The Scientific Imagination in South Africa

William Beinart is Emeritus Professor, St Antony's College, University of Oxford and former Director of the African Studies Centre. His publications include The Rise of Conservation in South Africa (2003), Environment and Empire (2007) with Lotte Hughes, Prickly Pear: A Social History of a Plant in the Eastern Cape (2011) with Luvuyo Wotshela, African Local Knowledge & Livestock Health (2013) with Karen Brown and Rights to Land (2017) with Peter Delius and Michelle Hay. Saul Dubow is Smuts Professor of Commonwealth History at the University of Cambridge. He is the author of books, edited collections, and articles about nineteenth and twentieth-century South African history including Scientific Racism in Modern South Africa (1995), A Commonwealth of Knowledge (2006), South Africa's Struggle for Human Rights (2012), and Apartheid 1948–1994 (2014). He is the editor of Science and Society in Southern Africa (2000).

• Introduction: The Scientific Imagination in South Africa; 1. Scientific Imagination and Local Knowledge at the Cape in the Eighteenth Century; 2. Scientific Governance and Colonial Institutions, c.1800–1870; 3: Technological Innovation and the Scientific Imagination in Mining and Agriculture, 1870–1902; 4. Science, Reconstruction, and the Imagining of the First 'New' South Africa, 1902–1929; 5. The Commonwealth of Knowledge, 1930–1948; 6. The Republic of Science, 1948–1990; 7. Big Science and Indigenous Knowledge: Post-Apartheid South Africa and the African Renaissance; Afterword.

'Viewed locally and globally, the history of science in South Africa is an astonishing mix of achievement and conflict that is difficult for even experts to understand. At last, two of the region's finest historians have produced a synthetic account that makes this fascinating story intelligible to amateurs and specialists alike.' Keith Breckenridge, University of the Witwatersrand