I found the discussion of the relationship between inter-imperial rivalry and cooperation in the workshop on “Actors and Ideas between European Empires” run by Ulrike Lindner very useful. We decided that in the late nineteenth century commercial cooperation and rivalry often were not considered to be antithetical. Advocates of international economic cooperation (i.e. standardization, collective infrastructural management, commercial regulation) were often trying to establish a framework that would facilitate more intensive competition. As Lindner put it, many internationalists essentially viewed rivalry, within certain bounds, as progress. However, the chapters by Lindner and MacKenzie from Imperial Cooperation and Transfer also persuasively demonstrated that a new sense of white, Euro-American solidarity did emerge in the late nineteenth century. During this period, imperial expansion and commercial integration, which entailed massive new programs of infrastructural development, resource extraction and administrative reform created many new opportunities for scientific and technical cooperation among Western “experts” and generated a new sense of Western cultural superiority. Moreover, new cooperative organizations, such as the Institut Colonial International, helped enhance the visibility and professional prestige of transnational networks of experts. I will need to think more about how national commercial institutions may have supported and/or regulated this type of cooperation as I develop my dissertation project.
Kapil Raj’s introduction to Relocating Modern Science, which we discussed in the workshop by Jakob Vogel and Alexander van Wickeren, provided an alternative perspective on European scientific networks. Raj argued that the history of modern science should include non-Western actors operating in imperial “contact zones” who participated in and shaped European research activities “outside the laboratory.” It is possible that this argument could be applied to the development of European theories of commercial practice. At the end of the nineteenth century there was a general movement to codify “commercial science” within an emergent network of European business schools (e.g. l’École des Hautes Études Commerciales). However, this body of knowledge generally was not based on methodical fieldwork but rather on an accumulation of anecdotal experience and customary practices drawn from a diverse array of private actors and associations (chambers of commerce, shipping companies, etc.). In its infancy “commercial science” seems to have involved less systematic consultation of local, non-Western experts than the disciplines discussed by Raj (cartography, botany, etc.). This does not mean that this kind of consultation did not occur but its influence on Western institutions may be quite hard to trace.
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