Contentious careers

The aim of this article is to characterize transnational science and its motivations, execution, and contradictions.Footnote ¹ It uses the case of three German naturalists—the Schlagintweit brothers, Hermann, Robert, and Adolph—and their chequered experiences as surveyors for the British East India Company (EIC) in South and High Asia between 1854–58 to examine the opportunities and the sources of conflict for German specialists within the process of imperial recruitment into a foreign power.Footnote ² The Schlagintweit expedition was one of the largest transnationally sponsored scientific missions in the mid-nineteenth century. It was mainly sponsored by the Court of Directors of the EIC, but also received funding from the kings of Prussia and Bavaria. In the later 1850s it prompted considerable hostile and hagiographic responses in India, Germany, and Britain.Footnote ³ A close look at this multinational enterprise allows for a detailed study of science and the role of the state at a moment of gradual and extremely uneven transformation in the funding of enquiry—a shift from private patronage to more public, and purportedly more accountable, systems of national support.

Science is, fundamentally, a negotiated social activity. The status and reputation of its practitioners can only be understood by considering the specific social, political, and scientific settings in which individuals crafted their works and made their careers. The rich surviving records about the Schlagintweits’ careers and conduct provide a rare chance for a multifaceted analysis of what was at stake in such a multinational enterprise—both for their illustrious mentors and patrons such as Alexander von Humboldt and the Royal Society, as well as for their numerous opponents, critics, and wider publics. Since the brothers were no gentlemen scholars with access to private wealth, they present an excellent case study through which to explore the travels and travails of more ordinary figures vying for resources and reputation in a competitive imperial labour market. Their contentious recruitment to British India formed part of a much broader migration of German scientific experts to other countries’ colonial dominions in the long nineteenth century, a phenomenon that always yielded potential for conflict. The Schlagintweits’ story thus bears upon deeper historiographic concerns today, at a moment when works of transnational and global history seek to better account for the rupture of connections, backlashes to integration, and opposition to cross-border movements in the past.Footnote ⁴

Transnational staffing arrangements have rightly been regarded as the norm within the various European East India companies.Footnote ⁵ Nevertheless, the historical literature on professional mobility—especially among scientific practitioners—has often overlooked another side to this picture, namely, the frequent hostility and resistance to the recruitment of foreigners. Kris Manjapra, in an influential account of Indo-German intellectual exchanges in the age of empires, declared that ‘[t]he role of German-speakers as managers of British imperial science raised few eyebrows in the metropole in the period of Victorian self-confidence’. He continued: ‘The Victorian popular readership encountered the German presence in India as affable intellectual and scholarly service.’Footnote ⁶ In many instances, however, this was not the case. While foreign manpower and expertise offered obvious advantages to British administrators, the large-scale recruitment of scientists to India from beyond the bounds of the British population was recurrently fraught with tension and provoked polemical reactions. The following analysis thus diverges from recent works that have painted an all-too-smooth picture of the opportunity that empires presented to outsiders.Footnote ⁷ Exploring the tensions characteristic of the transnational nature of British imperialism offers a revisionist account of a globalizing world in which transversal expert mobility and social aversion were two sides of the same coin.Footnote ⁸

The Schlagintweits and other German scientists and travellers in Britain's expanding empire adapted existing colonial infrastructures, repositories of knowledge, and rhetoric for their own purposes. At the same time, the three controversial brothers sought to navigate the different, and sometimes irreconcilable, designs of their employers and other interested parties. As a consequence, it is not possible to locate a single meaning or motivation behind their expedition. Rather, it is through an analysis of the relationship between different (and often competing) interests and meanings that we are able to understand the kind of frictions that attended the brothers’ and other Germans’ transnational scientific pursuits.

Friction, as it is understood here, is not merely a drag on progress or a hindrance to mobility.Footnote ⁹ As Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has made clear, frictions produce effects, sometimes useful or productive effects, in the social realm as much as the physical: ‘Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick.’Footnote ¹⁰ Rather than seeing friction as a negative force, as only an impediment to be overcome, ‘movement and change are only possible when friction occurs; when two elements interact’.Footnote ¹¹ While friction can certainly present insurmountable problems or cause deleterious consequences in some instances, I am instead interested in the unforeseen, and not necessarily adverse, consequences of friction—the sticky ‘grip of worldly encounter’ (as Tsing has poetically put it)—which we can study in the interactions and negotiations that were part of transversal careers in science, and, indeed, made them possible.Footnote ¹²

This article, then, makes use of the term ‘friction’, which I loosely borrow from Tsing, as a lens through which to concentrate our focus on how new political, social, and cultural dynamics were produced through the controversial transnational recruitment and sojourning of scientific practitioners across national and imperial boundaries. It argues that while the pursuit of transnational science always created friction at individual, scientific, institutional, and even political levels, these frictions were not inevitably detrimental to the careers of scientific outsiders. Rather, certain frictions could also open up hitherto closed opportunities for ingenious scientific recruits to capitalize on. For example, for most of their careers in the British empire, the Schlagintweits held a communications monopoly with their Anglo-German patrons and could effectively manage and manipulate information asymmetries between their multinational sponsors, playing off one side against the other to maximize their personal gain. Other frictions of transnational science could ultimately be used for personal benefit, too: while the accumulation of large sets of material artefacts during transnational expeditionary schemes repeatedly caused conflict around the question of ownership, the brothers ingeniously used their Company assignment to acquire and bring back a huge collection of artefacts to Germany, with which they subsequently launched ambitious museological projects in their name.

