Seminario IMF-CSIC: John Bosco Lourdusamy, Fruits, Nuts and Flows of knowledges

Abstract:This paper will explicate the different modalities of the flows of knowledge between supposed centres of knowledge production in the European world and the colonies that European nations acquired. Challenging the unilateral flows, this paper will highlight the different directionalities and agencies of the exchanges in the colonial context. It does so by taking the cases of a few crops like cashew nut and jackfruit – crops that traversed several regions of the world, back-and-forth with attendant knowledges, regimes of labour and technologies. The paper lays particular emphasis on knowledge in its plural form – underlying the varieties of knowledges that transcended the specifications, qualifications and limitations set up by some of the players over others.

John Bosco Lourdusamy is with the Department of Humanities and Social Science, Indian Institute of Technology Madras. He works in the domains of plantations, global movement of crops, and the history of science, technology and medicine in colonial India. He had studied B.A in History in Loyola College, Chennai and M.A and M.Phil., in Pondicherry University, India. He obtained his doctorate from the University of Oxford. While at Oxford, he had also been a Queen Elizabeth Visiting Scholar to the Department of History and Sociology of Science, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. Lourdusamy has authored the books: Science and National Consciousness in Bengal, 1870-1930, (2004); Religion and Modern Science in Colonial Bengal, 1870-1940, (2007) and co-authored the book Moving crops and the Scales of History (2023) which won the 2024 Sidney Edelstein Prize of the Society for History of Technology and the 2024 World History Association Bentley Book Prize. He was an International Scholar of the Society for the History of Technology (2013-15) and a member of the Research Council, Indian National Commission for the History of Science – an organ of the Indian National Science Academy (2014-16); he is also a member of the Editorial Board of Technology and Culture.