Modern science is often framed as European genius, yet many breakthroughs relied on knowledge from Indigenous peoples and colonised communities. This article explores how colonial power shaped what counted as science.
By Ariella Morris
When we envision the great scientific minds of the Enlightenment - Linnaeus cataloguing the natural world, Banks navigating the globe, Harvey mapping the body - we imagine solitary geniuses, torchbearers of reason escaping the dark. We rarely picture the enslaved women in the Caribbean who had been using plants medicinally for generations, the indigenous guides who led European explorers to specimens they could not have found alone, or the Ayurvedic physicians whose anatomical knowledge silently underpinned European texts. The Enlightenment did not emerge from a vacuum. It was, in no small part, a product of extraction.
The Myth of Independent Discovery
The history of Western Science is routinely narrated as a linear march of European minds from ignorance toward truth. Yet historian Kapil Raj (2007) argues that modern science was never produced in isolation; it was constructed through encounters between European scholars and non-European knowledge systems whose contributions were often left out of the historical record. The Enlightenment was profound for classifying and cataloguing such discoveries, but in doing so, it removed a section of the story to exercise power, relying on networks that stretched across colonised territories.
Carl Linnaeus, whose taxonomic system remains the foundation of modern biology, led to an environmental tragedy no one saw coming. His binomial nomenclature swept away thousands of indigenous plant names that had encoded medicinal uses, ecological relationships, and cultural knowledge accumulated over centuries, by standardising biological classification with a universal Latin naming system. Londa Schiebinger (2004) has shown how European botanists adopted indigenous knowledge about plants wholesale - including contraceptive and abortifacient properties of the peacock flower, documented by colonised and enslaved women in Suriname - yet stripped this knowledge of its origins before publishing it. The knowledge travelled, but the people who held it did not.
A System Built on Erasure
This was not simply an accidental omission. Sociologist Anibal Quijano (2000) coined the ‘coloniality of knowledge’ to describe how the colonial project actively dismantled non-European epistemic systems, positioning Western science as the singular legitimate form of knowledge production, going beyond mere land and labour extraction. Fanon (1961) extended this analysis to argue that colonial domination required the devaluation of indigenous culture, science, and thought - not simply as a side effect, but as a precondition for justifying the colonial enterprise itself.
These patterns were not isolated to individual scientists, but the logic permeated institutions we still revere. The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, founded in 1759, functioned - as Richard Drayton (2000) meticulously documents - as a key node in imperial bioprospecting: cataloguing, redistributing, and profiting from plant knowledge gathered across the Empire. Quinine, the anti-malarial derived from Andean cinchona bark, was known to indigenous Quechua peoples long before European pharmacology ‘discovered’ it. Rubber, indigo, and countless crops were similarly ‘transferred’ under the apparatus of empire, with their origins quietly disappearing.
Why This Matters Now
The structures of erasure are not merely historical. As Vandana Shiva (1997) warned, biopiracy - the appropriation of indigenous biological knowledge by corporations and research institutions without consent or compensation - did not end with colonialism. It was formalised by it. Modern pharmaceutical patents on compounds derived from plants long known to indigenous communities for generations represent the same epistemic extraction, now dressed in intellectual property law.
Moreover, the underrepresentation of scholars from formerly colonised nations in prestigious journals, funding bodies, and citation networks is not coincidental. Gurminder Bhambra (2014) argues that sociology and the natural sciences alike were institutionally constituted to centre European perspectives, and that ‘decolonising’ these fields required more than adding diverse voices to an unchanged structure - it demands a reckoning with the foundations themselves.
Towards a More Honest Science
The Gaia Hypothesis reminds us that the Earth’s systems are irreducibly interconnected. Perhaps the same is true of knowledge: no idea truly emerges from one mind, one culture, or one civilisation. To pretend otherwise is not only historically dishonest - it impoverishes science itself, cutting it off from the full breadth of human inquiry that made it possible.
Decolonising science is not about dismantling rigour or relativising truth. It is about recognising that rigour demands honesty - about who contributed, who was silenced, and who continues to bear the cost. The question ‘whose science is it?’ is not rhetorical. It is the most scientific question we could ask.
References
Bhambra, G.K. (2014) Connected Sociologies. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Drayton, R. (2000) Nature's Government: Science, Imperial Britain, and the 'Improvement' of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Fanon, F. (1961) The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press.
Quijano, A. (2000) 'Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America', Nepantla: Views from South, 1(3), pp. 533–580.
Raj, K. (2007) Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650–1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Schiebinger, L. (2004) Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Shiva, V. (1997) Biopiracy: The Plunder of Nature and Knowledge. Boston: South End Press.
