Abstract
One of the major themes in this collection is distance in science, and the problems and opportunities presented by dependence, independence and interdependence; another is the relationship of the central or metropolitan and the peripheral. These things are easy to see in the context of the USA, politically but not yet culturally independent in the nineteenth century, and Australia, still formally a colony into the twentieth century; but they can also be seen within Britain, in the relationships between those in or near London (especially in Oxford and Cambridge) and those in the provinces. The position of somebody in the north of England, like John Dalton, was not so very different from that of a colonial; when he bade farewell to his audience after a course of lectures in London to return to ‘comparative retirement’ in Manchester he sounded like someone going home to a colony.1 The Australian or American experience of being snubbed or patronized happened to Englishmen all the time; and the sort of people who wrote disparagingly about the domestic manners of Americans or Australians reacted in the same way to those of manufacturing districts in their own country. This indeed is classic metropolitan behaviour.
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Notes
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Knight, D. (1991). Tyrannies of Distance in British Science. In: Home, R.W., Hohlstedt, S.G. (eds) International Science and National Scientific Identity. Australasian Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 9. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-3786-7_3
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