Keywords

1 Introduction

The modern earth sciences were born in an era of accelerating imperialism. Many of the unequal relations that characterized the expansion of north Atlantic empires were crystallized in the emerging tradition of geology, which eventually formed the foundation of the wider earth sciences. Along with biology, geology organized and then generated global modes of enquiry that accelerated both the exploitation of nature and its enlistment in imperial projects of racial categorization and stadial assessment. The outlines of this story have been well-known since at least the 1980s. Historians of science undergoing a social turn noted then that geology in particular had immediate applications throughout the middle of the nineteenth century as an instrument of empire and as a vector of capitalism (Stafford 1984). The agents who pursued these connected geologic and political economic ends – the European and North American geologists of the nineteenth century – were extraordinarily prone to heroic auto-mythmaking. Many embraced and enacted the territorial, military, and imperial metaphors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which were worked into the very fibers of academic and practical earth science (Alam 1978; Rudwick 1976; Secord 1982). Early perspectives connecting extraction, science, and politics have remained relevant touchstones throughout the wider history of science, which now must be understood, as Suman Seth aptly notes, as always ideological and always colonial (Seth 2009).

So much is clear within the history of science, but the picture is less clear within the history of the earth sciences. As Kapil Raj has argued, the history of science has become an important intellectual battleground in the “post-colonial world,” where Indigenous scientists, historians, and social scientists have sought to press their own claims of “scientificity” in the face of centuries of dismissal (Raj 2013; Bocking 2023). Historians of science and empire writing from this position have also long pointed out that imperialism, capitalism, and the earth sciences are indivisible. Drawing initially from Mao Zedong, scholars such as Anis Alam and Deepak Kumar understood that imperial and colonial political economies existed in a symbiotic relationship with the scientific study of the earth. European imperialism was a system that created “captive markets” and captured “raw materials” for industrial production (Alam 1978, 244; Kumar 1980). This “production science” was defined not just by its applied character, as Alam and others argued (Alam 1978, 241), but by its intimate involvement in the mobilization of natural materials as imperial resources. These relationships stand in high relief in a series of colonial and postcolonial contexts. From the point of their first encounters with continents outside of Europe naturalists and earth scientists were highly interested in minerals and their extraction because of their prospective value to industrializing societies. By the late nineteenth century, the intellectual and practical dimensions of this interest had congealed into an organized system of definition, training, surveying, and mining that spanned nations, empires, and the globe (Anthony 2018; MacLeod 2000). Yet, historians of the earth sciences have only belatedly sought to scrutinize the colonial conditions that inflected so-called universal knowledge of the planet and its subterranes. Lukas Rieppel, writing in this collection, is led to these conditions through an analysis of capital, imperialism, and extraction, all in the context of geological practice (Rieppel 2023). Far more than just identifying political economies, defining structuring characteristics, and charting intellectual developments, scrutinizing the colonial conditions of universal knowledge involves resituating the history of earth science in recognition of its long involvement with non-European geographies. It is tempting to fit this attempt to resituate modern thinking about the earth within a postcolonial tradition, but I suggest in this chapter that it is more productive to conceive of this body of scholarship as pursuing a history of the earth sciences from the south.

This chapter focuses on histories of earth science from and about non-European geographies, especially those in the southern hemisphere. I follow the historian of science Pratik Chakrabarti, who argues that deep history itself acquired a “geographical motif of ‘southern-ness’” as European naturalism absorbed ideas about primitivity, myth, and place in the colonial contexts of South America, Africa, South Asia, and Australasia (Chakrabarti 2020, 62). I argue that histories of the earth sciences that are conducted within this mode amount to a kind of “southern theory” for the physical, rather than the social sciences (Connell 2007). Usefully employed by historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars, the category of the south has become a starting point for critiques of the Eurocentricity of habits of inquiry like “theory,” of ideas like modernity and development, and of nineteenth-century literary cultures (Chakrabarty 2000; Comaroff and Comaroff 2012; Comyn and Fermanis 2021). And, much as “postcolonial ecocriticism” has revealed the complex tensions between environmentalism and various colonial projects, approaching earth science history from the south politicizes and historicizes deep histories of the planet that are often construed as “objective knowledge” (Mount and O’Brien 2019; Daggett 2019). Locally grounded histories of the earth sciences challenge a tradition fully inhabited by European agents and ideas and beg urgent historiographical questions. If not as a core concern, how have colonial sites and materials figured in the history of the earth sciences? When and where does this historiography turn to a critique of power relations? And how is this reflected (or not) in the major issues and debates that have defined the subfield? This chapter will explore these questions across two sections addressing the traditional preoccupations of earth science history and the challenges to these models that have recently been mounted from the south. The question of where and when postcolonial perspectives have influenced views from the south is an important one that surfaces periodically throughout the chapter. On balance, though, historians of the earth sciences are still yet to embrace postcolonialism widely. I propose that along with other approaches from outside the subfield such as deep history, political geology, and geological anthropology, there is significant scope to make postcolonialism a more central concern in future earth science histories.

