The Science and Empire Commission is pleased to announce 2 travel grants of €100 each to support participation in academic events taking place during the second semester of 2026. The grant does not apply for the ESHS/HSS joint event.

These grants are intended to assist scholars whose participation may be limited by financial constraints and who are actively engaged in research related to the history of science, technology, medicine, empire, colonialism, or related fields.

Eligibility Criteria

Applicants must be members of the Science and Empire Commission and meet at least one of the following criteria:

• Be based in the Global South, broadly defined;

• Be a scholar in need (we will use the following criteria)

• Be an independent scholar;

• Be a postgraduate student (Master’s or PhD level).

Application Deadline

Applications will be accepted until 20 July 2026.

Eligible Events

The grant may be used to support participation in academic events scheduled between July and December 2026.

Application submission:

Applicants should write an email to scienceandempirecommission@gmail.com:

• Email subject: Travel Grant – 2026/2

• A brief statement (maximum 300 words) explaining the event, its relevance to their research, and how the grant would support their participation;

• Proof of acceptance (if available);

Selection

Applications will be evaluated by the Science and Empire Commission, taking into account financial need, academic relevance, and the potential impact of the grant on the applicant’s participation.

For submissions and inquiries, please contact:  scienceandempirecommission@gmail.com .

We particularly encourage applications from early-career researchers, independent scholars, and colleagues working in contexts with limited access to research funding.

The Science and Empire Commission is currently reorganizing its activities and we are now looking for two early career scholars (either PhD students or those within the first five years of defending their PhD dissertation) who would be interested in taking over responsibility for our Early Career activities.

The main responsibility of the role will be organising our new Science and Empire Online Seminar Series. We hope the series can start in October 2026 and run one event per month until June 2027.

You will also be expected to attend monthly SCIEMP Committee meetings and to get involved in other SCIEMP activities as they relate to early career scholars.

Previous experience in similar events tells us that the organization runs better with at least two scholars sharing it. Therefore, we are accepting two people for this role, and we can arrange a division of responsibilities. Feel free to team up with a colleague, or to reach out individually and we can put you in contact with anyone else who has expressed interest.

If you are interested, please send a short proposal for a seminar series (300-500 words) identified with your name, affiliation, and research interests until 9th July 2026 by sending an email to scienceandempirecommission@gmail.com. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch. And please, feel free to circulate this message.

We are hosting a symposium at the HSS/ESHS Meeting!

The History of Science Society and the European Society for the History of Science will hold their first joint meeting from 13 to 16 July 2026 in Edinburgh, Scotland, supported by the British Society for the History of Science. The Science and Empire Commission is pleased to announce its participation in this event with an organized symposium, marking a long-awaited return to the international stage beyond the DHST/ICHST International Congresses.

Under the theme “Shifting Perspectives: Plural Worlds, Contested Sciences,” the conference invites historians of science, technology, and medicine to reflect on plural knowledge traditions, contested narratives, and epistemic diversity.

The SCIEMP symposium, titled Science and Empire in the Anthropocene: Towards an Environmental Shift, comprises four sessions exploring the complex entanglements between science, empire, and environment. The sessions bring together scholars working across natural history, botany, zoology, meteorology, medicine, and ecology. Together, they examine how scientific knowledge was produced and mobilized in the service of empires, and how colonized peoples, rural communities, and marginalized groups contested, reinterpreted, and reworked that knowledge on their own terms.

Running through all four sessions is a shared concern with the environmental dimensions of imperial science: how landscapes, species, and bodies were transformed by colonial knowledge-making, and what legacies those transformations carry into the present.

