During the 1920s, researchers from the American Museum of Natural History led by Roy Chapman Andr... more During the 1920s, researchers from the American Museum of Natural History led by Roy Chapman Andrews exported a large collection of valuable fossils from the Gobi Desert. While their expedition was celebrated across Europe and the United States, it aroused enormous controversy in China and Mongolia, especially after a new Nationalist government was formed in Nanjing during the late 1920s. Whereas Chinese scholars accused American scientists of plundering their natural heritage, Andrews argued that because dinosaurs went extinct long before the creation of China, prehistoric fossils belonged equally to all mankind. This essay locates the Central Asiatic Expedition within a broader history of epistemic imperialism to explore what the controversy that it engendered reveals about the production, circulation, and accumulation of knowledge in a global context. I n the spring of 1922, a celebrity explorer from the American Museum of Natural History in New York named Roy Chapman Andrews embarked on a natural history expedition into the Lukas Rieppel is Associate Professor of History at Brown University, where he teaches courses on the history of the life, Earth, and environmental sciences, the history of capitalism, and the history of museums. He recently published Assembling the Dinosaur (Harvard, 2019), and he is currently a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow, working on a project about the role of the Earth sciences in the history of American imperialism.
During the 1920s, researchers from the American Museum of Natural History led by Roy Chapman Andr... more During the 1920s, researchers from the American Museum of Natural History led by Roy Chapman Andrews exported a large collection of valuable fossils from the Gobi Desert. While their expedition was celebrated across Europe and the United States, it aroused enormous controversy in China and Mongolia, especially after a new Nationalist government was formed in Nanjing during the late 1920s. Whereas Chinese scholars accused American scientists of plundering their natural heritage, Andrews argued that because dinosaurs went extinct long before the creation of China, prehistoric fossils belonged equally to all mankind. This essay locates the Central Asiatic Expedition within a broader history of epistemic imperialism to explore what the controversy that it engendered reveals about the production, circulation, and accumulation of knowledge in a global context. I n the spring of 1922, a celebrity explorer from the American Museum of Natural History in New York named Roy Chapman Andrews embarked on a natural history expedition into the Lukas Rieppel is Associate Professor of History at Brown University, where he teaches courses on the history of the life, Earth, and environmental sciences, the history of capitalism, and the history of museums. He recently published Assembling the Dinosaur (Harvard, 2019), and he is currently a Mellon Foundation New Directions Fellow, working on a project about the role of the Earth sciences in the history of American imperialism.
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