While the Schlagintweits provoked fierce debates about their recruitment, scientific prowess, and personal demeanour within their own lifetimes, interest in their mission has reignited of late. Following an earlier edited volumeFootnote ¹³ and introductory articles,Footnote ¹⁴ a new wave of research on the history of exploration has emphasized the importance of examining the practices of expeditionary science in the field, some of which makes passing mention of the Schlagintweits.Footnote ¹⁵ In contrast to the older literature on the brothers’ expedition, which systematically underplayed the political conditions of their scheme—diminishing the role of South Asians and treating the political structures of British India as merely a backdrop for the heroic activities of the white explorers—it is imperative now to place the Schlagintweits’ projects squarely back into their colonial contexts.Footnote ¹⁶ This means taking seriously the decisive roles of cultural encounters and indigenous agents in the Schlagintweits’ enterprise.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, the brothers’ great dependence on ‘native’ guidance, which is evident in how extensively they quoted indigenous testimony in their published works, was another aspect in the critical reception of their mission. Attention to the multiple contexts of the Schlagintweits’ project also requires an investigation into how their ambitious survey programmes of physical geography, climatology, soil science, and ethnography depended heavily on the mobilization of the colonial infrastructure of British India. This includes the brothers’ wide-ranging privileges as temporary Company employees, which granted them full access to colonial intelligence networks and allowed them to use technical facilities. These conditions alone made possible the realization of their scientific programme in its ultimate form. Yet, I also argue that it was precisely this privileged integration of the German recruits into formal colonial structures, and the significant monetary, logistical, and political support they received in the colony and Britain, that provoked a significant backlash and opposition from neglected British practitioners and wider publics in South Asia and metropolitan society.

The article's first part reflects on the limited financial support which the British state and the EIC offered to scientific enquiry. The next section explores why British colonial authorities nonetheless chose to co-opt such large numbers of German scientific practitioners. The final parts elaborate upon the complexities of the Schlagintweit mission and the practices of making science in the field. Their expedition is taken as a revealing example of transnational networks and systems of recruitment being put under pressure and ultimately breaking down amid the Indian Rebellion, arguably the British empire's greatest crisis in the nineteenth century. The wide, and often contradictory, responses to the Schlagintweit programme ultimately resulted in highly divergent reputations and legacies of these travellers in India, Britain, and the German states—with significant ramifications for growing overseas ambitions in their non-colonial fatherlands.

Competition over patronage

The funding environment into which the Schlagintweits stepped was marked by a scarcity of resources and positions. This situation was ripe for conflict between competing scientific practitioners. The British state has been described as a ‘reluctant patron’ that lacked a central institution for scientific enquiry until the early twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁸ For much of the nineteenth century, it also offered only a handful of paid positions in science. In light of sparse state support for scientific enquiry, the East India Company (with its headquarters in London) and its growing number of medical and scientific establishments overseas ranked among the most important employers for natural historical, medical, and technical specialists in Britain and India.Footnote ¹⁹ Large-scale scientific projects funded by the EIC, such as the long-running Great Trigonometrical Survey of India (GTS), offered paid employment to generations of servants of the Company and, after 1858, the British Raj. The GTS, and a host of route, revenue, and other surveys, were intended to make known the constantly expanding territories colonized by the British.Footnote ²⁰ These enormous operations provided lucrative (if limited) openings for Britons and other nationalities to engage in scientific, medical, and technical pursuits. Company service became only more attractive in the closing years of the eighteenth century as the EIC started to sign discriminatory treaties with Indian rulers that forbade the recruitment of continental Europeans into their military, scientific, and technical services.Footnote ²¹ Crucially, some of these Indian powers had been empires of opportunity—with their own expansive ambitions—for continental European practitioners too. The British discriminatory treaties attempted to regulate the presence of free-roaming foreigners in South Asia, significantly curtailing their opportunities and channelling many outsiders and mercenaries into the EIC's own ranks.Footnote ²²

Despite this, Company officers and surgeons as well as British settlers in India regarded the EIC's patronage of scientific endeavours as woefully insufficient.Footnote ²³ In particular, British men of science repeatedly criticized the Company's Court of Directors for failing to provide material support for more non-utilitarian, philosophical works in various branches of knowledge.Footnote ²⁴ Joseph Dalton Hooker (1817–1911), a leading botanist and director of Kew Gardens between 1865 and 1885—a man of great capacity but little personal affluence—once vented: ‘the keeping up of the various Seminaries, Horticultural Gardens and other Establishments, which promise return, more or less profitable, cannot be regarded as a patronage of the Science’.Footnote ²⁵ Hooker, who would later become one of the Schlagintweits’ fiercest opponents in Britain, spoke from bitter experience. The EIC had refused to fund a publication on Indian flora based on Hooker's eastern voyage (1847–1851), despite the fact that it had provided a wealth of new specimens and insights into Indian and Himalayan natural history. In the end, his co-author Thomas Thomson was forced to pay out of his own pocket to produce their first and only volume of Flora Indica.Footnote ²⁶ The Company's status as an influential patron of the arts and sciences thus raises a paradox. While the EIC did sponsor utilitarian scientific projects (and, on occasion, more curious and ornamental researches), its irregular and unsystematic largesse towards British practitioners—both within its own ranks and towards Company outsiders like Joseph Hooker—meant that most scientific activities during the period of Company rule were undertaken as a private occupation, in the mould of gentlemanly science as also practised at home in Britain at the time.Footnote ²⁷

From early on, the feeling was that salaried positions should go first and foremost to British subjects. Only if no suitable British or internal candidates presented themselves should the authorities consider enlisting foreigners. But even then, the appointment of non-nationals to well-funded schemes could still frequently rouse public condemnation. For instance, when the Schlagintweits’ employment became public in 1854 (after no available British officer in India had been found), The Athenaeum, London's leading artistic and scientific journal—a natural forum for concerns regarding scientific reputation and expeditionary funding—seethed in a manner symptomatic of the times: ‘This desire to promote science through the instrumentality of foreigners, so insulting to our Indian service, is not now for the first time indulged in.’Footnote ²⁸ By contrast, the president of the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) Roderick Impey Murchison offered a more pragmatic response. As an influential patron of the sciences, well connected to German geographers through his long correspondence with Alexander von Humboldt, Murchison viewed the reliance on skilled outsiders such as the Schlagintweits justified ‘provided we have no better & fitter men ready’.Footnote ²⁹

