Before the nineteenth century, travellers who left Britain for the Americas, West Africa, India, ... more Before the nineteenth century, travellers who left Britain for the Americas, West Africa, India, and elsewhere encountered a medical conundrum: why did they fall ill when they arrived, and why -if they recovered -did they never become so ill again? The widely accepted answer was that the newcomers needed to become 'seasoned to the climate'. Suman Seth explores forms of eighteenth-century medical knowledge, including conceptions of seasoning, showing how geographical location was essential to this knowledge and helped to defi ne relationships between Britain and her far-fl ung colonies. In this period, debates raged between medical practitioners over whether diseases changed in different climes. Different diseases were deemed characteristic of different races and genders, and medical practitioners were thus deeply involved in contestations over race and the legitimacy of the abolitionist cause. In this innovative and engaging history, Seth offers dramatically new ways to understand the mutual shaping of medicine, race, and empire.
This essay explores the racial theories of Edward Long, the West Indian planter and slave owner w... more This essay explores the racial theories of Edward Long, the West Indian planter and slave owner who published his History of Jamaica in 1774. Long's polygenism, it argues, looks strikingly different from that we are more familiar with from nineteenth-century sources. The reason for the difference is twofold. First, although Long was willing to buck biblical orthodoxy, he balked at materialism, a position that gained traction in racial studies following the successes of the phrenological movement in the early nineteenth century. Second, Long presents us with a (relatively rare) case of an eighteenth-century writer on "race science" with political sympathies toward a part of the world that was both outside the bounds of the European metropole and contained a majority black population. As a result, one finds a fundamental ambivalence in his writings on race, an ambivalence that stemmed directly from his desire to manage social relations and political systems in a slave society. Metropolitan figures who believed in-the fixity of race (regardless of the question of origin) made a cornerstone of their position the essential identity of newly arrived African slaves and their descendants. For Long, however, the difference between "salt-water" and "creole" Negroes was to be the solution to the most pressing social problem of the sugar islands: slave insurrection. This understanding of the (potential) political and social differences between generations of slaves required a physical corollary: Long's polygenism presumed less fixity than the monogenism of a figure like Immanuel Kant.
... Such is the thought-provoking conclusion to a book that manages to accom-plish the rare feat ... more ... Such is the thought-provoking conclusion to a book that manages to accom-plish the rare feat of combining empirical depth with theoretical bite. Suman Seth Cornell University ... 274 | SUMAN SETH Page 11. ences can emerge as an epistemological relativist. ...
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 2009
The paper detailed what we now know as his ''exclusion principle.'' This essay situates the work ... more The paper detailed what we now know as his ''exclusion principle.'' This essay situates the work leading up to Pauli's principle within the traditions of the ''Sommerfeld School,'' led by Munich University's renowned theorist and teacher, Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951). Offering a substantial corrective to previous accounts of the birth of quantum mechanics, which have tended to sideline Sommerfeld's work, it is suggested here that both the method and the content of Pauli's paper drew substantially on the work of the Sommerfeld School in the early 1920s. Part One describes Sommerfeld's turn away from a faith in the power of model-based (modellmässig) methods in his early career towards the use of a more phenomenological emphasis on empirical regularities (Gesetzmässigkeiten) during precisely the period that both Pauli and Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), among others, were his students. Part two delineates the importance of Sommerfeld's phenomenology to Pauli's methods in the exclusion principle paper, a paper that also eschewed modellmässig approaches in favour of a stress on Gesetzmässigkeiten. In terms of content, a focus on Sommerfeld's work reveals the roots of Pauli's understanding of the fundamental Zweideutigkeit (ambiguity) involving the quantum number of electrons within the atom. The conclusion points to the significance of these results to an improved historical understanding of the origin of aspects of Heisenberg's 1925 paper on the ''Quantum-theoretical Reformulation (Umdeutung) of Kinematical and Mechanical Relations.''
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 2008
... was being offered with this rule, Sommerfeld stressed again its 'rather formal' cha... more ... was being offered with this rule, Sommerfeld stressed again its 'rather formal' character: ... in developing, Sommerfeld gave up the search for modellmässig foundations in order to develop a ... since experimental data was not the end but the starting-point of Sommerfeld's analysis. ...
