Abstract :
[en] This paper fits in a broader research project funded by the Belgian F.R.S.-Fonds national de la Recherche scientifique. It is entitled: Africa in the “science policies” of France and Great Britain from the eighteenth to the mid- nineteenth century: the scholarly background of the Scramble.
This general project aims at completing in an original way recent studies on the interactions between the “New Science” derived from the Scientific Revolution and the building of colonial empires in the Atlantic area from the Enlightenment to the apogee of the first Industrial Revolution. Its objective is to investigate how in this period Africa has become a scientific object in its own right for the colonial administrations of France and Great Britain. Botanical knowledge (industrial plants, food crops and medicinal herbs) that originated in Africa was first applied in the plantations of slave economies in the Caribbean and North America. It was increased with knowledge about the geography and natural history of the continent’s interior through a revival of exploration in Africa itself. The project aims to relate the increased interest from scholars for Africa to the intensification of economic and military competition between the powers. It also wants to demonstrate how a more precise knowledge of the African terrain influenced the ways in which the governments of both countries have integrated colonial expertise in a complex science policy adapted to the specific needs of the two states.
In this paper I will focus on the British side of the spectrum. I will investigate the changing British attitude towards Africa in the early nineteenth century through a case study of an expedition to the River Congo organized in 1816. Although this expedition ended in disaster (a majority of the members died in the course of the undertaking), it offers a series of useful examples that help to illustrate the transformation of British science policies under the pressure of competition with the French. Thus, it is my aim to show how Great Britain in the face of state-oriented French science has abandoned its policy of informal relationships and started to encourage its administration and scientific institutions to intervene more directly in exploration. Crucial in this evolution was the way in which the Admiralty absorbed the scholarly input of a number of learned societies and institutions, such as the Royal Society, the British Museum or the so-called “African Association” – the latter combining both scientific and commercial objectives.
Thus the expedition illustrates the transition from Late Enlightenment “Banksian” exploration, inspired by the omnipotent science organizer Sir Joseph Banks (1743-1820), towards a more thorough imperial design of exploration under the command of Sir John Barrow (1764-1848). Already since the French conquest of Egypt, “scientific” expeditions relied on the collaboration between learned networks and the military, an example that would be copied later in Algeria. At the British side, it was the Admiralty that strengthened its grip on exploration. Tuckey’s expedition illustrates very well the amplification of operations, the more direct intervention by the government, and the growing importance of the commercial agendas of science. I will focus here on the interaction between the Admiralty and the learned societies with regard to the composition of the instruction text given to the leader of the expedition on the eve of his departure, on the specific choice of the area he had to explore (related to the “Niger question”), on the practical organization (e.g. the development of special steam engines by the engineer Watt, the scientific equipment offered with the help of the British Museum, etc.), on the choice of the scientists who formed a real team of experts (e.g. Christen Smith, John Cranch, etc.), on the collection of scientific data and their integration in collections in Britain, on the presentation of the expedition’s results in a published report entitled Narrative of an expedition to explore the river Zaire, usually called the Congo, in South Africa, in 1816, under the direction of Captain J. K. Tuckey, R.N., (London, 1818), and finally, on the circulation of these results in the rest of Europe due to the translation of the report in Dutch and French.
