ABSTRACT

This chapter examines a specific field of knowledge production that emerged in both Europe and Japan in the late nineteenth century under such headings as ‘colonial studies’, ‘colonial science’, and ‘imperial science’. Colonial expertise was widely exchanged between empires, challenging to some extent the historical narrative of competing imperial powers. At the same time that colonial studies disappeared in the late 1960s, a new strand of historical research interested in the relation between science and empire began to take shape. Relatively little research has addressed the nineteenth-century development of colonial studies. One precursor of the field, particularly for teaching purposes, was the earlier training programmes for colonial officers set up in several European countries during the nineteenth century. Whereas colonial studies offered a welcome and apparently ‘apolitical and neutral’ area for cooperation, it was at the same time a field of exclusion. This also applies to the Institut Colonial International, which excluded delegates from the Ottoman Empire and from Japan.