Until recently, the global history of science assumed that modern science was a product of western reason. Beginning from that premise, leading works on the history of science in the non-western world asked questions such as why China failed to develop modern science despite impressive advances in an earlier era (Joseph Needham), or how non-European societies learned to do modern science (George Basalla). On the other side, and in reaction to various forms of west-centrism, a strand within nationalist historiography claimed that Indian society before colonial rule was, scientifically speaking, equal to that of Europe if not better.

From the 1990s, historians of science working on Indian subjects began to move beyond this choice between Eurocentrism and Indocentrism, focusing instead upon the dynamics of interaction between local and global knowledge. In this view, modernization need not mean westernization. In parallel with interrogations of colonial modernity within cultural history, science history suggests that modernity in knowledge was the product of an encounter between the local and the global, rather than of transplantation of the only relevant science to different parts of the world. Indigenous knowledge was neither a passive reservoir of data for the early European explorers nor necessarily inferior to or different from the knowledge conventions that the latter represented. Because it was not, traditional local knowledge influenced the process through which new ideas were created, and this process was influenced in turn by the relationship between indigenous agents and new actors linked with colonial rule.

Relocating modern science belongs in this new historiography. The book makes possibly the clearest statement so far of the thesis that the history of science should be an account of how knowledge was made through interactions and not of how knowledge was transplanted. It studies the process of knowledge-making in early modern and colonial India, and moves beyond science and technology as conventionally understood, also considering such fields as law and geography. In that respect, the focus here is on ways of knowing rather than on pieces of knowledge. Unlike their colleagues in cultural history, historians of science usually write in a jargon-free language. This work is no exception. In fact, the friendly style, liberal and effective use of images, an eye for the dramatic moments in narratives, a forceful and convincing argument, and the fascinating case studies (some of which involved considerable detective work in the archives) make this book a rewarding and enjoyable read.

The book argues that the making of knowledge in South Asia was shaped by ‘material, economic, and symbolic transactions between indigenes and Europeans’ (p. 31). These transactions are studied in six illustrative contexts. The first of these is that of a work containing descriptions of medicinal plants of Eastern India, prepared by a French surgeon, Nicolas L'Empereur, in the early eighteenth century. This was an attempt, not the first of its kind, to reproduce knowledge collected from a variety of Indian sources and potentially useful for European seafarers and settlers. Unlike his more famous Dutch counterparts, L'Empereur experienced little success in selling his knowledge in Europe. But his role as an intermediary was no less pioneering, especially considering the remote region that he chose as a field. If the indigenes appear as rather an amorphous category in this story, consisting of fakirs and Brahmins and surprisingly no doctors, we have a more concrete idea of local agency in the next study, that of mapmaking. Extending his own earlier pioneering work on maps, the author argues that early European cartographic enterprise in South Asia proceeded by means of a ‘negotiated adaptation of embodied skills and instruments’ (p. 72) connected with terrestrial surveying before colonialism. The local agents here straddled fiscal and navigational uses of maps. Once again, the emphasis on significant individuals, in this case James Rennell, brings home the interactive nature of the enterprise effectively. The point that some of these local skills were available in the shape of maps and machines makes the reader curious to know what these older artifacts looked like and what their legacy was upon maps and instruments of later days. Unfortunately, the images supplied are nearly all post-European.

Moving from the practical to the liberal arts, the study of William Jones offers a strikingly new interpretation of the manner in which he conducted linguistic and juridical explorations in the eighteenth century. Historians have noted the element of civility and respect that Jones consciously maintained in his relationships with Indian collaborators, and have seen it alternatively as an ‘anti-conquest’ streak in Jones, or as the benign mask of Orientalism that should not obscure the nexus of knowledge and power that lay behind it. Raj sees civility in a different way, starting from the premise that validation and legitimization of science depend upon interpersonal trust, gentlemanly etiquette, and thus upon the social order. ‘Jones’, in this study, ‘was one of the pioneers of the institutionalization of intercultural trust’ (p. 106). He was recreating a social order. A similar strategy, elevating the native intermediary to the rank of a peer, is shown to exist again in a field of collaborative enquiry that exposed both European and Indian lives to considerable risk, namely, trans-Himalayan exploration. Two chapters on institutionalization of knowledge in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Calcutta show the influence of indigenous literate groups in the making of early colonial policy on education.

Economic historians would find the main proposition–that knowledge-making depended on the relationship between participants in the process–persuasive but incomplete. The analytical target of the book is what it calls diffusionism, which is a theory of how modern science came into being in the non-western world. Diffusionism is criticized for being ‘a passive notion’ (p. 166). The word ‘diffusion’ is not exactly defined. Presumably diffusion meant that Indians had little role in the acceptance or rejection of scientific ideas. If that is so, this meaning of diffusion is very different from the way economists see diffusion of science and technology in commercial applications. With ‘useful’ knowledge, diffusion processes are far from passive, and depend on how users perceive benefits and costs associated with the adoption of a new idea, and how they can make a foreign idea work in their own milieu. Benefits and costs do not consist only of direct benefits and costs, but also of transaction costs. For example, an idea circulating in the form of palm-leaf manuscript or as tacit knowledge of artisan castes would be hugely more expensive to acquire than an idea circulating in printed books, as many ideas did in Europe in the eighteenth century.

I feel that Raj could have considered the economic axis in knowledge-making more explicitly in order to contextualize his own arguments better. I also think that doing so would shift the argument slightly. Although it is mentioned that ‘trade and learning were very closely intertwined’ (p. 16), the world of commerce and industry is only thinly present in this work. Where end-uses of knowledge are discussed, the discussion considers mainly colonial administrative uses rather than commercial uses. When indigenous agents appear as well-defined groups, we read about Brahmin scribes, and not about merchants, peasants, consumers, or artisans. While the relationship between colonists and indigenes was important for administrative knowledge, it was less so for commercially oriented knowledge. Economic agents made utilitarian choices by observing what their peers did. These choices, therefore, need to be understood in terms of their expected economic consequences, as decisions that worked better, made more money, or failed to work. These choices also need to be understood with reference to the collectives in which they belonged and which influenced these expectations. In short, explaining knowledge-making in modern South Asia only with reference to relationships fashioned in a colonial administrative context is a limited enterprise.

That said, the main project of the book–relocating the historiography of knowledge to points of contact between cultures–is timely and valuable. The book more than succeeds in that objective.