The history of the earth sciences is peculiar scholarly terrain because it organizes thinkers who work not only across different fields but across two entirely different disciplines. It might seem that the history of the earth sciences is a kind of scholarly relic, one that unites the “two cultures” of the natural sciences and the arts (Snow 1959). In a way that has had important consequences for the manner in which the history of the earth sciences has been written, scientists and historians have been involved in a shared project. In the years after its foundation in 1982, the journal of record for the subfield, Earth Sciences History even admitted two notation styles: those of Northeastern Geology for the scientists and Isis for the historians. Both groups were most often concerned with geology, the most historical of all the earth sciences, although this focus regularly opened out into related topics such as the evolution of geophysics or the development of oceanography. Reflecting this dominant concern, this chapter will consider histories of the earth sciences that cluster around geology, which as the historian Martin Rudwick has argued, most effectively “transposed” the notion of “historicity” into the natural world. Geology was the discipline that “burst the limits of time” at the turn of the nineteenth century, and it has retained an abiding interest to all kinds of historians since (Rudwick 2014, 3–5; Bashford et al. 2023a).

Due to its constituent roles in imperial expansion and exploitation, geology is especially important in making sense of the ways that historians and scientists have challenged north Atlantic perspectives on the history of the earth sciences. These perspectives have typically concentrated on the emergence of geohistory within a set of influential metropolitan institutions and networks. They hold that earth history was put together in places like England, western Europe, and the northeastern United States by a new group of intellectuals and professionals. Institutions like the Geological Society, the Geological Survey of Great Britain, and the Royal School of Mines seeded a global network of naturalists, geologists, and engineers from the middle of the nineteenth century (Rudwick 1985; Secord 1986b). Even at its most sensitive, the history of the earth sciences has often been a kind of expansive intellectual history of the natural knowledge that these figures collected on behalf of metropolitan institutions or their colonial equivalents. It is partly this method that has led historians of the earth sciences into a view of earth history from the north, where records and specimens have accumulated since the nineteenth century. As Chakrabarti has argued though, the naturalism these institutions valued so highly was an essential part of the colonial project (Chakrabarti 2020). This chapter explores the alternatives to this northern view of the history of the earth sciences. Sometimes inadvertently, alternatives have been broached by those working squarely within northern traditions, but they have also been challenged by perspectives from marginal positions. I argue that modern earth science history looks different from these sites, where colonial pasts and presents have challenged historians to examine the situated politics of natural knowledge. The first part of the chapter addresses how the history of the earth sciences developed a northern center of gravity that absorbed materials and information from across the globe. The second part of the chapter explores how scholars have recently begun to critique and resituate this history, and considers how these new perspectives might be combined with others from outside the field of the history of the earth sciences to combat the inertia of prevailing global (north) frames.

2 Traditional Histories of the Earth Sciences and Their Northern Centers of Gravity

In general terms, historians of the earth sciences have typically focused on the development of Western knowledge about the planet at the expense of reckoning with the politics of that knowledge. From about the 1960s, the history of science more widely took a social turn and began exploring how forms of expert knowledge were produced, circulated, and validated. Scholars interested in these problems began investigating the practice of science and considering its wider social impacts. Throughout this period, the history of the earth sciences remained relatively attached to traditionally positivist understandings of scientific knowledge, even as a postpositivist challenge raised new and fundamental questions about the development of science away from the metropolitan contexts of the north Atlantic (Chakrabarti and Worboys 2020). In contrast to these latter developments, historians of the earth sciences remained preoccupied with what we might still think of as universal problems. Among the most abiding of these was the long tension between understandings of the earth sciences as either chronological or physical disciplines. Classifying these competing “emphases” as the natural historical tradition on the one hand and the natural philosophical tradition on the other, the historian Rachel Laudan explained that the former dealt with the “reconstruction of the history of the earth” and that the latter was “concerned with understanding the processes of change on earth” (Laudan 1982, 7). Another problem, particularly trenchant during the emergence of modern plate tectonic theory during the middle of the twentieth century, was how to integrate the philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s assessment of the nature of “paradigm shifts” in scientific revolutions (Kuhn 1962; Marvin 1973; Laudan 1978). Often failing to divide themselves along disciplinary lines, both the historians and the scientists within the subfield seem to have accepted that these intellectual problems were highly important.

Although the core intellectual problems were reasonably agreed upon, there have been differences in the ways that scholars within the history of the earth sciences have gone about their work. While historians and social scientists have steadily sought to achieve a holistic understanding of modern geohistory, the physical scientists working within the subfield have tended to reflect more narrowly on the development of certain methodological traditions or ideas. In the 1980s geologist-historians bristled at the Kuhnian assumption that they worked in a state of “scientific stagnation” before the breakthrough of plate tectonics (Hallam 1973). One such figure, the metageologist David Kitts, argued that physical scientists already had the tools to understand the development their fields, without the approaches, concepts, and theories that historians and social scientists were gradually bringing to bear on the history of the earth sciences (Kitts 1986, 3–4). The narrative adopted by traditionalists in lieu of the critiques of social science explained that geological thought emerged from eighteenth century European naturalism. From here, geology was rationalized throughout the nineteenth century, as its practitioners absorbed causal thinking, experiment, and analogous comparison, and split natural historical endeavor into an array of “earth sciences.” During the beginning of the twentieth century, these earth sciences turned toward “actualistic comparison” and then, increasingly toward mid-century, sophisticated mathematical quantification (Visher 1986). Various elements of this traditional narrative have been challenged by historians over the past 50 years, and especially since the late 1980s, when the historian of science David Oldroyd observed that the subfield was “scarcely touched by current controversies in sociology of science and even studies in philosophy of science.” Since then, Oldroyd’s desired “closer union between scientists and historians of science” has largely addressed this disconnect (Friedman 1990). In this tradition, the history of the earth sciences is a kind of intellectual history focused on the relationships between modern humans – as geo-logical thinkers – and the planet.