It was on this point that the widespread British sense of entitlement collided with the necessities of colonial empire building, which depended, among other things, on filling vacant positions in the scientific and technical services in India. Historians have shown that Europe's colonial systems drew promiscuously on foreign manpower and expertise wherever capable seamen, gunners, settlers, soldiers, naturalists, and advisers could be found ‘because their own subjects at home were too choosy, expensive or unskilled to be of much use’.Footnote ³⁰ In some areas, British dependence on outside recruitment was particularly acute, such as in the scientific and technical fields in which the British seemed to lag behind.Footnote ³¹ The perception that certain foreign nationalities were the pre-eminent experts in particular branches of enquiry generally overrode the persistent protests of ‘slighted’ British Company servants and metropolitan scientists.Footnote ³²

Changing perceptions of ‘German science’

There were several reasons why the politically fragmented German states became a prime pool of experts for foreign imperial recruitment from at least the 1830s until the early twentieth century. Throughout the entire period of Company rule in South Asia, the observational and field sciences such as botany, geology, and the study of inland waters and rivers played a crucial role in exploring and surveying the expanding British territories. For many Anglo-Indian naturalists and scientific travellers in the first half of the nineteenth century, the work of the Prussian geographer and explorer Alexander von Humboldt presented both a model and a taxing challenge. Humboldt pioneered the use of modern instrumentation and combined natural-historical and cultural observations to achieve a more holistic understanding of any traversed region. He emphasized the interplay of various physical forces, which he sought to visualize through new aesthetic epistemologies.Footnote ³³ His empirical-observational approach influenced scientific exploration in South Asia for several decades after his American voyage (1799–1804) and the publication of its results.Footnote ³⁴ Humboldt, who was an outspoken critic of slavery and colonialism, never received permission from the EIC to venture to India and into the Himalayas himself. He nevertheless seemed to nurture—at least in the eyes of British officials and science managers—a ‘stirring school of Prussian geographers’ capable of realizing extensive and instrument-based fieldwork better than most contemporaries.Footnote ³⁵ By the mid-nineteenth century, even some French men of science believed Germans to be the natural first choice when looking for members of an expedition involving many different fields of study:

This statement from the late 1850s reflected a significant change in the European balance of scientific power. Earlier, Humboldt had consciously chosen to compile large parts of his American oeuvre in Paris until he returned to Prussia in 1827. During his stay in the French capital, he had maintained a correspondence with the Prussian minister of culture, Karl vom Stein zum Altenstein, about ways to overcome the scientific backwardness of Prussia when compared with Britain and FranceFootnote ³⁷—especially Paris which was at the centre of European natural enquiry in the first three decades of the century.Footnote ³⁸ However, after 1830, French superiority in the sciences declined, even if such a judgement needs to take into account the different trajectories of particular disciplines.Footnote ³⁹ The German states then began to rival—and eventually overtook—their neighbour in innovative and organized scientific research.Footnote ⁴⁰

Besides their supposedly profound and interdisciplinary outlook, German scientific practitioners were also valued for other reasons, not least because they were often experienced in the practicalities of exploration. The Schlagintweit brothers, whom Humboldt would later mentor, first cut their teeth in the Alps (1846–1853). This initiation often proved crucial for later overseas ventures. In addition, German naturalists usually mastered the lingua francas of European scholarly discourse—French, Latin, and English—besides their native tongue. Moreover, they closely followed the progress of knowledge in various fields of enquiry thanks to the international correspondence networks in the sciences and the steady proliferation of printed journals circulating between European and extra-European centres of learning.Footnote ⁴¹ Thanks to their deep integration into international knowledge networks, early nineteenth-century Germany saw the production of its own learned publications on extra-European worlds.Footnote ⁴² The Schlagintweits, for instance, had thoroughly read both Humboldt's and Carl Ritter's publications on Asia before they launched their mission in British India.Footnote ⁴³ Ritter's monumental oeuvre Erdkunde [Comparative Geography] appeared in its second edition between 1822–1859 and focused almost exclusively on Asia.Footnote ⁴⁴ It inspired German explorers—including the three brothers—to travel to this continent themselves to complement and correct the work of the old master.

Some German regions saw men enlist in foreign empires in particularly high numbers.Footnote ⁴⁵ Skeins of private patronage and long-standing lines of correspondence linked Berlin, in particular—an important centre for Oriental studies, natural history, and geography—to the scientific communities and imperial authorities in Britain and India. From their positions within Berlin's Geographical Society, Humboldt and Ritter could direct appointments and practices within the geographical sciences, leaning on their substantial international reputation to advance their young protégés. Their far-reaching networks of patronage channelled German practitioners into British and Indian employment in the first half of the nineteenth century. This informal system of recruitment relied on personal ties, trust, and scholarly standing. It also benefited from the presence of scientifically inclined Prussian consuls in London, such as Christian Karl von Bunsen, who gently pulled strings in a coordinated effort with Berlin. Bunsen also proved crucial for the Schlagintweits’ entrance into Company service in 1854.Footnote ⁴⁶ The British quest for German scientific practitioners furthermore profited from the patronage provided by German scholars and scientists already established in Britain. Exemplary in this regard was Max Müller at the University of Oxford, the leading Orientalist in Victorian Britain. He helped a number of German scholars to find learned positions across the Channel.Footnote ⁴⁷ Finally, personal connections between the British and German royalty—the Hanoverian union with Britain between 1714–1837, and the lasting family connections of the British monarchy to German princely states until the First World War—proved to be important factors for academic exchanges and recruitment between the two countries. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria's consort, never tired of luring Germans talented in the arts and crafts, music, and the sciences to Britain.Footnote ⁴⁸ He and the queen also met and supported the Schlagintweit brothers who, in turn, dedicated significant parts of their later Indian publications to ‘Her Majesty, Victoria’.Footnote ⁴⁹