Program:

Science and Empire in the Anthropocene: Towards an Environmental Shift 1 – Imperial roots of Plantationocene and Anthropocene 

Session Organizers 

Sabina Ferreira Alexandre Luz — luz.sabina@gmail.com 

Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva — matheus.alves_duarte_da_silva@kcl.ac.uk; King’s College London 

Chair Daniel Gamito-Marques — dbm19002@fct.unl.pt; NOVA School of Science and Technology, Lisbon, Portugal 

Session Abstract 

This symposium, sponsored by the Science and Empire Commission, aims to reinforce discussions on the complex intertwinements between Science, Empire, and Environment in order to assess the possibilities of an environmental shift for the Science and Empire. This first session is dedicated to presenting a critical analysis of the imperial roots of the Plantationocene and the Anthropocene, as well as alternative indigenous cosmologies. 

Plantations reconfigured: from empire’s monocrop to contemporary pop-up polytunnels

Presenter 

Cristiana Bastos — cristiana.bastos@ics.ulisboa.pt; Universidade de Lisboa Abstract 

In this paper I will explore the potential and limitations of approaching contemporary agribusiness in southern Iberia with the analytical lens of plantation studies. Drawing from my research under the project “The Color of Labour — the racialized lives of migrants”, in which I explored how plantation economies in the aftermath of abolition and emancipation kept racializing humans via indentured labor, I will address contemporary configurations of agribusiness as they emerge in extreme conditions in southern Iberia via pop-up plastic greenhouses, obscure financial capital sources, and highly mobile precarious migrant labor. The analysis will account for different aspects, including: the materiality of the plantationocene; the co-production of people and environments; the persistence of empire and subjugation; the reconfigurations of labor, class, race and extractivism in the transitions of the Anthropocene. 

Science and Empire in the Anthropocene: Towards an Environmental Shift 2 – Making Imperial Worlds 

Session Organizers 

Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva — matheus.alves_duarte_da_silva@kcl.ac.uk; King’s College London 

Sabina Ferreira Alexandre Luz — luz.sabina@gmail.com 

Chair

Anderson Antunes — anderson.p.antunes@gmail.com; University of Évora 

Session Abstract 

This symposium, sponsored by the Science and Empire Commission, aims to reinforce discussions on the complex intertwinements between Science, Empire, and Environment in order to assess the possibilities of an environmental shift for the Science and Empire. This second Session critically investigates how different sciences, from natural history and botany to zoology and meteorology, have shaped society and nature across different colonial, imperial, and post-colonial settings, including Brazil, Angola, India, and Britain. Conversely, the presentations examine forms of resistance and contestation, revealing the existence of plural worlds. 

Landscapes of Difference: Natural History and the Shaping of Colonial Stereotypes

Presenter 

Catarina Simões — catarinasimoes@fcsh.unl.pt; Universidade NOVA de Lisboa 

Abstract 

Natural history discourses and representations from the 16th and 17th centuries are a unique source of knowledge on European ideas regarding the relationship between human societies and their environments. Classical and medieval scholarly traditions, which held that differences in human cultures and physical attributes were a direct product of place, resonated heavily in early modern knowledge production about nature. These perceived differences in humans, their cultures, and the surrounding natural world informed exoticized imageries of non-European spaces, which relied heavily on the inclusion of elements of nature to convey and communicate notions of alterity and extravagance. This presentation will focus on natural history knowledge produced in the context of the early modern Portuguese empire, analysing the relationship between perceptions of non-European nature and the development of stereotypical notions associated with colonized places and their peoples. It intends to demonstrate how nature was mobilised, from the earliest stages of European imperialism, to galvanise European audiences towards colonial endeavours, and, on the other hand, to legitimise colonial rule by presenting non-European spaces as lush, abundant and receptive, and their human and non-human inhabitants as radical, wild and transgressive. It also reflects on the longterm impacts of this objectified view of the non-European world. 