As historians have sought to explain or refute shifts in intellectual paradigms or understand the frequent controversies that erupted between specialists, they have been led to examine the agents and conditions of change. Classic works in the history of the earth sciences have situated key agents in England, Europe, or North America. As a result, the history of the earth sciences has been and is still predominantly a history of north Atlantic knowledge accumulation. Martin Rudwick’s “great Devonian controversy” was played out by successive directors of the British Geological Survey and Royal School of Mines, Henry De la Beche, and Roderick Murchison. As we might expect of such figures, their dispute over a sequence of fossils in southern England took place in the gentlemanly context of Victorian London (Rudwick 1985). James Secord added the University of Cambridge, base of Adam Sedgwick, to this social background of “controversy in Victorian geology” (Secord 1986a). Rachel Laudan’s study of the intellectual foundations of the tradition that De la Beche, Murchison, and Sedgwick reshaped, From Mineralogy to Geology, widened the frame slightly, integrating British geology with the broader European context defined by figures such as Abraham Werner and Georges Cuvier (Laudan 1987). It was well understood that North American earth science maintained linkages to this tradition, but, as Naomi Oreskes has explained, it advanced along a kind of parallel path guided by a commitment to fieldwork over theory and a local network of influential research institutions (Oreskes 1999). From Rudwick’s Devonian controversy to the breakthrough of plate tectonics in the 1960s, the history of the earth sciences has presented the conditions of shifting geological knowledge as the product of a similar set of north Atlantic institutions governed by a relatively homogenous cast of white agents. Focusing on these conditions and agents has bound the history of the earth sciences to a view from the north. Information from places like Africa and South America has flowed in and out of these places – as it did during the 1920s when the South African geologist Alex Du Toit matched strata on both sides of the Atlantic for the Carnegie Institution of Washington, substantiating the theory of continental drift (Chetty 2021) – yet it has only seldom been used to redirect, reorient, or resituate the history of the earth sciences.

There are numerous tensions that run throughout this body of scholarship. For example, work within the history of the earth sciences typically seeks to balance an old tension between geology and biology. Among others, biogeographers, zoologists, and paleontologists, were often heavily involved in critical debates within earth science (Frankel 1985). The early twentieth century German climatologist and geophysicist Alfred Wegener initially trusted that Australian fauna would make an important contribution to “the overall problem of continental drift,” a hunch that the English botanist Albert Seward and the Punjabi palaeobotanist Birbal Sahni took up in the 1920s and 1930s (Wegener 1915/1966, 110; Seward 1929; Sahni 1936). Du Toit, again, synthesized much of this work as a geologist in Our Wandering Continents in 1937. This “holistic outlook” also brought other competing tensions into a kind of balance (Du Toit 1937, 4). There are both theoretical and practical strands within the scholarship that focuses on this period, historiographical iterations of the traditional split between earth science as natural philosophy or as natural history. Perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this chapter, there is also a remarkable tension between localism and globalism that brings colonial contexts, knowledges, and objects into imperial earth science. Not only did figures like Sahni and Du Toit ground themselves in colonial worlds, but the objects of their study were necessarily local: specific fossil strata in India, South Africa, Brazil, and Australia. The reconfiguration of these local places as sites of global interest and the circulation of the knowledge generated in them quite literally transformed earth science, just as it did for many kinds of scientific knowledge throughout modern history (Raj 2013). Understanding this allows us to recognize how histories of the earth sciences must be resituated in both geopolitical and geographical ways to account for the place of southern agents, actors, perspectives, and materials.

From this perspective, even conventional histories of the emergence of the modern earth sciences are necessarily transnational and transcultural, even if they wear these approaches lightly. Even the basic contours of how geological surveying developed in some European colonies in the latter half of the nineteenth century reveal the trans-imperial dimensions of earth science. From the 1860s, Western science adopted a practical geological focus and European practices of surveying and mapping were extended over places like the Indian subcontinent, generating a return of intellectual information about the “mineral potential” of the colonies. James Secord wrote that these geologists were practitioners of “the ultimate cosmopolitan science,” providing for the ordering, exploitation, and extraction of “the materials of the terrestrial globe” (Secord 2018, 401–402). Geologists and paleontologists positioned themselves as “sub-imperial” actors, mediating between the information accumulated in places like India or the American West and the knowledge generated at institutions like the Royal School of Mines or the American Museum of Natural History (Stafford 1989, 223). These earth scientists also became involved with an increasing number of organizations, institutions, and benefactors seeking to capitalize on the study of the deep past (Rieppel 2019). Even during these early stages, then, earth scientists working in colonial worlds were playing an “integral” role in the “development of Western science” (Chakrabarti and Worboys 2020, 9–15). The inclusion of these agents effectively extends and flattens the networks through which the modern earth sciences developed by confronting the false hierarchies implicit in histories focused on the intellectual contexts of Europe or North America. A challenge to this tradition might go further, though, by asking what kinds of history emerge when scholars focus, instead, on the colonial or southern contexts of earth science.