The reputation of ‘German science’Footnote ⁵⁰ markedly increased after the first modern research laboratory was established and run by the chemist Justus von Liebig at the University of Gießen in 1828, a model that soon spread across the competing German states.Footnote ⁵¹ By the later decades of the century, the positive associations of ‘deutsche Wissenschaft’ had broadened further from the perceived distinction of its practitioners in the realms of geography, empirical fieldwork, scientific forestry (for which a huge imperial demand existed in India), medicine, and mining to include other scientific fields such as bacteriology and agricultural (and later industrial) chemistry, as Germany played a key role in the second Industrial Revolution.Footnote ⁵² With soil analyses and the sciences of agronomy, manuring, and pest control all playing an ever-greater role in improving the agricultural output of European colonies and the rapidly expanding plantation complexes, the wish to enlist German expertise barely diminished.Footnote ⁵³

Crucially, since there was no overseas German colonial empire until 1884, skilled scientific practitioners in German states looked to their European neighbours to find adequate and rewarding employment overseas. These represented empires of opportunity for aspiring Germans to gain income, to fulfil their curiosities and scholarly ambitions, and to acquire specific skills, experiences, and scientific collections that could be used for professional advancement. The perceived political neutrality of most German practitioners gave them an advantage over their European neighbours. British (and other national-imperial) authorities did not see German specialists as representing a competing imperial power, who might pursue fifth-column activities once within the protective umbrella of a foreign colonial infrastructure.Footnote ⁵⁴ In that regard, German recruitment patterns differed markedly from those of the French. British officials were acutely conscious of the remaining small pockets of French sovereignty—Pondicherry, Chandernagor, and so on—in South Asia and remained alert to their former arch-rival's potential ambitions well into the nineteenth century. While a few itinerant French naturalists, such as Victor Jacquemont in the late 1820s, did receive official permission to roam around Company territories and enter the Himalayas, few other Frenchmen were allowed to occupy an exalted scientific or administrative position within the British administration.Footnote ⁵⁵ And even those Frenchmen who did find mid-level employment often regarded ‘British’ India as their second preference—and one which they often abandoned when the chance arose to work for their own national empire instead.Footnote ⁵⁶

The appreciation for German science and its practitioners, however, was never unchallenged—even if a large body of scholarship on a hand-picked group of cosmopolitan and disinterested German scientists active around the globe at the time gives that impression. As a matter of fact, the appeal of German scientists dwindled the moment the interests of British naturalists or science managers were crossed. Controversies, for instance, regularly flared up over the questions of where scientific results from Anglo-German ventures were to be published first, and whether German naturalists in foreign employ were consciously holding back information or material specimens from their British employers. Heinrich Barth's travels in central Africa under British protection (1849–55) and the Schlagintweit brothers’ enterprise in South Asia are exemplary instances of joint exploratory missions resulting in tensions around questions of national prestige.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the wake of the Schlagintweits’ return to Europe in 1857, the brothers were openly accused by British scientists and journalists of ‘the withholding of their Scientific results from our Societies, to the sending of all their materials to Prussia’.Footnote ⁵⁸ The recruitment of German scientists into the British empire, in India as elsewhere, continued throughout the later nineteenth century; however, the mere fact of their numerically significant presence in the scientific and technical departments of the Raj does not indicate the absence of frictions in the system. Those who fared better and encountered less public or professional opposition usually occupied relatively low-status positions within the military, civil, or scientific departments of British India. What distinguished the Schlagintweits from the vast majority of their countrymen, who were recruited more quietly, was the brothers’ large, at times utopian, ambitions and their resulting willingness to challenge and transgress established norms and conventions of ‘respectable’ science in the quest for status, wealth, and power.

The Schlagintweit brothers and the frictions of imperial recruitment

The Schlagintweits’ Asiatic mission is of particular interest for the study of transnational science because it shows how, in this instance, the established machinery of appointing Germans to the British empire faltered spectacularly. Over the years, many—though by no means all—German surveyors, naturalists, and advisers integrated themselves more or less noiselessly and anonymously in the services of British India. In contrast, the brothers’ aspiration to become great Asian explorers made waves from the start. Their incessant quest for publicity and stature necessarily attracted greater public scrutiny and professional jealousies.Footnote ⁵⁹ In the end, the Schlagintweits’ controversial enterprise destroyed long-established Anglo-German networks and redrew alliances—academic and political—across transnational scientific communities.

Nothing in the brothers’ early careers portended such a dramatic fallout. There were six Schlagintweit brothers altogether. They each found empire-related opportunities in a world dominated by Western powers. While they all led notable lives in their own right, the remaining sections will centre on Hermann (1826–1882), Robert (1833–1885), Adolph (1829–1857), and Emil (1835–1904).Footnote ⁶⁰ Hermann, Robert, and Adolph, the three older brothers, all travelled to India for the EIC. Emil, who was too young, did not. He nevertheless profited in lasting ways from the Asiatic excursions, making use of the material artefacts and manuscripts accumulated by his siblings to become a leading European authority on Buddhism in its ancient and modern forms.Footnote ⁶¹