Cotton, Botany and Empire: Tracing botanical sciences in the archive of the first industrial city 

Presenter 

Arianna Tozzi — arianna.tozzi@manchester.ac.uk 

Abstract 

This paper examines the entanglement of botany, empire, and industrial capitalism through the cotton archives of Manchester — the world’s first industrial city. Moving beyond narratives of the Industrial Revolution as solely driven by mechanical innovation, it foregrounds the role that botanical sciences played in creating extractive cotton economies in rural India. Archival materials — ranging from plant specimens and lithographs to correspondence between imperial botanists and Manchester merchants — reveal how colonial agricultural experiments sought to classify, standardise, and “improve” cotton varieties from India to suit the demands of Lancashire’s mills. These scientific practices were not neutral: they transformed plants and landscapes into instruments of extraction and control, reproducing hierarchies that cast Indian cotton as “inferior”, justifying interventions to reshape local agriculture practices and erasing existing knowledges. Tracing these processes, the paper highlights the role of botanical knowledge in materialising imperial ambitions and shaping global cotton commodity chains. The paper argues that the making of industrial modernity depended as much on the circulation of seeds and specimens as on machines and free markets ideologies. Recovering archival connections between cotton, botany, and empire reframes plant science as a key vector of colonial power — one that continues to inform contemporary debates on sustainability, biodiversity, and the legacies of extractive agriculture. 

Collecting the empire. Natural history collections as committed colonial practice 

Presenter 

Catarina Marques Madruga — cmmadruga@gmail.com; Technische Universität Berlin

Abstract 

The history of African territorial borders is riddled with violence, injustice, and colonial power displays. This paper shows how the history of collecting zoological specimens from specific colonized African localities is embedded in that same context and how museums of natural history are institutions implicated in histories of racial prejudice, imperial control, and territorial appropriation. Museum collections represent classic examples of accumulation sites, with images of rooms filled with objects up to ceiling feeding our collective imagination. Bruno Latour used the example of the Paris natural history museum to describe museums as sites of calculation and centers of accumulation, where a specific paradigm of information management and knowledge production is made possible. However, this view of natural history museums as privileged places overemphasizes Western institutions’ claims to authority. Since the eighteenth century, museum naturalists actively instigated the procurement of more specimens, from more collecting localities, often expressing an enumerative mania based on the premises of compared anatomy. Today, public European zoological collections demonstrate geographical sampling biases that are a function of colonial pursuit. Analysing Cameroonian collections of the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and Angolan collections of the Zoological Museum of Lisbon, I confront scientific and political uses of “collecting localities.” 

Empires of time and weather in Brazil: keeping time, predicting weather, and being contested by the public 

Presenter 

Sabina Ferreira Alexandre Luz — luz.sabina@gmail.com 

Abstract 

This paper examines how scientific and technological infrastructures for timekeeping and meteorology reshaped territorial governance, scientific authority, and public debate in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Brazil. During this period, the expansion of communication technologies such as the telegraph made it possible to build global networks of time. As Peter Galison (2004) has noted, these systems formed the basis of what he calls “empires of time”: infrastructures designed to synchronize clocks, coordinate railways, calculate longitude, and extend state and commercial control over populations and territories. In Brazil, these dynamics intersected with major state projects of mapping the territory, maintaining national integration, delimiting borders, connecting the hinterland to the coast, and controlling Indigenous populations. For these purposes, the calculation of time and the use of “time machines” were fundamental, making the activities of the Imperial/National Observatory crucial to these developments. Concurrently, the development of a meteorological network became a key component of nineteenth-century “observatory sciences”. Competing initiatives from the Observatory and the Brazilian Navy in the 1880s reveal the frictions and negotiations through which atmospheric knowledge was organized, leading to a more specialized network in the First Republic. Focusing on the Observatory’s dual role in keeping time and predicting weather, the paper explores how these activities were interpreted, challenged, and reworked in the public sphere. Newspapers often responded to official weather forecasts with irony and humor, exposing the tensions between state-sponsored expertise and everyday experience. 

