Science across the European Empires is a commendable but flawed effort to bring a comparative European perspective into the fashionable historiographical field of imperial science. Now thirty years old, the premises of that historiography are familiar but still vital: science was an active protagonist in imperial adventures, providing both technological capacity and ideological justifications for the rule of one people by another. This volume brings original material on German and other continental empires to an anglophone readership, and is particularly strong on the inter-war period, where essays shed new light on the role of science in the construction of racially accented discourses of improvement in the French, British and Dutch empires.

However, the collection does not cohere, and for the most part it fails to live up to the promise of its title to deepen our understanding of science across European borders. Imperial case studies from Britain, France, Germany and the Netherlands are collated to create a ‘comparative perspective’ (p. 35), but a confused structure does little to alert the reader to points of similarity and difference. The ordering of the essays (into ‘national models’, ‘metropolitan identity’, ‘colonial identity’ and ‘tropical medicine’) often defies the arguments of the pieces or their suitability for juxtaposition. The prolix introduction is a useful bibliographic tool but has little new to say about the historiography and provides an inadequate backdrop to the essays that follow. In particular, it does little to remedy the inadequate attention paid by most contributors to the direct scientific connections between empires.

Despite the collection's faults, the essays are mostly worth reading in their own terms. Two pieces on metropolitan institutions add to the historiography in English of the German Empire, but would have benefited from a stronger editorial showcase. Lothar Burchardt documents the alliance between the Berlin School of Oriental Languages (founded in 1887) and Reich colonial policy. Few imperial-science specialists will be surprised to learn that this was ‘a case of converging interests’ between the university and the state (p. 104) rather than a reflection of the deep ideological commitment of each to the other's objectives. Wolfgang U. Eckart's essay on the roots of the 1901 Hamburg Institute of Nautical and Tropical Diseases is better sited in the literature and is a powerful exploration of the tension between germ theorists and the proponents of acclimatization in the later nineteenth century.

The once-fashionable topic of colonial scientific institutions is revisited by two authors, with differing success. C. Michele Thompson outlines the evolution of French colonial medicine in Indo-China, identifying it as a branch of metropolitan science, though shaped by colonial exigencies. Interesting material on the interaction with indigenous medical practice is unfortunately underused. Roy MacLeod, as students of his work might expect, attacks George Basalla's argument that science at the periphery was dependent upon metropolitan models. MacLeod's examination of Archibald Liversidge's contribution to the development of Australian science suggests that the ‘dynamics of cultural transmission are far more complex than those implied by the linear and deferential “centre–periphery” relationship’ (p. 182). Emphasizing the interwoven development of science and of wider society in settler colonies, MacLeod shows how Liversidge helped to form an Australian science which explored the country's intellectual and physical frontiers and fuelled an autonomous Australian identity.

Several essays explore the networks of imperial science. Patrick Petitjean's outline of the role of French science in the ‘civilizing mission’ summarizes diverse interconnections, and has some neat continuities with James E. McClellan III and François Regourd's survey of the Ancien Régime in the MacLeod-edited Osiris volume Nature and Empire (2000). Petitjean's account will be helpful to students, and would have served the volume's avowed aim of facilitating comparisons of ‘national models’, had similar essays on other empires been contributed. Other authors chose a more international approach. The scientific and other networks which traversed imperial borders provide promising avenues to pursue insights into commonalities and disjunctures across European imperial science. Donal McCracken's short piece on the continental connections of British imperial botany asks if there was ‘fraternity in the botanical world in the period of jingoism’ (p. 55), an interesting question which deserved a fuller answer. In one of the book's most enjoyable essays, Markus Kirchhoff considers exploration rivalries in Palestine with far more nuance. His entangled history of geographers, missionaries, Zionists and great-power politics is a fascinating prologue to the dissection of the Ottoman Empire at Sèvres.

The most substantial contribution of Science across the European Empires is its examination of the categorization, ordering and development of colonial subjects in the twentieth century, interrogating the boundaries between social knowledge and social engineering. Emmanuelle Sibeud discusses the work of administrator–ethnographers in French Africa like Maurice Delafosse, who considered that ‘Africans had civilizations of their own and that Europeans should respect these natural frameworks in order to promote a balanced development of Africa’ (p. 299). Benoît de l'Estoile examines the rise of anthropology through the 1931 Exposition coloniale in Paris, as assimilationism gave way to a policy of ‘association’ with colonized peoples in order to understand them better, and so to promote development. Suzanne Moon considers agricultural development in the Netherlands East Indies in the 1920s, as administrators began to argue that previous economic strategies had been ‘based on mistaken assumptions about the nature of economic life in the colony … that did not take into account the key differences between Natives and Europeans’ (p. 133). Finally, Helen Tilley's examination of the African Survey shows how the ambitions of British eugenicists in the 1930s to ‘develop’ colonial societies through the control of reproduction were abandoned (outside Egypt and South Africa) in favour of using anthropology and public healthcare to remake existing African populations.

The merits of some of its essays make this a valuable text, particularly to those interested in the German Empire, anthropology or the emerging field of the history of development. This collection, though, contains many missed opportunities, several weak contributions and one notably odd omission – Belgium. Anyone interested in using Europe's colonial scientific interconnections to explore the conflicting demands of imperialism and internationalism should note that this task remains both important and largely untouched.