“This is an ingenious book that will establish Helen Tilley as a considerable authority in the field. It presents a real opportunity for systematic historical revision of many received models of the processes of long-term economic and scientific development in a key field of colonial and postcolonial importance. Tilley’s unusually rich  and sensitive exploration of primary materials and firm grounding in the existing literature will help students and scholars reorient their understanding of the crucial roles scientific agencies played both in imperial administration and economic development.”

Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge

“Africa as a Living Laboratory is an extremely ambitious book about the history of the production of knowledge about medicine, the environment, ethnography, geography, and race in British colonial Africa. It may prove somewhat controversial in its conclusions, but Helen Tilley’s scholarship is impeccable. Historians of science and medicine and historians and anthropologists of Africa, as well as colonialism in general, will be fascinated by what she has to say.”--Steven Feierman, University of Pennsylvania

Steven Feierman

“Helen Tilley’s deeply researched, well-argued, and thought-provoking book on science in the British colonial empire in Africa should be read and pondered by historians of science and historians of empire. Africa as a Living Laboratory offers an antidote both to a view of science as a straightforward history of progress and to seeing science as the imposition by Europeans of an unwanted modernity on Africans. In a book of considerable nuance and sophistication, she provides a simple but convincing answer to the question of whether there was such a thing as ‘colonial science’: ‘no’ [….] Tilley advances, without being polemical, a view of knowledge within a colonial context more interactive and more historical than such influential approaches as Foucauldian concepts of biopower and other scholars’ emphasis on states as agents of singular, simplified, forcefully imposed conceptions of society and social change. Science, she shows, was a source of debate and criticism. As much by their disagreements among themselves as by the consensuses they reached, scientists contributed to an important aspect of the politics of empire in the late 1940s and 1950s: uncertainty.”—Science

Fred Cooper | Science

“Africa as a Living Laboratory will surprise some readers, who may expect from the title yet another stricture on the way Britain used its colonies and their peoples as a research facility for its own imperial purposes; but they will find that Tilley is far too aware of the nuances, ambivalences, weaknesses and even contradictions of British imperialism to be seduced by such foolish simplifications. She is at pains to emphasise that she is not defending imperialism; and the effect of her analysis is to provide a much more reliable basis for any critique of it [….] Tilley admits that she is a ‘defender of science’: the scientific method, that is, rather than the conclusions that ‘bad’ science sometimes throws up. The same method informs her own research, which is rigorously empirical, in contrast with the airily theoretical approaches that mar so much recent work in this area.”

Bernard Porter | London Review of Books

“A major contribution to African colonial history….Africa as a Living Laboratory is superbly researched and extremely provocative, and it deserves a wide readership.”

Jeff D. Grischow | The Historian

“Africa as a Living Laboratory is a groundbreaking study that challenges existing orthodoxy concerning the role of science in the colonization of Africa. It offers much not only to scholars of Africa, but also to those interested in the intersection of scientific thinking and politics more generally.”

Matthew V. Bender | Journal of World History