Science and Empire in the Anthropocene: Towards an Environmental Shift 3 – (Post)-Imperial Ecologies 

Session Organizers 

Sabina Ferreira Alexandre Luz — luz.sabina@gmail.com 

Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva — matheus.alves_duarte_da_silva@kcl.ac.uk; King’s College London 

Chair 

Jules Skotnes-Brown — jasb@liverpool.ac.uk; University of Liverpool 

Session Abstract 

This symposium, sponsored by the Science and Empire Commission, aims to reinforce discussions on the complex intertwinements between Science, Empire, and Environment in order to assess the possibilities of an environmental shift for the Science and Empire. This third session critically investigates the emergence of ecological frameworks across different sciences, including medicine and pharmacy, and their application in colonial and post-colonial settings, such as Britain, Brazil, Mauritania, and Mexico. More than just assessing the views of imperial agents and elites, this session also examines how rural populations, patient associations, and other marginalised groups have contested, reinterpreted and employed these ecological frameworks in their own terms. 

The Imperial Epistemology of Fraser Darling’s ‘Ecological Reconnaissance’ 

Presenter 

Lawrence Dritsas — L.Dritsas@ed.ac.uk; University of Edinburgh 

Abstract 

Having earned fame through his human ecological studies of northwest Scotland (West Highland Survey 1955), British popular ecologist and author, Frank Fraser Darling (1903–1979) was in demand from governments and conservation organisations as an expert advisor. In the 1950s, he received commissions to conduct a series of regional ecological surveys in colonised spaces: Alaska (1952), Northern Rhodesia (1956–7), Kenya (1958) and Sudan (1961). Fraser Darling described his investigations as “ecological reconnaissance, no more and no less”. This reconnaissance was broad in scope, including environmental, mental, historical and social factors in his studies of interactions between humans and wildlife. Critics found him unscientific, but he argued that the “narrow view” produced by academic ecologists would not produce the policies governments needed. Furthermore, his wide-ranging reconnaissance was equivocal, practised under both the auspices of the colonial system and the progressive ideas of mid-century human ecology. Focussing on his fieldwork diaries, this paper examines Fraser Darling’s epistemology of ‘reconnaissance’, and how he used this method to construct ecological insights and recommendations from the Alaskan tundra to the African savannah. In doing so, the potentially imperial nature of human ecology and environmentalism will be considered. 

Between internal imperialism and post-imperial crossroads: Rethinking disease ecology within Brazilian rural communities (1920–1950) 

Presenter 

Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva — matheus.alves_duarte_da_silva@kcl.ac.uk; King’s College London 

Abstract 

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Brazil was pitted against a new sanitary phenomenon: diseases usually associated to urban spaces, such as plague and yellow fever, started to move to the hinterland, infecting rural communities and wild animals, a process that ultimately gave place to what I suggest calling the “wild diseases”. The wild diseases attracted the attention of Brazilian doctors, zoologists, and ecologists as well as of their North and South American, and European counterparts, who visited the Brazilian hinterland in different occasions. This national and international scientific interest ultimately placed several rural communities at the intersection of Brazilian projects of conquering, civilizing, and sanitizing the hinterland, and international competition on subjects such as disease ecology and animal reservoirs of disease. Going against the historiographical grain of centring the history of disease ecology on White male figures, in this presentation I focus instead on the Brazilian rural populations affected by the wild diseases, how they navigated these national, international, and (post)imperial disease ecology networks, how they collaborated with and reacted against the experts, and ultimately how the rural communities reworked the problem of wild diseases in their own terms. 

A Mauritanian Anademic: Pasteurian Science in the Search of Sylvatic Plague at the (Post)Imperial Frontier 

Presenter 

Christos Lynteris — cl12@st-andrews.ac.uk; University of St Andrews 

Abstract 

The paper examines the ways in which a key Pasteurian scientist, Marcel Baltazard, approached the disease ecology of sylvatic plague in postcolonial Mauritania. Positioned between his more famous research on plague among wild rodents in Iran and Brazil, Baltazard’s Mauritania expedition and ensuing Pasteurian research in what was at the time a recently independent country (1969–1971) has been overlooked by historians. Yet it plays an important role in the emergence of Pasteurian approaches to disease ecologies. Key to these frameworks, the paper will argue, was Baltazard’s development and application of notion of the “anademic” (anadémie) (originally coined in 1959) to bring together ecological and ethnographic data from the Mauritanian-Spanish Sahara borderland and its nomadic communities and configure the existence of plague foyers in the absence of a scientifically ascertainable animal reservoirs or effective insect vectors. Developed in debate with recent studies of sylvatic plague science at imperial frontiers, and the critical study of the notion of disease reservoirs, the paper will examine how this neglected episode in Pasteurian science acted as an important bridge between the research that would establish Marcel Baltazard as a key player in the science of disease ecology during the Cold War. 