This essay explores the racial theories of Edward Long, the West Indian planter and slave owner w... more This essay explores the racial theories of Edward Long, the West Indian planter and slave owner who published his History of Jamaica in 1774. Long's polygenism, it argues, looks strikingly different from that we are more familiar with from nineteenth-century sources. The reason for the difference is twofold. First, although Long was willing to buck biblical orthodoxy, he balked at materialism, a position that gained traction in racial studies following the successes of the phrenological movement in the early nineteenth century. Second, Long presents us with a (relatively rare) case of an eighteenth-century writer on "race science" with political sympathies toward a part of the world that was both outside the bounds of the European metropole and contained a majority black population. As a result, one finds a fundamental ambivalence in his writings on race, an ambivalence that stemmed directly from his desire to manage social relations and political systems in a slave society. Metropolitan figures who believed in-the fixity of race (regardless of the question of origin) made a cornerstone of their position the essential identity of newly arrived African slaves and their descendants. For Long, however, the difference between "salt-water" and "creole" Negroes was to be the solution to the most pressing social problem of the sugar islands: slave insurrection. This understanding of the (potential) political and social differences between generations of slaves required a physical corollary: Long's polygenism presumed less fixity than the monogenism of a figure like Immanuel Kant.
... both those analysts critical of Western science's claims to universality, an... more ... both those analysts critical of Western science's claims to universality, and arguably ... The 'indigenous' (people, plants, soil) were removed even as indigeneity itself*captured on ... Weekly, 41, 2006, pp 210Á217; Warwick Anderson, 'Postcolonial Technoscience,' Social Studies of ...
In 1995, cooperative learning tutorials were introduced into large first year physics classes at ... more In 1995, cooperative learning tutorials were introduced into large first year physics classes at the University of Sydney. This paper describes the effect of these cooperative learning tutorials, called Workshop Tutorials, on student learning from both a quantitative and ...
Before the nineteenth century, travellers who left Britain for the Americas, West Africa, India, ... more Before the nineteenth century, travellers who left Britain for the Americas, West Africa, India, and elsewhere encountered a medical conundrum: why did they fall ill when they arrived, and why -if they recovered -did they never become so ill again? The widely accepted answer was that the newcomers needed to become 'seasoned to the climate'. Suman Seth explores forms of eighteenth-century medical knowledge, including conceptions of seasoning, showing how geographical location was essential to this knowledge and helped to defi ne relationships between Britain and her far-fl ung colonies. In this period, debates raged between medical practitioners over whether diseases changed in different climes. Different diseases were deemed characteristic of different races and genders, and medical practitioners were thus deeply involved in contestations over race and the legitimacy of the abolitionist cause. In this innovative and engaging history, Seth offers dramatically new ways to understand the mutual shaping of medicine, race, and empire.
This essay explores the racial theories of Edward Long, the West Indian planter and slave owner w... more This essay explores the racial theories of Edward Long, the West Indian planter and slave owner who published his History of Jamaica in 1774. Long's polygenism, it argues, looks strikingly different from that we are more familiar with from nineteenth-century sources. The reason for the difference is twofold. First, although Long was willing to buck biblical orthodoxy, he balked at materialism, a position that gained traction in racial studies following the successes of the phrenological movement in the early nineteenth century. Second, Long presents us with a (relatively rare) case of an eighteenth-century writer on "race science" with political sympathies toward a part of the world that was both outside the bounds of the European metropole and contained a majority black population. As a result, one finds a fundamental ambivalence in his writings on race, an ambivalence that stemmed directly from his desire to manage social relations and political systems in a slave society. Metropolitan figures who believed in-the fixity of race (regardless of the question of origin) made a cornerstone of their position the essential identity of newly arrived African slaves and their descendants. For Long, however, the difference between "salt-water" and "creole" Negroes was to be the solution to the most pressing social problem of the sugar islands: slave insurrection. This understanding of the (potential) political and social differences between generations of slaves required a physical corollary: Long's polygenism presumed less fixity than the monogenism of a figure like Immanuel Kant.