At first the British authorities followed standard patterns of Anglo-German recruitment when they appointed the university-trained brothers, the geographers Hermann and Robert and the geologist Adolph Schlagintweit.Footnote ⁶² After it had been established that no Company officer in India could be spared from military duty to complete the assignment, the brothers were tasked with completing a series of surveys in the Indian subcontinent.Footnote ⁶³ They had already proven their physical endurance, expeditionary experience, and writing skills through several excursions into the German and Swiss Alps from the mid-1840s to mid-1850s. The brothers developed an international reputation (albeit not uncontested) as physical geographers in the spirit of Humboldt.Footnote ⁶⁴ Their Alpine treatises quickly attracted the latter's attention, and Hermann and Adolph left Munich in 1849 to pursue their habilitation in the mecca of geographical sciences in German-speaking Europe: Berlin.Footnote ⁶⁵ There, with Humboldt's strong prompting, the idea of an Indian and Himalayan voyage soon took shape. The old mentor wanted the brothers to act as his auxiliary observers in the Himalayas and to enrich existing museum collections in Prussia.Footnote ⁶⁶ The expedition was to be carried out using Prussian funding exclusively, without the backing of the East India Company. Yet in 1852, the brothers’ first attempt to realize a large-scale scientific expedition to South and High Asia failed spectacularly. It fell victim to the tendency at the time towards knowledge specialization. When Adolph and Hermann applied to the king for state money to pursue studies in ‘geology’ and various other fields of ‘physical geography’ in the Himalayas, an expert consultant in the discipline of mineralogy from Berlin University, Christian Samuel Weiss, rejected their proposal for its failure to identify a sufficiently narrow scientific agenda. This focus, he believed, was imperative to justify such a large public outlay.Footnote ⁶⁷ This rejected proposal would have resulted in a very different enterprise to that organized later under the aegis of the British.

Not long afterwards, Humboldt learned from his contacts in London about a sudden vacancy in a project to conduct a magnetic survey of the Indian peninsula, which had been launched in 1846 with the backing of the EIC and the Royal Society.Footnote ⁶⁸ Through a diplomatic masterstroke, Humboldt and the Schlagintweits used the opening created by the unexpected death of the project's leader to turn British India into their promised land. The Prussian king Frederick William IV promised his enthusiastic support, hoping, not least, to advance his prestige as a patron of the sciences and to enrich museological collections in his state. The Prussian consul in London, Bunsen, arranged meetings and soon worked out initial agreements with the Royal Society to have the Schlagintweits considered for the position.Footnote ⁶⁹ The EIC was the primary sponsor, but they also received support from the Prussian and (in the case of Robert) Bavarian monarchs. The stakes of this appointment were so high that Hermann and Adolph gave up lecturing positions (at the universities of Berlin and Munich respectively) to take a shot at elevating themselves—if everything worked in their favour—to the same society as the greatest travellers of their time.

But this ambition would first require that the Company's limited commission—to complete the geomagnetic survey of India as part of Britain's global ‘Magnetic Crusade’—be transformed and expanded upon at once. Through clever negotiations with the Court of Directors, which were responsible for Company interests in natural riches, the brothers significantly widened the scope of their mission to include global physical geography, large-scale climatology, and resource identification in India and the trans-Himalayas. The expedition now took on Humboldtian proportions. To formally advise the brothers on their diverse activities, the botanist and experienced Indian traveller Joseph Hooker was appointed to a subcommittee formed by the Royal Society in March 1854; he was joined by the evolutionary scientist Charles Darwin and the military engineer Edward Sabine, an influential Royal Society man. Hooker immediately warned of, as he saw it, the Schlagintweits’ disciplinary overreach. He cautioned in a critical commentary to Sabine that the Schlagintweits’ revised mission statement encompassed ‘a programme of at least 8 years work’ for the brothers ‘& a staff of assistants, & which will require a much greater outlay than the E.I. Company will probably be prepared to allow, both for instruments & travelling schemes’.Footnote ⁷⁰ Some British observers in India, such as George Buist, an important scientist, collector, and journalist, shared Hooker's concerns. After Buist met and hosted the Schlagintweits in Bombay (Mumbai) in late 1854, he predicted that ‘Their mission will prove a complete failure.’Footnote ⁷¹ Buist added in correspondence to the RGS secretary that the ‘Schlagintweits have done John Company beautifully … when they were here they did not seem to understand the use of half their instruments, and if they carried out their observations with the minuteness they had proposed, the Century would have been completed before the work is finished.’Footnote ⁷² London's Athenaeum had already published a piece that urged a ‘re-consideration’ of their appointment, stating that ‘we have a right to protest against foreign diplomatic influence being brought to bear for the purpose of forcing strangers over the heads of Englishmen more distinguished for their attainments than the new comers’.Footnote ⁷³

Yet, owing to Humboldt's strong campaigning, the well-informed opposition of Joseph Hooker and other British scientists was overruled. The breadth of the Schlagintweits’ planned enquiries was reflected in the list of over 200 modern scientific instruments that they took with them.Footnote ⁷⁴ They gained special training in these instruments at the Kew observatory, and some of the instruments were specifically calibrated for the Indian climate in Paris. To ignite public attention in France, the brothers presented a letter and gifts to Emperor Napoleon III, and they aroused the interest of Parisian geographers with lectures and reports. Through these reports, they managed to present their enterprise, in front of their French peers at least, as being driven exclusively by the advancement of disinterested knowledge.Footnote ⁷⁵

