systems: Ways of Knowing (Bloomington: University of Indiana, 1991); it is worth pointing out that this book preceded by a decade John Pickstone’s wonderful synthesis of “Western” scholarship, Ways of Knowing: A New History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

96. Martin Hollis and Steven Lukes, eds., Rationality and Relativism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982).

97. My analysis here is indebted to the ongoing research of Colin Bos, “John Augustus Abayomi Cole and the Search for an African Science, 1886–1898” (unpublished research paper, Northwestern University, May 2017). The dialogic nature of these arguments deserves much closer scrutiny; Cole, for instance, may have explored mathematical subjects while working with his instructor, Adolphus Mann (who first drew attention to Yoruba “numeral systems”); Cole also played a role in heated debates within Freetown in the 1880s and early 1890s about his (and others’) role as local healers and agriculturalists.

98. See, for instance, David Schoenbrun, A Green Place, A Good Place: Agrarian Change and Social Identity in the Great Lakes Region to the Fifteenth Century (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1998); and for a fascinating study focused on more recent environmental changes, but which gestures to deeper pasts using an endogenous category, doli (a way of seeing and a body of knowledge) to anchor the story, see Tamara Giles-Vernick, Cutting the Vines of the Past: Environmental Histories of the Central African Rain Forest (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002). Giles-Vernick rightly questions the label “indigenous knowledge” for her analysis, as doli captures a much broader set of phenomena and is far less instrumental.

99. Jan Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest: Toward a History of Political Tradition in Equatorial Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).

100. For a complementary analysis of a smaller subset of groups in Equatorial Africa, which uses game theory heuristically to unpack collective priorities and innovations, see Robert Harms, Games Against Nature: An Eco-Cultural History of the Nunu of Equatorial Africa (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Harms explains his conceptual framing: “The game metaphor . . . allowed me to distinguish, in a systematic way, between different forms and different rates of change. Tactics can change rapidly. Strategies, which involve sequences of tactics, change more slowly. Rules change more slowly still. Slowest of all to change are the objective and goal of the game itself. Distinguishing among tactics, strategies, rules, and goals gave me a way of discussing complex changes in a series of related, yet distinct, societies in a systematic manner” (p. xvii).

101. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest, 255–256, and 88–92. Vansina’s understanding of vernacular knowledge as science conforms to anthropologists’ assertions in the early 20th century that all people possess science; see Tilley, “Global Histories, Vernacular Science, and African Genealogies.”

102. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest, 251 and passim.

103. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest, 237.

104. Vansina, Paths in the Rainforest, 258–259.

105. In medical history, Nancy Hunt’s work explores some of these questions for the Congo in the 20th century: Nancy Hunt, A Nervous State: Violence, Remedies, and Reverie in Colonial Congo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); and Nancy Hunt, A Colonial Lexicon: Of Birth Ritual, Medicalization, and Mobility in the Congo (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999). On fragmentation and debris, see Ann Stoler, ed., Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013).

106. Many African historians explore the shaping influences of colonial/state laws, including the codification of customary law, but few have yet explored the macro patterns I am invoking here; see Diana Jeater, Law, Language, and Science: The Invention of the “Native Mind” in Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1930 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2007); Dubow, A Commonwealth of Science, chapter 3; and Langwick, Bodies, Politics, and African Healing, chapter 2.

107. Even recent syntheses fail to appreciate the role of learned societies and the part they played in legal dynamics; see Steven Press, Rogue Empires: Contracts and Conmen in Europe’s Scramble for Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017) and compare to chapter 2 of Africa as a Living Laboratory. More work on this front still needs to be done because it is clear that laws and procedures of partition were deeply tied to geographical expeditions and the findings of naturalists.

108. Bruno Carrière, “Le Transsaharien: histoire et géographie d’une entreprise inachevée,” Acta Geographica 74 (1988): 23–38; and N. Broc, “Les Français face à l’inconnue saharienne: géographes, explorateurs, ingénieurs (1830–1881),” Annales de Géographie 535 (1987): 302–338; David Sunderland, ed., Communication in Africa, 1880–1939, 5 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012); and Casper Anderson, British Engineers and Africa, 1875–1914 (New York: Routledge, 2011).

109. Casual references to the Suez canal turning Africa into an island appeared periodically between 1869 and 1890; J. Clerk, “Suez Canal,” Fortnightly Review 5, n.s. (1869): 80–100 and 206–225, 80; John F. Bateman, “Some Account of the Suez Canal,” Proceedings of the Royal Society 18 (1869–70): 132–144, 142; Paul Soleillet, Avenir de la France en Afrique (Paris: Challamel Ainé, 1876), 57; and Arthur Silva White, The Development of Africa, 4.

