Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire - Hardcover

Erik Linstrum

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0674088662 ISBN 13: 9780674088665

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2016

Synopsis

The British Empire used intelligence tests, laboratory studies, and psychoanalysis to measure and manage the minds of subjects in distant cultures. Challenging assumptions about the role of scientific knowledge in the exercise of power, Erik Linstrum shows that psychology did more to reveal the limits of imperial authority than to strengthen it.

About this title

Review:

This book offers a compelling examination of the intersections between psychology, empire, and modernity. Linstrum deftly illuminates the ways in which psychology was harnessed and deployed in the making and remaking of imperial modernities, and this analytical concern allows him to press against the often narrow focus on the production of cultural difference that has characterized most recent scholarship on the history of colonial knowledge and empire building. There is no doubt that this is a sophisticated and significant work. --Tony Ballantyne, author of "Entanglements of Empire"

Linstrum s deft and fascinating study of imperial psychology reveals the ever-present tension between the radical possibilities of psychology and the requirements of the colonial state. In seeking to reconcile human diversity with a universalist model of the mind, psychologists ran up against the assumptions and prejudices that fed imperial rule, as well as the needs of colonial regimes. This is a groundbreaking work of considerable depth, that speaks as much to contemporary concerns as it does to the history of the British Empire. A tour de force. --Philippa Levine, author of "The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset""

"Challenging one-dimensional accounts that stress the unapologetic complicity of psychologists in the project of empire, he excels in unpicking the complexity and contradictions that bedeviled the encounter between science and colonial rule [...] Linstrum's deeply researched volume also contains a warning as pertinent now as it was in the age of pith helmets - that whatever the intentions of the researcher, and however much they they qualify their conclusions, officials are often willing to co-opt knowledge to their own ends." Times Literary Supplement

A tough and sophisticated account of how the science of mind was deployed in the British Empire in surprising ways to shore up empire, to critique it, to modernize it. Linstrum s own psychological acumen is applied to the personnel, instruments, and subjects of imperial psychology to reveal the multiple potentials but also, ultimately, the frailty of expertise in the global power politics of the twentieth century. --Peter Mandler, author of "Return from the Natives""

About the Author:

Erik Linstrum is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Virginia.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0674088662
• ISBN 13: 9780674088665
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 286