Historians of natural history have long explored the emergence of evolutionary theory. Most of the studies that I have read on the subject tend to discuss its development and influence within an Imperial framework. The colonized world appears in these histories as a site in which key figures, such as Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles…
Tag: History of Science
Getting the Wasp into the Cyanide Jar
In his address to the Bombay Natural History Society in 1893, Colonel Charles Thomas Bingham regaled the audience with stories from his recent trip along the Myawaddy Road that ran between British Burma and Siam collecting rare specimens of bird, butterfly and wasp. Using cliched imagery, he wrote of the region’s “unbroken forests” where “no…
Missing Links in Myanmar
When I was going through some Burmese colonial-era magazines on my research trip earlier this year, I came across the following article discussing some models that were displayed at the Field Museum in Chicago. I think that they were probably part of the ‘Hall of Prehistoric Man’ which opened in 1933. The article was published…
The Imperial Science of Hypnotic Adverts
Whilst I was doing some research in colonial-era magazines, I stumbled across this 1930s advert in to: te’ yei: (progress) magazine for a book promising to teach people the skill of hypnotism. Costing just three rupees, the seller generously offered to refund any purchaser who found that they could not ‘master the science’. Learning hypnotism—or,…
‘The Philosopher Burmese Prince’ and the Air-Pump
The other week I found a digitized archive of the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, a periodical originally founded under a different name by the famed colonial Orientalist scholar William Jones. I was having a flick through looking for articles on Burma and found the following little article from early 1833. I haven’t…
Colonizing Animals 