110. Richard Grove, “The Island and the History of Environmentalism,” in Nature and Society in Historical Context, ed. Mikulas Teich, Roy Porter, and Bo Gustafsson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 148–162; Gillian Beer, “Writing Darwin’s Islands: England and the Insular Condition,” in Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication, ed. Timothy Lenoir (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 119–139; Rod Edmond and Vanessa Smith, eds., Islands in History and Representation (New York: Routledge, 2003); and John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

111. Norbert Dournaux-Dupéré, “Le role de la France dans l’Afrique septentrionale,” Bulletin de la Société de Géographie 6 (1873): 607–650, on p. 650; Dournaux-Dupéré was killed the following year on an expedition.

112. These figures are illustrative (rather than definitive) as they are from one library’s collection; the countries surveyed include Britain, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States, and the maps include those that were freely circulating as well as those published in geographical journals; 257 maps appeared between 1800 and 1859; 172 appeared in the 1860s; 236 appeared in the 1870s; 535 appeared in the 1880s; and 628 appeared in the 1890s. See Thomas Bassett and Yvette Scheven, eds., Maps of Africa to 1900: A Checklist of Maps in Atlases and Geographical Journals in the Collections of the University of Illinois (Urbana: University of Illinois, 2000).

113. “Old Maps of Africa,” Nature (June 6, 1878): 149–151, on p. 149; for this earlier period, see Richard Betz, The Mapping of Africa: a Cartobibliography of Printed Maps of the African Continent to 1700 (Brill: Hes and De Graf, 2007).

114. Oscar Norwich, Maps of Africa: An Illustrated and Annotated Carto-Bibliography (Cape Town: Donker, 1983); see 19th-century maps on pp. 176–208; the precedent for leaving blanks on maps was set by the French cartographer J. B. B. d’Anville (1697–1782), p. 163.

115. Thomas Bassett, “Cartography and Empire Building in Nineteenth Century West Africa,” Geographical Journal 84 (1994): 316–335.

116. James Grant to Sir Henry Rawlinson, April 13, 1876, in James A. Grant, RGS Correspondence Block 1871–80, Royal Geographical Society Archives, London. For a now dated, but empirically rich study, see Donald Simpson, Dark Companions: The African Contribution to the European Exploration of East Africa (New York: Harper and Row, 1975).

117. On patent controversies and their wider contexts, see Abena Osseo-Asare, Bitter Roots: The Search for Healing Plants in Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); and Laura Foster, Reinventing Hoodia: Peoples, Plants, and Patents in South Africa (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017). A focus on controversies over profits and priority needs to be complemented with studies of patent claims that did not become controversial and that were not necessarily about profits.

118. Quotations and details from Olivier Loiseaux, “Regnauld de Lannoy de Bissy’s Nineteenth Century Map of Africa at a Scale of 1: 2,000,000,” Cartographic Journal 53 (2016): 282–293.

119. J. C. Stone, “Pioneer Geodesy: The Arc of the 30th Meridian in Former Northern Rhodesia,” Cartographic Journal 13 (1976): 122–128; and J. C. Stone, A Short History of the Cartography of Africa (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press, 1995).

120. Also relevant here are Thomas Bassett, “Indigenous Mapmaking in Inter-Tropical Africa,” in The History of Cartography, ed. D. Woodward and M. Lewis ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 24–48; and Thomas Bassett, “African Maps and Map-Making,” in Encyclopedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures, ed. H. Selin (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1997), 554–558.

121. Julie MacArthur, Cartography and the Political Imagination: Mapping Community in Colonial Kenya (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2016). In spite of her focus, MacArthur engages surprisingly little with African historiographies of science and cartography, which seems a missed opportunity given the strength of her evidence.

122. Robyn d’Avignon, “Subterranean Histories: Making ‘Artisanal’ Miners on the West African Sahel,” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 2016); and Robyn d’Avignon, “Shelf Projects: The Political Life of Exploration Geology in Senegal,” Engaging Science, Technology and Society 4 (2018): 111–130, quote on p. 112.

123. D’Avignon, “Subterranean Histories,” 21.

124. Johannes Fabian, Out of Our Minds: Reason and Madness in the Exploration of Central Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).

125. Edward Blyden, “Africa and the Africans,” Fraser’s Magazine 18 (1878): 178–196, on pp. 181–182; Herbert Spencer, ed., Descriptive Sociology or Groups of Facts, African Races, compiled by David Duncan (New York: Appleton, 1875).

126. Relevant here is also Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

127. Fabian, Out of Our Minds, 275. Patrick Harries, Butterflies and Barbarians: Swiss Missionaries and Systems of Knowledge in South-East Africa (Oxford: James Currey Press, 2007).

