Collaboration and knowledge exchange between scholars in Britain and the empire, 1830–1914

In recent years there has been a growing interest among historians in the British Empire as a space of knowledge production and circulation. Much of this work assumes that scholarly cooperation and collaboration between individuals and institutions within the Empire had the effect (and often also the aim) of strengthening both imperial ties and the idea of empire. This chapter argues, however, that many examples of scholarly travel, exchange, and collaboration were undertaken with very different goals in mind. In particular, it highlights the continuing importance of an ideal of scientific internationalism, which stressed the benefits of scholarship for the whole of humanity and prioritized the needs and goals of individual academic and scientific disciplines. As the chapter shows, some scholars even went on to develop nuanced critiques of the imperial project while using the very structures of empire to further their own individual, disciplinary and institutional goals

Mobilities of Knowledge: An Introduction

Mobilities of Knowledge examines how geographical mobility of people and (im)material things has impacted epistemic systems of knowledge in different historical and geographical contexts. In this chapter, the authors introduce concepts and debates in interdisciplinary research on spatial mobility and the production, dissemination, and transfer of knowledge. They suggest extending Urry’s (2007) typology of interdependent mobilities that constitute the space of flows and the space of places (Castells, 1996) from five to six dimensions through the consideration of mobile knowledges, concepts, and practices. Finally, they outline how the chapters of this volume help to identify generic as well as context-specific practices and processes of knowledge production, dissemination, and transfer and call for more empirical case studies to further the collective development of flexible conceptual understandings