The Production of Value: Metrology, Land Revenue, and the State in Colonial India, 1820-1900
The mapping of India has long been viewed as an instrument of colonial governmentality and control. In this view, scientific survey and map-making legitimised British territorial possession and extraction, presenting an image of imperial rule at once enlightened and powerful. More recently, historians of science have called for a greater focus on local contributions to colonial cartography, emphasising the labour and knowledge of the ‘go-between’ in the circulation of scientific knowledge and the often-imperfect manifestation of science-making on the ground. The focus in all these studies has been on grand surveys, notably The Great Trigonometrical Survey of the nineteenth century, and on particular scientific innovations.
This paper, part of the AHRC-funded ‘Colonial Standards’ project at History of Science Museum (HSM) Oxford, looks instead at the ideas and practices of land surveying in the nineteenth century that underpinned a vital function of the British colonial state: the land revenue system. The largest single source of colonial revenue, the land tax has long been a contentious issue in Indian economic and social history. Yet, little is known of the social, material, and political-economic considerations of this system, the techniques used to determine value, and the interaction of this cadastral knowledge with local forms of power and ordering such as caste. Using the scientific instrument collections at HSM Oxford and archival materials, the paper argues that an engagement with the material and social practice of land surveying provides fresh insight into the making of the colonial state and the lasting entanglement of land and power in India.

Dr. Shankar Nair
Postdoctoral Researcher, History of Science Museum, University of Oxford.
My research focuses on the social and economic history of science and technology and its relation to the history of empire in South Asia in the 19th and 20th century. I am particularly interested in agricultural and rural industrial production, and the history of scientific and commercial standardisation in a transnational and comparative perspective. I am currently a Linda Hall Library Fellow in the History of Science and Technology (2025-26). I previously worked as a Lecturer in the History of Science and Technology at King’s College London (2024-25) and co-convened the Centre for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHoSTM) during this period.

The Big Sequence: chronology and the pan-Africanisms of the twentieth century
During the mid-twentieth century archaeology on the African continent was fixated on producing chronological sequences of artefacts and dirt: elements that held the key to a comprehensive picture of the continent’s deep past. This recognition catalysed an unprecedented project to collate a continent’s worth of distinct sequences, excavated under varying paradigms by different research teams in various languages, with an ambition of presenting the first scientific pan-African archaeology: an Atlas and accompanying Lexicon of African Prehistory. While this archaeological project did not explicitly align itself with other contemporary pan-African politics, it had to contend with these amidst the rapidly changing landscape of the independence period. In particular, the ultimate pariah status of the apartheid government – representing the country with one of the best-documented human fossil chronologies on the continent – forced conversations about the limits of scientific cooperation, with fractures ultimately forming between African and Euro-American archaeologists. This seminar explores how aspirations of organising time without borders in Africa’s deep past confronted other forms of solidarity and resistance, and led to a reckoning in archaeology’s purpose on the continent.

Rachel King is an inter-disciplinary scholar specialising in the study of the recent past in southern Africa. Her most recent publications include her 2025 book The Neoliberalisation of Heritage in Africa (Cambridge University Press), her 2024 co-edited textbook Methods and Methodologies in Heritage Studies (UCL Press), and several forthcoming articles on the impacts of South Africa’s framework for protecting the past after 30 years of democracy.