Transnational Biopolitics in Laboratories: Animals and Humans at Risk 

Presenter 

Deyanira Cuanal Cano — deyanira.cuanal@gmail.com; Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Cuajimalpa 

Abstract 

Some authors, such as Adriana Petryna (2009), have pointed out the shift that occurred after the Second World War in the search for biological materials when it was demonstrated that the human and animal models that had governed scientific practices since the late 19th century were not anymore acceptable. Conceptually, the bodies of some populations have been equated with ‘guinea pigs,’ that is, animal bodies; and some laboratory animals, no longer considered indispensable, were banished from caregiving practices. From 1983 to 2011, Mexican health institutions allowed more than 5,000 clinical trials to be conducted by American pharmaceutical companies in Mexican population. The lack of a reconceptualisation of our interdependencies between humans and animals to sustain laboratory practices and health policies has led to their erasure and has generated imbalances that have enabled pharmaceutical companies to decide which bodies matter. This participation aims to contribute to the discussions about what Mexican bodies mean to large American pharmaceutical companies in a neoliberal world in crisis, lack of animals, and to outline what animal bodies have become for them. 

Science and Empire in the Anthropocene: Towards an Environmental Shift 4 – Imperial Medicine Contested 

Session Organizers 

Matheus Alves Duarte da Silva — matheus.alves_duarte_da_silva@kcl.ac.uk; King’s College London 

Sabina Ferreira Alexandre Luz — luz.sabina@gmail.com 

Chair 

Shiori Nosaka — nosaka@unistra.fr; University of Strasbourg 

Session Abstract 

This symposium, sponsored by the Science and Empire Commission, aims to reinforce discussions on the complex intertwinements between Science, Empire, and Environment in order to assess the possibilities of an environmental shift for the Science and Empire. This fourth session focuses on how imperial medicine was enacted, and contested from below across different Asian contexts. By analyzing cases from colonial India, China, and Japan in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this session invites reflection on the construction of scientific knowledge in plural and intersecting worlds. 

Pilgrims, Pathogens, and the Port: Environmental Crisis and Disease Control in Colonial Voyages in Colonial India (1850–1940) 

Presenter 

Sutanwi Chatterjee — schaterj@cougarnet.uh.edu; University of Houston 

Abstract 

The paper argues that diseases were controlled in colonial ports and on ships that arrived in these ports, shedding light on the conditions for establishing a disease-free zone within the ports during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This paper highlights the plight of pilgrims and travelers travelling to other countries during the late nineteenth and twentieth century. The paper will also investigate unhygienic sanitary conditions existing in the colonial ports that affected the health of laborers and accidents that happened from oil spillage in colonial ports leading to environmental pollution. In the existing field of scholarship, the works of David Arnold, Projit Mukherji, Partho Dutta, Pratik Chakrabarti, and Erica Wald have argued the role of modern medicine in colonial India. However, these works have not focused on the details of diseases affecting the environment of colonial ports during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Instead, this paper suggests the importance of disease control and its environment in ports. 

