ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book investigates the role of science in the relationship between Europe and Africa and in creating knowledge about Africa. It deals with the history of scientific travels and expeditions – cartographic, botanical, natural-historical – from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, with a particular focus on the production of maps and other special knowledge. The book then addresses the role of the coloniessince the late nineteenth century, as laboratories for modern scientific research. It also investigates how the relationship between Western and non-Western countries increasingly came to be embedded, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in international discourses and transnational circulations of knowledge. The book analyses how knowledge on the Cape of Good Hope formed an important part of the transnational information networks between Europe, Asia and Africa.