128. This literature is burgeoning; see, for instance, Schumaker, Africanizing Anthropology; Helen Tilley with Robert Gordon, eds., Ordering Africa: Anthropology, European Imperialism, and the Politics of Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007); Andrew Bank and Leslie Bank, eds., Inside African Anthropology: Monica Wilson and Her Interpreters (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013). On economic knowledge, see (for newly independent Nigeria) Mary Morgan, “‘On a Mission’ with Mutable Mobiles,” Working Paper on the Nature of Evidence: How Well Do Facts Travel?, no. 34/08, London School of Economics and University of Amsterdam (2008); Morten Jerven, Poor Numbers: How We Are Misled by African Development Statistics and What We Can Do About It (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013); Grace Davie, A History of Poverty Knowledge in South Africa: A Social History of Human Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015); and Alden Young, Transforming Sudan: Decolonization, Development, and State Formation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018). For a recent contribution on psychiatry, see Matthew Heaton, Black Skin, White Coats: Nigerian Psychiatrists, Decolonization, and the Globalization of Psychiatry (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2013).

129. I discuss this as a pattern of “epistemic decolonization” in my book Africa as a Living Laboratory, but I hasten to add that this point should not be overdrawn both because different instruments of power—economic, political, and military—have a way of resurrecting stereotypes, myths, and inaccuracies, and also because changing theories can produce inaccuracies of their own.

130. Some of the leading examples are James Fairhead and Melissa Leach (with research collaboration with Dominique Millimouno and Marie Kamano), Misreading the African Landscape: Society and Ecology in a Forest-Savanna Mosaic (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996); James Fairhead and Melissa Leach, Reframing Deforestation—Global Analysis and Local Realities: Studies in West Africa (London: Routledge, 1998); and Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns, eds., The Lie of the Land: Challenging Received Wisdom on the African Environment (London: James Currey, 1996). For a recent study of Northern Africa, see Diana Davis, Resurrecting the Granary of Rome: Environmental History and French Colonial Expansion in North Africa (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007).

131. On this latter point, see Peter Howlett and Mary Morgan, eds., How Well Do Facts Travel: The Dissemination of Reliable Information (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011); especially relevant in this context is Naomi Oreskes’ chapter, “My Facts Are Better Than Your Facts.”

132. Paul Richards, “‘Alternative’ Strategies for the African Environment: ‘Folk Ecology’ as a Basis for Community Oriented Agricultural Development,” in African Environment: Problems and Perspectives, ed. Paul Richards (London: International African Institute, 1975), 102–117; and Paul Richards, Ebola: How a People’s Science Helped End an Epidemic (London: Zed Books, 2016).

133. See, for instance, Frederick Cooper, “Development, Modernization, and the Social Sciences in the Era of Decolonization: The Examples of British and French Africa,” Revue d’Histoire de Sciences Humaines 10 (2004): 9–38; Emmanuelle Sibeud, ed., “Décolonisation et sciences humaines,” Revue d’Histoire des Sciences Humaines 24 (2011): 3–187; Gregory Mann, “Knowing the Postcolony: Sociology and Socialist Government in 1960s Mali,” La Fabrique des Savoirs en Afrique subsaharienne, ed. Didier Nativel and Daouda Gary-Tounakara (Paris: Karthala, 2012), 91–108; and Gregory Mann, “Anti-Colonialism and Social Science: Georges Balandier, Madeira Keita, and ‘the Colonial Situation’ in French Africa,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 55 (2013): 92–119.

134. Here the already cited work of Gabrielle Hecht and Robyn d’Avignon stands out for its rich evidence base and links to environmental politics; for a creative piece pointing to Cold War legacies, see Stacey Langwick, “From Non-Aligned Medicines to Market-Based Herbals: China’s Shifting Relationship to Traditional Medicine in Tanzania,” Medical Anthropology 29 (2010): 15–53.

135. Beyond works already cited by Laura Foster, Abena Osseo-Asare, and Morten Jerven, I would include Duana Fullwiley, The Enculturated Gene: Sickle Cell Health Politics and Biological Difference in West Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011); Crystal Biruk, Cooking Data: Culture and Politics in an African Research World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); and Noémi Tousignant, Edges of Exposure: Toxicology and the Problem of Capacity in Postcolonial Senegal (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). For a fictional account that brings an STS perspective on development into play, see Richard Rottenburg, Far Fetched Facts: A Parable of Development Aid (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).

136. Robert Paarlberg, Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).

137. On improvisation and the limits of biomedicine, see Julie Livingston, Improvising Medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Epidemic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

138. On polycentrism in the history of chemistry, see Emily Osborn, “From Bauxite to Cooking Pots: Aluminum, Chemistry, and West African Artisanal Production,” History of Science 54 (2016): 425–442; and for an example that explores mobile technologies, see Francis Nyamnjoh, Mobile Phones: The New Talking Drums of Everyday Africa (Leiden: Langaa/African Studies Center Leiden, 2009).