Disease in a Temple Town 

Presenter 

Prakash Kumar — puk15@psu.edu; Pennsylvania State University 

Abstract 

Baidyanath (also, Deoghar) is a place of pilgrimage in India whose origins lie deep in antiquity. But its emergence as a temple town during colonial rule was connected to the growth of East Indian Railway’s chord line, a rising pilgrim traffic, and the colonial state’s efforts at creating hygienic modernity as congregates continued to descend on the township. Conquered early as part of forays into Bengal Presidency, the colonial state wished to bring the town under its epidemic governance. This paper highlights two episodes — a smallpox breakout in 1866 and a late nineteenth and early twentieth century outbreak of plague — to highlight the civic engagement of specific classes of colonized subjects with the colonial state. Looking at disease governance through the eyes of the subjects, it captures scattered responses to resurrect an alternative imaginary of ways Indians expressed themselves as political and social beings. As the colonial state implemented a deferral of biomedical citizenship (Anderson, 2006) and suspended basic rights at times of epidemic (Arnold, 1993), those in Baidyanath advocated a different social ethic and ethic of livelihood. This political assertion resisted the colonial state’s attempts to mark colonial bodies as simply pathological. 

Where epidemiology failed: plague, facemasks and the crisis of the Japanese imperial hygiene in 1940 Manchuria 

Presenter 

Meng Zhang — mengzhang@manchester.ac.uk; University of Manchester 

Abstract 

In September 1940, a severe outbreak of pneumonic plague struck Shinkyo (now Changchun), the capital of Manchukuo (a Japanese client state). The Japanese military’s bacteriological corps quickly assumed control, imposing unprecedented massive compulsory masking, quarantine, lockdowns, and contact tracing — measures celebrated in official propaganda. Yet the outbreak soon revealed troubling inconsistencies: transmission chains could not be identified and infections appeared in urban environments presumed to be hygienic and well-protected. These difficulties led some Japanese epidemiologists and physicians to rethink the effectiveness of technical solutions in epidemic prevention. This paper argues that the Shinkyo plague constituted an epistemological rupture within Japan’s imperial hygiene regime. The crisis exposed the fragility of an ideology that had long privileged bacteriology and military-style sanitary policing while systematically marginalising the social, economic, and environmental determinants of disease prevalent among the colonised population. Drawing on medical reports, internal memoranda, and Japanese archives, this study demonstrates that the 1940 crisis opened a crucial, yet brief, space for a nascent social medicine perspective to rise as a direct challenge to technocratic authority. In doing so, the paper not only complicates the prevailing view that Japan’s imperial medical ideology reached its zenith during the war, but provides a critical historical precedent for understanding how socioeconomic inequality undermines a technological empire. 

Burying Anthrax: The Making of an Animal Cemetery in Izmit in Early Republican Turkey

Presenter 

Zeynep Akçakaya — zeyneptk@gmail.com; Kadir Has University 

Abstract 

In the 8 March 1937 issue of Cumhuriyet newspaper, it was reported that Ziya Tan, Director of the İzmit Veterinary Office, introduced a new proposal to the Provincial General Assembly — one that was subsequently approved: the construction of an animal cemetery for the burial of animal carcasses, particularly those that had died of contagious diseases. Tan justified his proposal by explaining that the anthrax bacillus can survive on the surface of the soil for more than thirty years, whereas it dies within seven to eight months when deeply buried. This decision by the İzmit Provincial General Assembly generated widespread public reaction in the press. Some questioned whether at a time when modern, tree-lined, and enclosed cemeteries for humans were still lacking, it should be animals to have one; others considered the decision highly appropriate from a public health standpoint. As Bacillus Anthracis acquired an identity, its nature was unraveled, which followed by anthrax’s global fame — thanks to Koch, Pasteur, and other scientists — this expanding body of knowledge, combined with the early Republic’s public health agenda and its aim to create a controlled, disease-free built environment, appears to have strengthened the drive to shape the surrounding environment accordingly. By bringing to light this little-known effort in the Republican history, and by exploring the discussions that occupied the newspapers for several days — while focusing specifically on anthrax as the catalyst for this case — this paper asks what diseases reveal about human–animal relations (including similarities and divergences between state perspectives and those of ordinary people towards animals), and how knowledge on diseases changed these relations. It further explores how these varied dimensions of human–animal relations informed efforts to redesign the surrounding environment. 

Communication Officers: Millena Farias and Anderson Antunes.
scienceandempirecommission@gmail.com