Lachlan Fleetwood’s monograph is a multi-layered study of the Himalaya as an emerging object of scientific investigation in the first half of the nineteenth century. Situated on the fringes of an expansive empire, this region, Fleetwood argues, was nevertheless “central to imperial imaginations” (p. 17) and an increasingly global science of an increasingly “vertical globe” (pp. 11, 15). The most famous exponent of that science was German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, whose early nineteenth-century ascent of the Chimborazo volcano became the yardstick by which future explorations of high mountains, including the ones discussed in this book, were usually measured. However, as Fleetwood convincingly demonstrates, locating the actors of Himalayan science making solely in Humboldt’s shadow would be a mistake. Not only because the tenets of “Humboldtian science” often proved inadequate when confronted with the different geographical and geological context of South Asia. But also, because moving away from narratives centered on such “heroic” figures of science – as indeed the Himalayan surveyors and naturalists themselves tried to do, to transcend their own “equivocal social status” (p. 94), as twice-peripheral creators of scientific knowledge – helps reveal the wider networks of knowledge and labour in which imperial science making was imbricated. In contexts like that of British India, which thrived on the erasure and devaluation of South Asian forms of knowledge and labour, such scholarship is essential.

In six carefully researched chapters, Fleetwood explores the role of the Himalaya in the vertical reconfiguration of the globe in the first half of the nineteenth century, focusing on two types of scientific ventures that were central to imperial knowledge production: expeditions and the establishment of scientific institutions. One of the merits of the book is that it seeks to capture the comprehensive and interdisciplinary nature of early nineteenth-century investigations of the Himalaya. Thus, Chapter 1 discusses the debates surrounding the status of the Himalaya as the highest mountain in the world against the background of a wider – albeit relatively recent – preoccupation with verticality as an organizing principle for both European mountain science and “imaginative geographies” (p. 40). Chapter 2 turns to the materiality of science making, exploring several instruments for measuring altitude, among them mountain barometers, boiling point thermometers, and field-books. In an important addition to previous literature, Fleetwood shows that instruments didn’t operate only as an “extension” of the human senses, but also highlighted their limits, helping “establish scientific authority in a world in which the senses were unreliable” when confronted with extreme environmental conditions (p. 65). Chapter 3 builds on the theme of bodily limitations by focusing on the connections between locality, disease, race and, to a lesser extent, gender, as evidenced in studies of medical topography. Examining indigenous understandings of altitude sickness alongside European travel narratives, Fleetwood notes that acknowledging physical suffering was essential to “establish[ing] a privileged position for producing credible knowledge” about the Himalaya. However, such confessions also ran the risk of “upsetting social hierarchies around race and bodily performance,” especially when locals appeared to negotiate the ill-effects of altitude better than their foreign masters (p. 116).

Chapter 4 discusses the making of geological knowledge about the Himalayas, focusing particularly on the collection of fossils in the Spiti Valley as well as attempts to understand the movement of glaciers and the upheavement of the mountains. As in the previous chapter, Fleetwood makes considerable effort to document – albeit by reading “against the grain” of colonial, English-language archives – the meaning attributed to fossils in local cosmologies as well as the crucial role indigenous networks played in helping locate specimens. Pati Ram’s multi-faceted contributions were particularly notable in this regard, as were oral traditions that facilitated understandings of topographical changes, for example in relation to the movement of glaciers. In Chapter 5, attention shifts to high-altitude institutions, in particular the twice-peripheral – by virtue of their distance from both London and Calcutta – establishments like the East India Company’s gardens at Saharanpur and Mussoorie, which struggled to carve a reputation for themselves as centres of “philosophical” botany, rather than mere points for the collection of flora (p. 199). In this context, Fleetwood documents Hari Singh and Murdan Ali’s important work at Saharanpur, the latter all the more remarkable for being recognized at the time as a “’botanist’ in his own right, rather than merely a ‘collector’ or ‘gardener’” (pp. 189–190). Finally, Chapter 6 turns to studies of biogeography, exploring the connections between verticality and the distribution of flora and fauna as well as notions of habitability in the Himalayas. As Fleetwood argues, questions of altitude and habitability were circumscribed not only by extant scientific knowledge but also by political concerns about the security of imperial frontiers.

The book engages critically with several more or less recent “turns” in the history of science, the global, the practical and the spatial, in an attempt to strike the right balance between telling the story of mountain science on a grand scale and recovering the more minor scale “’experiential texture’ of doing science” (p. 29). As Fleetwood points out throughout the book, global comparison was central to the making of knowledge about the Himalaya, but that “intensely imperial form of globality” (p. 252) was also predicated upon numerous erasures, disconnections, and moments when information, instruments and bodies broke down or did not circulate. Attending to such moments by investigating not only the textual, but also the material archives of science, in the form of scientific instruments, plants, or fossil specimens, is essential for writing different histories of science. Disconnections, inconsistencies, and contradictions notwithstanding – or perhaps because of them, as Waltraud Ernst pointed out in a related context1 – colonialism proved extremely successful at elevating certain actors, practices, and vocabularies of knowledge making over others. The fact that we must now devote hours of research and writing to exposing its conceits is clear indication of this. This realization struck me anew as I was reading the following, otherwise accurate, conclusion in Chapter 4: “Himalayan peoples were thus crucial for locating glaciers, much as they had been for fossils” (p. 168). Perhaps books like Fleetwood’s should also be read as an invitation to pause for a moment and consider what it is we are proving here: that people who had likely lived their entire lives, generation after generation, in the Himalaya and South Asia, were more familiar with their local environments than those who travelled from thousands of kilometers away to “discover” them. It might help to consider the counterfactual scenario in which a Pati Ram descended upon southern England in the early 1800s to discover Megalosaurus remains largely by himself. If that proposition sounds risible today, perhaps we should ask ourselves why that is so. Studies like Fleetwood’s might go some way towards providing an answer.

Note:
1 Waltraud Ernst, Introduction: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Race, Science and Medicine, in: Waltraud Ernst / Bernard Harris (eds.), Race, Science and Medicine, 1700–1960, London 1999, p. 7.