3 Challenging Earth Science History from the Colonial World

Historians writing about the colonial contexts of modern earth science have intermittently challenged northern perspectives by insisting on the locality of subjects, materials, and knowledges. By resisting the inertia that has kept European and North American agents and institutions at the heart of earth science history, these scholars have come to insist on the importance of concepts like marginality, materiality, and circulation (Finney et al. 2022). Since the early 2000s, scholars such as Silvia Figueirôa, Howard Plotkin, and Sumathi Ramaswamy have shown that one important future direction for the subfield lies in localized intellectual histories of how particular forms of landscape thinking and storytelling have come to relate to a universalized earth science. Accounts of how these local knowledges were adopted or marginalized within earth science proper have increasingly featured in the central forum of Earth Sciences History. As postcolonial perspectives reshaped histories of botany, geography, and medicine, this journal has published occasional articles that address the development of the earth sciences in colonial, borderlands, or non-Western contexts. Covering the modern history of the earth sciences across South Asia, East Asia, South America, Africa, North America, and Oceania, these articles have often focused on the ambivalent role of Western agents, the diffusion of expertise, the conditions of contact, or the way that non-Western scientists fed information back into global science. Good examples have examined the (geo)politics of meteorites in Central and North America, the histories of agricultural development, geological training, and mineral surveying in Brazil, Indigenous meteorological traditions in China, and the contested mineral economies of Southwest Africa (Plotkin 2005, 2014; Figueirôa 2007, 2016; Chen et al. 2014; Hearth 2021). Very few of these articles explicitly deploy the language of postcolonial critique, yet they all invert or upend the conventional northern story of the development of the earth sciences.

However, while this move to focus on locality and marginality and invert the northern history of the earth sciences is a relatively recent development within the subfield, it articulates with more established critiques within area studies and the history of imperialism. These critiques, much like the Marxist strand of the colonial history of science discussed earlier, have been especially useful for scholars interested in South Asia. For example, the historian of South Asia and empire, Sumathi Ramaswamy, has explained how the “global revelations of the paleo-sciences” were textured by interests in lost worlds and places that were at once highly localized and immediately global. Ramaswamy’s investigation of the incarnation and disappearance of the proposed Indian Ocean continent of Lemuria was therefore a restitching of Tamil place-making and geomythology into the central story of northern earth science: the modern realization of continental change, (dis)connection, and movement over deep time (Ramaswamy 2004). Lemuria may have been “lost” but the narratives that congealed around it were inherited by plate tectonics, which, as geographer Adam Bobbette has shown was made real in the Indonesian archipelago. Scientists working within a social matrix including “mystics, colonial Christians and Muslims, Sanskritists, ethnologists, antiquarians, occultists, postcolonial revolutionaries, and ethnonationalist animists” (Bobbette 2023, ix–xviii). The key insight of these lines of inquiry is to reveal that the modern geological theories broached in north-Atlantic scientific and intellectual communities were always conditioned by southern knowledges. Southern or Indian Ocean continents, for instance, were much discussed within early paleogeography and geophysics. Zoologist Phillip Sclater, geophysicist Alfred Wegener, and geologist Eduard Suess all proffered hypotheses on southern evidence during a key period of the development of the earth sciences. Likewise, tropical Javanese volcanoes like Merapi made potent microcosms of the earth system because of the way humans could observe how they shaped terrain through eruption and erosion. The scientific theories that emerged during these engagements were a product of an exchange between the institutions of European geology and figures simultaneously conducting studies along a range of ethnological, zoological, botanical, spiritual, and even mystical lines in distant sites (Chakrabarti 2020, 20; Bobbette 2022; Fleetwood 2022). When historians have considered the emergence of modern earth science from within this tapestry of colonial archives and texts, they have discerned that it involved so much more than just the European revelation of deep time.

