Knowledge, Science, and Development across Global Contexts

Madeline White (University of Oxford), Asian botanical names and images as gateways to early modern British science

The Du Bois Herbarium at the University of Oxford has been a mystery for over a century. Deconstructed from its original binding in the 1890s, its early modern organizing scheme was deemed permanently lost. However, review of corresponding archival documents and images have presented a new means of reconstructing the collection, not according to European ordering schemes, but through expertise brought to the herbarium by Asian contributors. This talk explores the process of rediscovering the herbarium through vernacular Tamil names and Chinese paintings. By combining digital scholarship approaches with historical research and scientific expertise, this research both provides a means of restoring the Du Bois Herbarium to its original form and creates new frameworks for interdisciplinary collaboration.

Koyna Tomar (University of Pennsylvania), Remaking Surplus and Scarcity: India’s Dairy Industrialization and the Global Surplus Food Regime, 1930 – 1970

This talk situates the history of dairy industrialization in South Asia within what Harriet Friedmann and Philip McMichael have called the ‘surplus food regime.’ Through complex bilateral and multilateral mechanisms, surplus dairy stocks from the United States, New Zealand, Australia, and, later, the European Economic Community were channeled to countries across the “Third World”, both as a relief measure and, more crucially, as a strategy of economic development. India’s ambitious program of dairy expansion through cooperative production and marketing became the largest recipient of dairy commodity aid. At a time when food aid, particularly wheat loans from the US, came under stark criticism, international experts and Indian political and scientific figures argued that commodity aid in dairy products was decidedly distinct. Milk’s material properties, they suggested, made it amenable to radically different projects of self-reliance, and instead of cementing relations of dependence, dairy aid could nurture a national, modern dairy industry that was not only economically productive but also fulfilled social imperatives of redistribution. The history of global agrarian development in the post-war period is usually narrated as a ‘seed-centric’ story. Scholars emphasize the role played by US foreign policy and philanthropic foundations in making high-yielding variety seeds, fertilizers, and technical experts central to postcolonial state-making projects. Approaching the history of global agrarian development through the case of dairy introduces new geographies, actors, and periodization in this narrative. It also demonstrates the importance of situating the history of transnational technical and scientific expertise within changing class relations across the so-called ‘first’ and the ‘third’ world.