... Such is the thought-provoking conclusion to a book that manages to accom-plish the rare feat ... more ... Such is the thought-provoking conclusion to a book that manages to accom-plish the rare feat of combining empirical depth with theoretical bite. Suman Seth Cornell University ... 274 | SUMAN SETH Page 11. ences can emerge as an epistemological relativist. ...
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics, 2009
The paper detailed what we now know as his ''exclusion principle.'' This essay situates the work ... more The paper detailed what we now know as his ''exclusion principle.'' This essay situates the work leading up to Pauli's principle within the traditions of the ''Sommerfeld School,'' led by Munich University's renowned theorist and teacher, Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951). Offering a substantial corrective to previous accounts of the birth of quantum mechanics, which have tended to sideline Sommerfeld's work, it is suggested here that both the method and the content of Pauli's paper drew substantially on the work of the Sommerfeld School in the early 1920s. Part One describes Sommerfeld's turn away from a faith in the power of model-based (modellmässig) methods in his early career towards the use of a more phenomenological emphasis on empirical regularities (Gesetzmässigkeiten) during precisely the period that both Pauli and Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976), among others, were his students. Part two delineates the importance of Sommerfeld's phenomenology to Pauli's methods in the exclusion principle paper, a paper that also eschewed modellmässig approaches in favour of a stress on Gesetzmässigkeiten. In terms of content, a focus on Sommerfeld's work reveals the roots of Pauli's understanding of the fundamental Zweideutigkeit (ambiguity) involving the quantum number of electrons within the atom. The conclusion points to the significance of these results to an improved historical understanding of the origin of aspects of Heisenberg's 1925 paper on the ''Quantum-theoretical Reformulation (Umdeutung) of Kinematical and Mechanical Relations.''
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A, 2008
... was being offered with this rule, Sommerfeld stressed again its 'rather formal' cha... more ... was being offered with this rule, Sommerfeld stressed again its 'rather formal' character: ... in developing, Sommerfeld gave up the search for modellmässig foundations in order to develop a ... since experimental data was not the end but the starting-point of Sommerfeld's analysis. ...
This essay explores the racial theories of Edward Long, the West Indian planter and slave owner w... more This essay explores the racial theories of Edward Long, the West Indian planter and slave owner who published his History of Jamaica in 1774. Long's polygenism, it argues, looks strikingly different from that we are more familiar with from nineteenth-century sources. The reason for the difference is twofold. First, although Long was willing to buck biblical orthodoxy, he balked at materialism, a position that gained traction in racial studies following the successes of the phrenological movement in the early nineteenth century. Second, Long presents us with a (relatively rare) case of an eighteenth-century writer on "race science" with political sympathies toward a part of the world that was both outside the bounds of the European metropole and contained a majority black population. As a result, one finds a fundamental ambivalence in his writings on race, an ambivalence that stemmed directly from his desire to manage social relations and political systems in a slave society. Metropolitan figures who believed in-the fixity of race (regardless of the question of origin) made a cornerstone of their position the essential identity of newly arrived African slaves and their descendants. For Long, however, the difference between "salt-water" and "creole" Negroes was to be the solution to the most pressing social problem of the sugar islands: slave insurrection. This understanding of the (potential) political and social differences between generations of slaves required a physical corollary: Long's polygenism presumed less fixity than the monogenism of a figure like Immanuel Kant.
... both those analysts critical of Western science's claims to universality, an... more ... both those analysts critical of Western science's claims to universality, and arguably ... The 'indigenous' (people, plants, soil) were removed even as indigeneity itself*captured on ... Weekly, 41, 2006, pp 210Á217; Warwick Anderson, 'Postcolonial Technoscience,' Social Studies of ...
In 1995, cooperative learning tutorials were introduced into large first year physics classes at ... more In 1995, cooperative learning tutorials were introduced into large first year physics classes at the University of Sydney. This paper describes the effect of these cooperative learning tutorials, called Workshop Tutorials, on student learning from both a quantitative and ...
Uploads
Papers by Suman Seth