As we can see from southern studies of the paleo-sciences, the actual practice of assembling a history of the earth involved handling a range of multiple perspectives. For late nineteenth century British colonists in Central India, the geological dramas of a newly ancient earth played out amidst mythical stories of Indian Romance. As Pratik Chakrabarti explains, “Man and Nature” were joined in this moment and in this place as they were within older Orientalist visions of the subcontinent. Geological surveyors like Joseph Medlicott and William Blanford and missionaries like Stephen Hislop connected the traditional vision of a living earth with a newer set of colonial priorities, which included the assembly of an account of human prehistory, the definition of “primitivity,” and above all the study of industrial resources like coal and other minerals (Chakrabarti 2019, 151–153). This latter part of the story enters conventional earth science history as the practical setting of super-continental theorizing in the late nineteenth century. Alan Leviton and Michele Aldrich argue that the concept of Gondwana-Land – later named by Suess in The Face of the Earth (1904) – grew out of this practical geological work on the Indian coalfields between the 1850s and 1870s (Leviton and Aldrich 2012, 247–269). Roughly a decade before Suess coined Gondwana-Land surveyors on the Geological Survey of India (GSI) and their colleagues in African and Australian colonies were proposing ancient lithic, fossil, and faunal linkages between the continents, extrapolating on the idea of lost Indian-Ocean continent of Lemuria. Importantly, not only did this practical work in the so-called “Gondwana System” – named after the Adivasi Gond people who lived in Central India – feed into Suess’ theorizing about the earth but it also generated similar engagements with rocks, materials, and peoples in different southern sites.

These engagements with southern soils and climates sit on the margins of the history of the earth sciences but they nevertheless form part of the origins of later, more specialized geophysical research. Moving within imperial infrastructures and pathways to traverse India and Africa, various figures began to compare and connect the two sites from the 1840s. Building on the insights of the orientalist and naturalist Thomas Newbold, Blanford took part in a military expedition to Abyssinia in 1867 and observed similarities between the volcanic regur of central and western India and the soils of West Africa (Leviton and Aldrich 2004; Chakrabarti 2020, 180–181). The soils were one thing, but the political geologies of local peoples were also comparable. Robyn d’Avignon has described how Maninka peoples in nearby Bambuk conceived of mineral deposits as “spirited geobodies,” claiming and politicizing subterranean space through an investment of spirituality in the underground (d’Avignon 2020, 22, 2022). Here, again, we can observe how southern mythologies were part of the context of northern earth science. The similarities were not simply geographical or anthropological either, and they extended to the fundamental characteristics of the fieldwork that natural historians and geological surveyors conducted in situ. In Southern Africa, the study of earth history, natural history, and prehistory converged in the intellectual work of several late nineteenth century geologists and paleontologists. In this context, geological knowledge, the South African historian Saul Dubow suggests, became the stable “intellectual substrate upon which cognate work in anthropology, archaeology, and ethnology was founded.” In this context, insights were produced into continental movement and connection, the evolution of species, and of course the antiquity of man (Dubow 2004, 109). The key point here is not that earth science developed out of the master discipline of geology, but that in the late nineteenth century Cape Colony, as in many other southern contexts, this undisciplined complex of paleo-inquiry was earth science.

One of the most significant figures within mid-twentieth century earth science, the South African geologist Alex du Toit, was trained in this context, where fieldwork involved expert knowledge across multiple disciplines. Du Toit was appointed to the Geological Commission of the Cape of Good Hope in 1903, and over two decades, he developed an unrivalled knowledge of the entire sedimentary Karoo system, the most extensive and commercially valuable geological unit in Southern Africa. Modern earth science, here, is a conventional pursuit of knowledge about minerals and geography conducted within state institutions. Yet, as Suryakanthie Chetty has explained, du Toit and South African earth science was indivisible from anthropology and colonial history (Chetty 2021, 182). The Geological Commissions fieldwork in the Karoo put earth scientists in regular contact with the Indigenous Sān peoples of Southern Africa, but du Toit himself also dedicated the final chapter of his 1926 The Geology of South Africa to a discussion of “primitive man” and he served as President of the South African Archaeological Society in 1946 (Du Toit 1926/1939, 426–434). Throughout this whole period, earth science in Africa was also closely allied to the political project of South African settler nationalism, on the one hand, and the emerging academic discipline of paleoanthropology, on the other. By the 1920s, not only was the African continent being refigured by nationalist statesmen like Jan Smuts as the “mother-continent” of the southern hemisphere landmasses, but it was proposed as one of the “cradles of mankind” (Beinart and Dubow 2021, 193–200). Considering earth science history from this southern site leads us to follow an intriguing twisting trajectory. In Southern Africa, for instance, the itinerary of thinking about the earth and its history proceeds from the enchanted geos of peoples like the Maninka, through the imperial search for industrial resources in the nineteenth century, into new provincial, then national, then global investments in the earth that involved a wide array of political and scientific justifications.