The Schlagintweit mission in colonial India: infrastructures and cooperation

While the Schlagintweits’ ambitious agenda was sanctioned several months before departure, their submitted ‘list of proposed operations’ only partly reflected the extent of what the German scientists ultimately carried out in Asia. The agreement with the Court of Directors in London included undertaking observations with regard to natural history (from meteorology and zoology to geology, including the study of coal deposits) and palaeontology.Footnote ⁷⁶ However, this agreement entirely left out the study of the human and cultural worlds of South Asia. In order to rectify this omission, the Schlagintweits again altered the nature of their mission once they landed in Bombay in October 1854. The experience of overseas travel and cultural encounters led immediately to a significant broadening of their interests and spurred a number of disciplinary transgressions. At their port of arrival, the brothers were already devoting considerable amounts of time to racial studies and cultural ethnography.Footnote ⁷⁷ Their project came to constitute an early example of comparative physical anthropology. It comprised the systematic accumulation of detailed observations and artefacts from local populations to identify different racial and confessional types—fields of enquiry not previously sanctioned by their imperial sponsors. Out of these amateur interests, the brothers produced an acclaimed series of 275 plaster ‘ethnographic heads’ that were believed to capture ethnic diversity across South and High Asia. These were, in the words of Britain's leading anthropometrist Joseph Barnard Davis, ‘by far the most important contribution ever made to Indian Ethnology’.Footnote ⁷⁸ To complement the plastered faces, hands, and feet of indigenous models, the Schlagintweits measured the bodily proportions and physical strength of 730 South Asian individuals, testing their muscles by means of a spring scale.Footnote ⁷⁹ While their photographs of different religious groups, craftsmen and craftswomen, and hired Indian staff lacked the systematic focus of later racial surveys, such as the People of India (1868–75), the brothers clearly also sought to document ethnic variety through this relatively new medium.Footnote ⁸⁰

The spaces in which the Schlagintweits conducted their racial ethnographies varied, but colonial prisons were a favoured site, to which they were able to secure full access. In the confined spaces of prisons, diversity was concentrated in one place. The brothers photographed a series of male and female convicts, some of them bound in ropes.Footnote ⁸¹ They took extensive measurements of inmates while prison staff helped fill out their pre-printed lists. To acquire human body parts and entire skeletons for racial studies in Europe, the brothers relied on their contacts with Indian and European doctors in hospitals.Footnote ⁸² They also plundered tombs for the human remains of Indian ‘tribes’ and ‘of those nations which bury, such as the Mussulmen and the Buddhists in Tibet’.Footnote ⁸³ As contractual employees of the Company, their privileges and rights within Company territories were so extensive that they were even entitled ‘to officially press [porters] into service, as in the case of military marches’.Footnote ⁸⁴ For those forced to join their mission, it certainly made little difference if these travellers were of German or British origin as the brothers were identified with British power. A local perspective on the brothers’ multifarious activities in the field demonstrates that they were not, as has often been represented, free-roaming, independent observers of Indian natural history and cultural and social mores, or avid but entirely autonomous collectors of large sets of data. On the contrary, their work was strongly guided by their need to negotiate access and rights with Company officials and medical and technical staff.

The brothers often travelled on separate routes to maximize the area of investigation. Each of them then formed an expeditionary party that must be imagined to have been a highly connected, mobile laboratory that maintained links and exchanges with outside agents and institutions. For one thing, the brothers had to have their routes and plans sanctioned by British authorities—together with an increase in the salaries of their South Asian staff for difficult legs of the journey or high mountain passages.Footnote ⁸⁵ During negotiations with the governor-general in Calcutta in early 1855, the brothers agreed to compile a series of field reports that were to be published in the journal of the venerable Asiatic Society of Bengal. This, too, required close communication and cooperation with external agencies in India. One striking example of this cooperation was the fact that their data and field sketches were quickly transformed into more refined visual products by Indian draughtsmen and European cartographers employed at the offices of the surveyor-general in Dehra Dun and Calcutta. While the brothers were still on the march, maps and cross-sections of important rivers, based on their newest surveys and observations, already adorned their published reports.Footnote ⁸⁶ This co-production of scientific output between moving expeditions and key sedentary centres of colonial surveying and cartography shows how the Schlagintweit mission was realized within a tight network of service points that formed part of British India's scientific infrastructure. The matrix of institutions and sites of learning which assisted their fieldwork and reports resists any ex-post distinction between European ‘centres’ and merely auxiliary colonial ‘peripheries’ in the making of European science in the subcontinent.Footnote ⁸⁷

Indeed, there was a volume of information and materials travelling in both directions: the brothers also frequently received input in the form of replacement instruments, weaponry, and the most recent British observations, cartographic depictions, and political intelligence which helped inform their future itineraries and objectives. The travelling brothers were also provided with letters of introduction to various Indian states as well as requests for protection, along with scientific instructions, route descriptions, and skilled personnel from various colonial institutions.Footnote ⁸⁸ That is, a sizeable number of trained Indian draughtsmen and European officers were formally ordered by the Quartermaster General offices in Madras and Bombay to accompany the Schlagintweits on their journeys. Among them was the British Captain Adams who had taken charge of the deputy assistant Quartermaster General's office at Mooltan in 1853 and thus came from a military background with substantial survey experience.Footnote ⁸⁹ Near the start of their mission, he was ordered to assist Hermann for the remaining time of his service in India. Similarly, the brothers recruited a Muslim writer and draughtsman from Madras, introduced by the brothers as ‘Abdul’, from within the British colonial administration. Abdul temporarily abandoned his position as ‘assistant surveyor in the office of the Quarter Master General’ of Madras to assist the Schlagintweits from February 1855 onwards.Footnote ⁹⁰

The realization of the brothers’ ambitious programme depended furthermore on close cooperation with the accumulated archives of the British in India. Given the comparatively short period they spent in each region (and in Asia as a whole), the brothers needed access to commensurate historical statistics and observations going back several years to identify recurrent climatic patterns. For this purpose, they were presented with a rare set of government observations and statistics on Indian meteorology by the ‘first secretary of the Medical Department of the Indian Army’.Footnote ⁹¹ The brothers also managed to mobilize various British officers, naturalists, surgeons, and even political Residents to record different natural forces and phenomena during their time in India, from stations deep in the Himalayas across the Indian plains to the coastlines, and even during Company servants’ return voyages to Britain around the Cape of Good Hope.Footnote ⁹²

