Kapil Raj (EHESS Paris), The Emergence of Calcutta as a Global Centre for Knowledge Production in the 18th Century

 

Commentator: David Shulman (The Hebrew University)

 

THE BAR-HILLEL COLLOQUIUM FOR THE HISTORY, PHILOSOPHY, AND SOCIOLOGY OF SCIENCE 

 

Monday, 26.3.2012, 18:00

Gilman Building, Room 449

 

התכנסות לקפה וכיבוד קל בשעה 17:45, ליד חדר 449

 

This talk explores the history of the first century of Calcutta¹s existence, from a swampy village of mud-huts in 1690 to the second most-important city of the British empire at the end of the 18th century. During the same period, Calcutta also emerged as a world-renowned centre of scientific knowledge making in botany, geology, geodesy, map-making, geography, history, linguistics and ethnology. Culcutta thus provides an excellent case study of the co-construction of knowledge and urbanity in the early-modern context of globalisation. As a contact zone between different ethnic, professional and religious communities, each with their specific knowledge practices, we shall see that it is through the legal management of difference in this cosmopolitan context that new knowledges are produced in this city. The talk thus seeks to deparochialise the current focus on cosmopolitanism and early-modern knowledge formation beyond the European and North Atlantic worlds.

 

     פרופ' יוסי שוורץ, יו"ר

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