The multiple valences and turns of the history of the earth sciences, viewed from the south, are especially significant in the context of the revelations that overthrew the orthodoxy of continental fixity during the middle of the twentieth century. Although some form of paleontological connection between the southern continents was apparent well before Suess’ suggestion of Gondwana Land in 1885 and Alfred Wegener’s promotion of continental drift from 1912, earth scientists were unable to devise an acceptable geophysical model of continental connection (LeGrand 1988, 55–99; Oreskes 1999). In this case, the vast quantity of facts about and materials from the earth that accumulated over the course of the nineteenth century ironically provided a store of evidence with which to reject the notion of continental drift (Oldroyd 1996). On the other hand, the information and networks forged during the global search for industrial resources and fossil energy provided a new starting point. From the early twentieth century, the key piece of evidence for continental connection in deep time shifted from the Glossopteris fossil leaf and other coal flora to the sedimentary systems underneath these deposits. Du Toit, who spent this period assembling evidence, powered this shift in his pilot study, A Geological Comparison of South America with South Africa (1927), and a new geohistory of the world, Our Wandering Continents (1937). These publications established southern continental connection in deep time as a “paleontological fact” that coexisted with widespread rejection of continental drift for other reasons (Oreskes 1999). In the 1950s, a new generation of scientists sought to use paleomagnetism to evaluate different models of earth history, culminating eventually in the ascendence of plate tectonic theory in the early 1960s, validating du Toit et al. (Hallam 1973). The outlines of this history of the earth sciences in the story of the rejection of continental drift and the development of plate tectonics have largely remained secure since the emergence of earth science history as a subfield in the 1970s. It is notable that du Toit is a central figure within this literature, even if the southern circumstances of the information and insights he gathered have remained peripheral topics until quite recently (Bashford et al. 2021).

Du Toit’s vision of earth history was significantly broader than many of his colleagues in Europe or North America, and framing him as simply an insightful forerunner working within the limited idioms of survey geology and stratigraphy risks minimizing his contribution. This is an example of how the history of the earth sciences has either misunderstood or marginalized a range of contexts for the planetary knowledge-making that it deals with as a central concern. Technical histories of what we might label the “high” earth sciences essentially follow the British geologist come historian of science Anthony Hallam. They understandably begin with the paradigm shift of plate tectonics following the application of sophisticated instruments and modeling to earth science after World War Two. Such histories ask how prior controversies and their contexts connect to this moment of breakthrough and how a disciplinary view like geophysics became prioritized over one like geology (Hallam 1973, 1983; Oreskes 1999; Frankel 2012). These are important details; however, they lead historians of science and technology toward deterministic arguments (Anderson 2009) and leave little room for a consideration of how different physical, geopolitical, colonial, and even intellectual contexts became part of modern earth science. Chetty and Chakrabarti argue that these contexts were foremost for du Toit and his southern colleagues in India and Australia, who readily accepted the evidence for continental connection in deep time because of their shared (British) colonial imaginations (Chetty 2021; Chakrabarti 2019). Such arguments suggest that the temporal axis, which obviously has been critical within traditional histories of the emergence of modern earth science (Gould 1987), is no longer the most promising avenue for further research. Historians of geology have made time and temporality their specialty, but future historians of the earth sciences might consider making the landscape or spatial axis their primary concern.

Scholars focusing on the physical and material contexts of knowledge about the earth have found that where thinking takes place matters. This is largely because of the importance of fieldwork within the earth and environmental sciences. Even if the empirical data of “high” earth science came to rely on sophisticated instruments and models, its foundations were in the practices of fieldwork that essentially defined the nineteenth century study of environments and undergrounds (Griffiths and Robin 1997; Hore 2022). Well before du Toit began his studies in the Karoo and across a wide range of similar southern contexts, field science provided information about discreet sites and generated more holistic knowledge about the earth (Vetter 2016; MacGregor 2018). What the historian of science Neil Safier would call the “itineraries” that link “individuals, objects, and impulses between sites” and transform observations into empirical data provide a map of places and their impacts (Safier 2010, 137–139). So it was that early nineteenth century natural theologies were melded with Awabakal geomyths, the materiality of carbon, and the intellectual pursuit of the Permian period in colonial New South Wales. Colonial geologist William Branwhite Clarke pursued all these projects with vigor, but his correspondence with more influential geologists in Cambridge and London tended to omit the various First Nations cosmologies that often enough drew him and other colonists to resources like coal. Between Clarke and Murchison, who in 1841 named the part of the stratigraphic column in which these coals were eventually situated, these details were superfluous (Hore 2023; Benton and Sennikov 2022). Any history of the intellectual idea of the Permian period, which was largely substantiated across the southern hemisphere by figures like Clarke and then du Toit, should be flexible enough to admit the local histories of encounter and brokerage that were part of fieldwork in the colonial world. Again, it is worth noting that this was earth science. As Alison Bashford, Emily Kern, and Adam Bobbette explain, “human engagement with the origins, and meaning of the earth and cosmos” took place “among distinct but overlapping temporal regimes.” Clarke, like many other geologists working in colonial sites, was necessarily a mediator of these orders. Earth science became, in such contexts, a “cosmopolitan” process of imagining and charting the deep history of the planet, including changing environmental, atmospheric, and biological orders, as well as (eventually) continental arrangements (Bashford et al. 2023b).

