Civilizing Natures: Race, Resources, and Modernity in Colonial South India

by Kavita Philip

Science was a central pillar of colonialism, but the converse holds true as colonialism profoundly shaped the character of nineteenth-century science. Civilizing Natures unravels unexpected relationships between science, technology, and administrative systems in colonial India from the 1850s to the 1930s, deepening our perspective on continuing conflicts over race, resources, and empire.

Botanists, anthropologists, and foresters had their most important sources of data—nature and natives—located at colonial sites. In the hilly, forested regions of Madras Presidency, tribal populations were studied by ethnographers, managed by revenue officials, recruited by plantation contractors, and modernized by missionaries. Racial constructions of nature and modernity helped criminalize and domesticate unruly natives. This is a story about the construction of nature in southern India that is deeply local and irreducibly global.

Through detailed case studies, Kavita Philip shows how race and nature are fundamental to understanding colonial modernities. Through its insightful combination of methodologies from both the humanities and the social sciences, Civilizing Natures complicates our understandings of the relationships between science and religion, pre-modern and civilized, environment and society.

264 pages, Paperback

First published October 8, 2003

About the author

Kavita Philip is Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of Studies in Unauthorized Reproduction (MIT Press).

Reviews

[Lilly Irani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Postcolonial studies ahead of its time. Civilizing Natures connects longstanding concerns of postcolonial studies: how historical relations of colonialism shape our knowledge of people, bodies, culture, land, and science and reshape lifeworlds of both colonizer and colonized (oversimplified dualism will have to stand for the goodreads review). Civilizing Natures also importantly shows how political economy -- relations of money making and livelihood -- shaped that knowledge. In an intellectual landscape where so many analyze culture in terms of discourse, rhetoric, and language, Civilizing Natures connects that language to the material practices and the economy while never slipping into easy discourse determinism.

[Zara Rahman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I loved the ideas and thought that went into this book - but I found it incredibly hard to read, due to the largely academic turns of phrase. The examples and the ideas were fantastic and exactly what I was looking for when I came to the book, but it's very much written with an academic audience in mind. In an ideal world, I'd love to see a re-write of some of the best bits - I can't help but think that many of these concepts could be communicated in a much more accessible way, without losing much (if any) of the smart thinking that went into it.