The systematic outsourcing of the recording of observations and the securing of material samples deeply integrated the Schlagintweits into the formal structures and scientific networks of colonial rule.Footnote ⁹³ Their extensive use of colonial data, such as topographical coordinates or climatic registers, demonstrates that the brothers were relying on scientific activities that were happening outside their own travelling parties. For example, the second volume of the published Results, concerning the General Hypsometry of India, the Himalaya, and Western Tibet (1862), recorded the heights of almost 3,500 points ‘from the southern parts of Ceylon to the environs of Kashgar in Turkestan, and from the eastern boundaries of Assam to Singh’.Footnote ⁹⁴ However, the German travellers had determined only 1,113—less than a third—of these themselves. Their fourth volume on Indian climatology also built extensively on British records, as Hermann Schlagintweit made important use of them to identify suitable regions for white settlement, sanitaria, and troop stationing, and proposed, like other contemporaries, the establishment of an Indian Meteorological Department to colonial authorities in 1866, which was ultimately realized in 1875.Footnote ⁹⁵

As these and numerous other instances demonstrate, their mission was a profoundly imperial expedition in the sense that its raw data in several fields of enquiry were the result of collaborative efforts by different government branches, technical services, and scientific offices across the subcontinent. The British empire was thus much more than a passive backdrop for the scientific pursuits of these German travellers. In reality, the existing colonial infrastructure partly determined scientific pursuits, not least what natural forces and phenomena could be simultaneously measured and observed over very large distances. This was, however, key to better understand the variation of different physical forces, such as geomagnetic and meteorological patterns and anomalies.Footnote ⁹⁶ Indeed, progressive scientific endeavours subsumed under the umbrella of ‘Humboldtian science’ heavily depended on ‘the mobilization of symbolic and political resources which extended well beyond the realms of disinterested knowledge’.Footnote ⁹⁷

The Schlagintweits’ mission also needs to be placed within the diplomatic context of British India. While, for instance, the enigmatic Nepal was hermetically closed to European visitors, it took ‘two years’ of ‘diplomatic negotiations, very kindly entered into upon our behalf by the governor-general and Colonel Ramsay, British Resident in Kathmándu, that the Court of Nepal allowed’ at least one brother ‘to visit a portion of its territories’. Since the Nepalese officials perceived Hermann Schlagintweit as a British agent, he was welcomed at the border by a ‘guard of sepoys’ as his ‘constant companions, partly in the capacity of guides, but more especially for keeping watch upon my operations’.Footnote ⁹⁸ To allow for uninhibited travel, the Schlagintweits also struck generous financial agreements with the Government of India, and seemingly operated on almost ‘unlimited credit’. The staggering amounts spent during their three years in Asia—for the accumulation and transport of their vast collections; to pay for their large entourages of up to 100 attendants per brother; the costs of their own accommodation and travel; and, finally, to pay bribes, not least to border officials in order to visit a portion of the closed country of Tibet—ultimately amounted to £18,000 (roughly equivalent to £2,150,000 today). This liberal expenditure unsurprisingly provoked strong responses from less favoured British naturalists in Britain and India alike.Footnote ⁹⁹

When the Schlagintweits realized the staggering costs of their exploration, they adopted a strategy that would serve them for years to come: they started to play their British and German sponsors off against each other. This game depended, crucially, on the fact that the brothers knew that they possessed a monopoly on the communication with their benefactors: the Prussian Court and British officials never liaised directly with each other, and any information regarding the progress of their enterprise was mediated by the Schlagintweits. Their liminal position—as formal recruits of the East India Company, but with lasting loyalties and alliances to patrons in the German states—thus opened up a considerable space for manoeuvring and self-advancement. The opportunities to increase their personal benefits from the Anglo-German expeditionary venture were only amplified because there existed in India an alternative, non-British infrastructure, thanks to the presence of several other German naturalists, commercial companies, and consuls at crucial nodal points of trade and communication. The brothers relied on these substitute channels to obtain, among other things, additional financial sums in Asia, while deliberately excluding British authorities from such transactions. They used Humboldt in Berlin to propose to the Hohenzollern king in late 1856 that ‘Mr Kilbourn, the Prussian Consul at Calcutta, shall be authorized to pay a sum of 18,000 to 20,000 Thalers’ to keep them afloat. The brothers, however, immediately added that ‘We very much wish that the Prussian Consul shall be informed through direct communication from Berlin to Calcutta, and should not be notified through … India House in London.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The brothers’ unusual privileges and their excursions into sensitive frontier regions had already started to arouse suspicion in colonial circles and the Indian press. The Schlagintweits even informed their German sponsors that ‘it has often been stressed in newspapers that we are not Englishmen. Only very recently, there was a lot of nonsense in all newspapers about “our supposed meetings with Russian agents in Turkestan”.’

To secure future royal patronage from Prussia, the brothers made far-reaching promises about their plans for their vast collections of natural history and ethnography materials. While the acquisition and difficult transport of over 40,000 artefacts was paid for by the Company, the brothers insinuated ‘that it will be much easier for us to obtain a large part of our collections for Berlin’ if money was secretly channelled to them and hence the burden of expenses more equally shared. In reality, the brothers had by then already made plans to establish their own India Museum in the Prussian capital with half their collection; the other half was to go to the East India House Museum in London. They temporarily succeeded in displaying their Asiatic booty in Palace Monbijou in the heart of Berlin between 1857–60.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Fully conscious of the professional and financial opportunities their position as both insiders and outsiders provided them, the Schlagintweits cleverly played one side off against the other. They thus ultimately profited from the friction generated from negotiating with several sponsors at once, even in the face of public criticism; this demonstrates that friction was not necessarily the opposite of opportunity, but could be a part of it.