Earth scientists interested in these debates took their prompts from specific materials. Clarke spent most of his career examining and thinking about the coal and sedimentary formations in the eastern part of the Australian continent and du Toit became an expert on the sedimentary formations of the Karoo and the diamond-bearing kimberlite pipes of the Northern Cape. Geologists and naturalists took cues from specific objects too. For example, the distinctive fossil seed-fern Glossopteris became one of the key pieces of evidence for continental drift over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First described by the Frenchman Adolphe Théodore Brongniart in the 1820s, by the 1860s, Thomas Oldham and the GSI overturned the northern consensus that the Glossopteris fern originated in the Jurassic, showing that in India and Australia, at least, the tongue-shaped fossil thrived during the earlier Permian period. Beyond a certain point, the material conditions of the Gondwana system confounded the GSI’s attempts to match Indian strata with the European stratigraphic column. To determine the lower horizon of this valuable coal-bearing system, Oldham needed to triangulate, and to do this, he looked southeast to the British colony of New South Wales (Oldham 1860). By the turn of the twentieth century, a comparable problem had developed in South America, where a network of scientists had encountered similar fossils. This time, the specimens were housed in a network of increasingly parochial natural history museums (Lopes and Podgorny 2001; see also Podgorny 2023), where earth scientists began to use the Glossopteris fossil to weigh into multiple debates about coal deposits, continental connection, and continental drift. During the 1890s, specimens were uncovered in Brazil and Argentina that, as Mariana Waligora has shown, spurred scientists such as Francisco Moreno and Friedrich Kurtz to connect stratigraphies in Bajo de Véliz to known deposits in the Cape of Good Hope, India, New South Wales, and Tasmania. As these researchers “followed the Glossopteris trail,” they created new circuits through which information about the earth and its past changes could flow (Waligora 2020). It is interesting enough to follow these circuits, via du Toit’s A Geological Comparison of South America with South Africa (1927), back into the northern debate over the movement of continents; however, a more novel approach might stay with the Glossopteris fossil itself and consider how the accumulation of these objects generated local intellectual histories.

Indeed, a wave of recent work has embraced the locality and spatiality of the geosciences, effectively grounding the intellectual history of the earth. It adopts a similar methodological approach as the so-called “new material history,” which presents human existence and thinking as “the product of a dynamic and creative material environment” (LeCain 2017, 11). Geohistory itself, argues Alison Bashford, “folds into the present in ways material and living,” and its “poetics” or “fictions” are traceable outside strictly scientific domains in travel literature, science fiction, fantasy, environmentalist ethics, Indigenous land rights, and even resource extraction (Bashford 2023, 279–281, 293–295; Patankar 2016). These geological scripts are frequently contested, as they are for Selby Hearth, who explains how Tsumeb copper played a different role in Haillom, Ndonga, Herero, and Anglo-German societies during a long period of colonial struggle over land and resources in Southern Africa. Not only does this “mineralogic” perspective show how Tsumeb copper shaped the history of colonialism in South West Africa-then-Namibia, but it also helps draw attention back to the Native people who mined and worked the copper and those who stewarded the land (Hearth 2021). Place-based approaches have also helped expand the cast of actors whose intellectual worlds constitute earth science (Bocking 2023). The “cosmovision” of the Mapuche people of south-central Chile, for example, has recently been linked to the tectonic environment in which they live (Bastías et al. 2021). Just as southern geologists such as du Toit took their cues from the materials and conditions that surrounded them, it is clear that Mapuche geomythology is intimately related to the physical setting of the South American continental margin. Earth science has always dealt with discrete materials like Tsumeb copper and even much larger objects such as geographic or tectonic boundaries, but these things have often been absorbed (or not) within northern institutions or intellectual traditions. A history of the earth sciences from the south might resist these tendencies by developing a place-based approach that recognizes the significance of materials, knowledges, and objects over a range of scales.

Since the emergence of modern geology, those who have sought to think methodically about the planet, and then their historians, have embraced time as the critical axis and application of earth science. James Hutton’s 1788 Theory of the Earth laid the foundations for this obsession with what the contemporary geologist and writer Marcia Bjornerud calls “timefulness,” the twists and turns of which have become the great drama of earth science history (Bjornerud 2018). The temporal utility of geology and geological thinking within the complex of the paleo-sciences and within Western modernity more broadly is clear (Rudwick 2014). The interest in poly-temporality remains useful; however, it has led to a neglect of the other axis through which earth scientists have made sense of the world: place. Thinking about the earth and its past provided more than just a timeline within which different disciplines could affix their objects of inquiry. Recent developments in thinking about earth science from the south and from other marginal perspectives suggest that there is an emerging place line through earth science history that scholars might productively follow and extend. These developments are fortifying a place-focused tradition within the subfield that has waxed and waned since the 1970s; however, only recently have historians of science been joined by historians of empire, the environment, geographers, and anthropologists in pursuing these grounded dimensions of earth science history. And when scholars start with the conditions of colonial worlds, the highly (geo)political nature of the earth sciences become inescapable (Bobbette and Donovan 2019). Writing about the colonial color lines of the Anthropocene, the geographer Kathryn Yusoff insists that the narratives about the world that earth science generates have always been political. Not only has the extraction of minerals historically been a “motivation and mode of dispossession” and colonial subjugation, but the innovative language of stratigraphy has often smoothly moved into biopolitical, cultural, and racial realms (Yusoff 2018, 103–108; 79). As a colonial science, geology reified and reinforced whiteness (Anderson 2006), but it did so unevenly across different geographies. Such perspectives indicate that not only do horizons of possible thought within earth science change from time to time, as traditional histories of science would have it (Kitts 1986, 5), but they also differ from place to place, depending on the power and material relations that define them.

