In the history of the circulation of knowledge certain objects may be considered as paradigmatic of the ways through which information about territories and people was produced. The namban screens and the maps of the Relaciones Geográficas de Indias – RGI, both produced in the second half of the sixteenth century, provide two visual representations of the encounters resulting from the Spanish and Portuguese largescale empires. These two sets of objects brought novelty in the forms of representation of space used, and reflected particular relationships established between Europeans and other cultures. The namban screens represent the nexus between Europe and the Orient; and the maps of the RGI the imperial territories of the Spanish Crown. Together they speak of a significant way of knowing and connecting the entire world. By associating the two instances, I argue that these visual and material objects are documents that allow for a clearer understanding of the early stages of European modernity since they both circulated within a network of data, visual representation, luxury, and power.

It was for both science and empire that East India Company employees lugged (or rather, employed Asian porters to lug) a panoply of fragile instruments into, and specimens out of, the Himalaya in order to account for what were only just coming to be acknowledged were by far the highest mountains on the globe. Measuring altitude accurately had never really been necessary before, but elevation was becoming a critical variable in many sciences, especially biogeography, altitude physiology, and geology. This scientific engagement with three dimensions was nevertheless complicated by surveyors’ dependence on their guides and the limits of imperial mastery along nascent high mountain frontiers. By focusing on the first half of the nineteenth century, often overlooked for the later period, I show that the gradual accumulation of scientific, political and imaginative coherence in the Himalaya occurred simultaneously with a recognition of the commensurability of mountain environments. Mountain science was thus, I argue, always global science. This had both a material dimension in the movement of things – specimens, scientific instruments, inscriptions and drawings – and an imaginative dimension in the way that plants, fossils and bodies increasingly had to be located on globe that was vertical as well as round. Practising science was thus an inherently comparative process, and even while physically ascending into the Himalaya, surveyors had to engage with a vertical globe that already prominently featured the Alps and Andes, even if tracing these equivalencies sometimes caused more confusion rather than coherence.

I examine conflicting accounts of “scorpion suicide” to explore the entanglement of colonialism, anecdotes, and nascent scientific journals in the late 1800s. The tale of the scorpion surrounded by fire choosing to turn its sting on itself is one of the most striking images of animal self-destruction. While the experimental tradition on scorpion suicide is almost 300 years old, dating back to work by the French natural philosopher Maupertuis in 1731, the British were relative latecomers. They had a distinct dearth of scorpions until encountering them in colonial holdings like South Africa and India. I show how venues for the international circulation of animal anecdotes and at-home experiments like Nature magazine, mixed with British colonial access to scorpions, mixed with concerns about the evolutionary implications of a self-destructive instinct, led to vigorous debate over the reality of scorpion suicide in the 1870s and 1880s. Ultimately, I argue, it was not just the grisly experimental evidence, but also shifting epistemic standards in scientific journals and a denial of the implicit epistemic authority granted to the reports of explorers and colonialists in exotic places that led to the British scientific community turning against scorpion suicide. However, despite this century-old scientific conclusion, the present day persistence of the tale of scorpion suicide, on Youtube and Reddit, on yahoo answers and pet shop owners forums, and even in non-biology academic papers, reminds of us the complex nature of not just the development, but also the distribution, of scientific findings.

Before there were chairs, institutes and courses of geography at universities, the discipline had its institutional basis in "Geographical Societies". The purpose of these more or less amateur associations, which started emerging in the 1820s, was to promote and disseminate geographical knowledge. When it came to distant, unknown lands, they received such knowledge especially from travelers. One of the most famous (or, given his involvement in the Belgian colonization of the Congo, infamous) travelers of the 19th century was the British-American Henry Morton Stanley who, between 1871 and 1889, conducted four explorations in central Africa. Upon his returns, he paid a total of twenty visits to a total of thirteen Geographical Societies in Europe, Africa, America, and Australia. He received honors from them, and gave talks about his journeys and geographical findings, concerning most importantly the sources of the Nile and the rest of the central African water system. In my paper, I analyze Stanley's talks to the Societies as they are recorded in the latter's journals. What knowledge did he convey to them, and how did he adapt his communications to the specifics of Geographical Societies of different cities and countries? Moreover, as it was an age of intense colonialism, Stanley's knowledge on Africa had, at least for European Geographical Societies, colonialist dimensions. How did these dimensions materialize in Stanley's visits to, and invitations by, the associations?