ABOUT THIS BOOK

A global history project that examines the diffusion of scientific and environmental discourses from India to Britain and the US.

This book examines how imperial agendas and colonial stereotyping shaped dietary and agricultural research carried out in the 1920s in British India, from soil protection initiatives to studies of diet and healthy living. It also discusses how a selective interpretation of this research, which focused on the supposed vigor of one community, the Hunzas, influenced the organic and lifestyles movements that later emerged in Britain and the US from the 1940s to the 1960s.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Ashok Malhotra is a senior lecturer in British imperial history at Queen’s University Belfast. He has previously served as a British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Making British Indian Fictions, 1772–1823, which examined British literary representations of India in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He has a PhD in history from the University of Edinburgh. Malhotra grew up in Leeds, West Yorkshire, but now lives with his wife and son in Belfast. In his free time, he likes to watch films, cook, and go long-distance running.

REVIEWS

'Imperial Science is a fascinating read. It provides a compelling narrative of colonial science in British India and its links with wider popular science movements in the early to the mid-twentieth century. Malhotra effortlessly melds interdisciplinary methodologies with transnational perspectives and offers a scholarly and engaging narrative of imperialism and agronomy, diet cultures and institutionalized sciences, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.'

Nandini Bhattacharya, University of Houston

'Ashok Malhotra’s manuscript represents an original and fascinating contribution to the fields of history of science, environmental history and cultural/postcolonial studies. By exploring the intersection of British imperial science in India and the twentieth-century organic movement, this fine storyteller gives a textured sense of the period and the key characters under study. His book breaks new ground by demonstrating how colonial agricultural and nutritional research was selectively interpreted and deployed by organic farming and soil protection movements in Britain and the US'

Claire Chambers, University of York

'A brilliant, sophisticated and probing account of the colonial pre-history of Anglo-American ecological research and proselytism. Ashok Malhotra's highly readable volume is an important intervention in global food studies and the history of sustainability, demonstrating the imperial dimension of nutritional and environmental science.'

Miles Taylor, Humboldt University of Berlin

TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Robert McCarrison’s imperial medical career in India and dietary experiments, 1902–1935

2 The Howards’ agricultural research in British India and the development of the Indore Process, 1900–1931

3 Adapting imperial agricultural and nutritional science for a British context

4 J. I. Rodale, the ‘healthy Hunzas’ and the organic movement in the US

5 ‘Hunza’ as Shangri-La in North American travelogues and film in the 1950s and 60s

Conclusion

Bibliography
Index