If there is a place line that new histories of the earth sciences are following, then it runs directly through the colonial world. Colonists have become adept at making use of what Jeremy Schmidt calls “geologic forms of reasoning – surprise observations, hypothesis generation, and probable explanations” to settle the problems of dispossession and exploitation. Schmidt analyzes how these forms of reasoning operate to make sense of seeping bitumen in contemporary Alberta (Schmidt 2020), but they have a long history and an expansive geography. Historian of science Londa Schiebinger perceives a whole colonial science complex that extended from those “Europeans working in a colonial context” and their intermediaries all the way to distant figures receiving information, resources, samples, or problems (Schiebinger 2005, 52). Examinations of this complex that focus on colonial power relations essentially return scholars to the work of Anis Alam and Deepak Kumar, who suggested that earth science was an imperial relation that inflicted epistemic and material violence over 40 years ago (Alam 1978; Kumar 1980). Connecting the dots, this approach offers, per Gayatri Spivak, “an account of how an explanation or narrative of reality was established as the normative one” (Spivak 1988) and how it was grounded in particular colonial worlds. Here, any work that we might refer to as “postcolonial” refers less to periodization and more to a critical posture within the history of imperial science that might pursue the “decentred, diasporic or ‘global’ rewriting of earlier, nation-centred imperial grand narratives” that Stuart Hall nominates as a key characteristic of the postcolonial turn (Hall 1996, 247). It is only belatedly, and as a product of the new forms of situated and interdisciplinary inquiry explored above, that the history of the earth sciences has turned to this postcolonial critique.

As these postcolonial perspectives on the history of the earth sciences are developing, they draw productively from other fields where questions of temporality, spatiality, and justice are also highly important. Australian historians such as Ann McGrath and Marry Ann Jebb, for instance, have been at the forefront of the development “deep histories,” which adopt expansive timescales to balance different disciplinary claims on the distant past as well as the intimate and ongoing connections to Country of First Nations people in Australia (McGrath and Jebb 2015; Way 2022). Sometimes pursuing a decolonial agenda, historians working in this mode aim to put these different forms of thinking about place and time into conversation, revealing how different “historicities might be understood as coexisting and in relation,” rather than as competitors within a single universal narrative (Rademaker and Silverstein 2022). However, the suite of disciplines that make up the earth sciences – geology in particular – are not just competing bodies of knowledge and method that “coexist.” Rather, as anthropologists and other social scientists interested in the geological have noted, they are key legitimating forces for colonial, capitalist, and racist operations of power via the “ontological distinction between life and nonlife” (Oguz 2022; Povinelli 2016). The geos is also, in and of itself, a powerful political force that human societies must reckon with as it reshapes the material conditions of life through such seismic or volcanic events (Bobbette and Donovan 2019). It may well be possible to reframe the history of geological universalisms – per the deep historians – by exploring their contexts and coexistences, but it is difficult to square this with the very force of the lithospheric processes that have altered or reshaped worlds throughout earth history. “New Earth Histories” – the program set out by Bashford, Kern, and Bobbette – charts a different, if overlapping path into the history of the earth sciences that is careful to balance the particular claims and histories of north Atlantic geological thinking, the array of coexisting knowledges that swirl around the geos, and the active forces of the planet itself (Bashford et al. 2023b). Notably, these perspectives have important and deep links to the south, where the fallacies of Western geo-universalism have often failed to hold.

4 Conclusion

Over the course of its existence as a subfield within the history of science, the history of the earth sciences has remained heavily preoccupied with the accumulation of knowledge about the earth within a set of north Atlantic institutions and networks. Tracing the emergence of the modern earth sciences via its origins in eighteenth century European naturalism, through a period where comparative global study and fieldwork made geology the “ultimate cosmopolitan science” (Secord 2018), and into an era of sophisticated geophysical modeling, many scholars have embraced a view from the north. In this chapter, I have argued that the most promising future directions for the history of the earth sciences lay in a neglected tradition of scholarship that inverts these dominant models and embraces a southern perspective. When historians have considered the history of the earth sciences from a position that focuses on southern archives, materials, knowledges, and networks, they have found that the emergence of the modern thinking about the planet is about so much more than just the European revelation of deep time. Important itineraries twist and turn between the enchanted geomythologies of Indigenous peoples, through imperial and colonial struggles over land and resources, and into a globalizing world where different investments in the earth and its pasts are held concurrently (Bashford et al. 2023a). Many of these facts have traditionally been marginalized within highly technical histories of the earth sciences that focused primarily on the piecing together of a new, deep temporality. However, if we take the spatial axis of earth science as seriously as we take the temporal one, these multiple relationships and new scales become key issues for the subfield. Historians are well aware that horizons of thinking change from time to time; however, my suggestion in this chapter is that historians of the earth sciences might consider inverting their traditional focus on time and temporality and focus place and spatiality. Embracing the place line that partly defines the history of the earth sciences from the south can help scholars construct a more accurate picture of the development of modern thinking about the planet that better accounts for the material, political, anthropological, and possibly postcolonial, dimensions of earth science.