‘An ethnographic museum with living specimens’: the expedition's cultural encounters

The brothers had considerable scope to manipulate their connections with European patrons; in contrast, their position vis-à-vis the employed cohorts of indigenous aides in Asia was relatively more fragile and changed according to circumstances and political context. The brothers’ reliance on indigenous testimony would later expose them to significant criticism, even public ridicule, by metropolitan commentators.Footnote ¹⁰² While the Schlagintweits lorded it over their numerous assistants in Company-controlled terrains, the internal hierarchies of their transcultural expedition parties shifted markedly beyond the North Indian frontier, where the German explorers were deprived of much of their authority. Ignorant of the geographies and routes of Chinese Turkestan in Central Asia, the brothers were also at a loss as to how to organize the necessary supplies for the expedition themselves or how to choose and secure adequate disguises that were necessary to roam around hostile territories.Footnote ¹⁰³ The nature of their scientific programme as much as their personal aspiration to explore places partly unknown to Europeans called for a greater reliance on Asian assistants and guides than most Western travellers at the time would have been comfortable in acknowledging. While at times the brothers’ total dependence upon the guidance of mere strangers provoked conflict among members of their group—the Schlagintweits once openly threatened to ‘shoot’ a recruited caravan trader in Turkestan called Mohammad Amin ‘like a dog’ should he ever try to betray them—they ultimately had to accept the authority of temporary indigenous leaders and place their lives in the hands of strangers.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Indeed, when crossing barely inhabited regions in the Asian highlands, the penalty for failing to secure a knowledgeable guide who could decide on routes and provisions would have been fatal. The Schlagintweit enterprise thus challenges us to rethink the notion that the only ‘local’ indigenous knowledge that was of interest related merely to topographical lore and botanical classification. In fact, as accounts of their expedition make clear, securing experienced leaders could be literally a matter of life and death.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

The roles of South and Central Asian companions in the realization of the Schlagintweit enterprise far exceeded mere auxiliary tasks. In a striking number of transcultural exchanges, the brothers learned about local geographies, cultures, and languages from their contractual employees, and, in turn, taught a number of their assistants cartographic practices and the use of Western instruments. Some of their hired hands excelled to such degree that they were entrusted to take serial measurements at temporary observatories established along the way, a scientific assignment that could last for several months.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Other indigenous members of the expedition party left the brothers altogether to pursue independent survey missions and thus significantly widened the scope of operation of the entire project. It is indeed impossible to locate a clear centre of the ‘Schlagintweit expedition’ at most points in time. Rather, their enterprise consisted of a series of independent excursions undertaken by different brothers or their trusted employees, who all crisscrossed the subcontinent and High Asia with a web of distinct routes. This branching out is captured in the official cartography of their mission, in which ‘the separate marches of the establishment’ were clearly marked.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The parties only temporarily met up at predefined points of convergence to share their results, recalibrate their instruments, and decide on future itineraries—only to depart in different directions once again. Against Eurocentric readings of their mission, which marked the end of their enterprise with the departure of the brothers Hermann and Robert for Europe in the early summer of 1857, it is more apposite to follow the Schlagintweits’ own dating of their mission. They themselves took 1858 as the termination date, long after the two brothers were back in Europe. The reason for this was that they had paid and instructed several of their former companions to continue certain scientific observations and collect material artefacts until March the following year.

While the inner life of their expeditions was thus deeply marked by collaborative work, the transitory nature of the mission also meant that their Asian assistants were themselves valuable objects of enquiry. The extremely heterogeneous composition of the Schlagintweit camps presented fertile ground for religious, linguistic, and ethnographic investigations. And since the brothers’ companions and aides differed in each region, the expedition parties were themselves an ever-renewing source of local knowledge and languages. The Schlagintweits wrote, without exaggeration, that ‘[o]n one occasion our camp presented a most interesting variety of tribes and creeds, and for the time being might be almost said to form an ethnographical museum of living specimens’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The members of the group then conversed in 12 languages and followed six different religions. Even the bodies of some of their closest companions became the object of racial studies. Nicely illuminating the intricacy of mutual dependence and exploitation in their relations with their Asian intermediaries, the Schlagintweits also plastered the faces of some of their key aides, including that of the later famous Indian pundit no. 1, Nain Singh. His facial cast is the only surviving portrait of this most significant explorer of High Asia in the wake of the Great Indian Rebellion, when British authorities decided to send indigenous spies to map the uninhabitable regions of trans-Himalaya.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The Schlagintweits prominently acknowledged their partnership and, at times, complete dependence upon their recruited guides. In their published accounts, they also noted that whole passages of their oeuvre relied entirely on the observations of despatched Indian assistants, who had turned into explorers in their own right.Footnote ¹¹⁰ However, since the trustworthiness of a field observer depended heavily on his (and, much more infrequently, her) class, gender, race, and training, any acknowledgement of the vital indigenous contributions to the chest of data and collectibles provoked harsh responses by metropolitan gentlemen of science, and made the brothers vulnerable to charges that their accounts were less reliable.Footnote ¹¹¹ The brothers relegated the vital support of a long list of British Company men and former Indian travellers and naturalists to a mere footnote, but they dedicated several full pages at the start of their first published volume of the Results of a Scientific Mission to particular Asian members of their entourage. The brothers lauded the high moral character, trustworthiness, and observational skills of many of their former companions. This was a highly unusual gesture. However, the biographical accounts of key assistants can also be read as an attempt to anticipate metropolitan criticism of their reliance on potentially doubtful ‘native testimony’. As Felix Driver has suggested, ‘like experimenters faithfully describing their apparatus at the start of a laboratory report, the Schlagintweits were presenting for inspection the moral, racial and intellectual characteristics of their intermediaries. As instruments of science, the equipment had to be tested and calibrated, and any weaknesses examined, before an account could be given of the data collected in the field.’Footnote ¹¹²

British observers, however, scorned the Schlagintweits’ decision to portray their mission as a deeply collaborative and multinational enterprise: ‘there are actually biographical sketches, written in the most matter-of-fact style, of all the observers, interpreters, collectors and servants’.Footnote ¹¹³ A prominent review in the influential London Athenaeum likened these sketches to ‘the contents of the dirty pieces of paper which on our arrival at the Indian ports natives force into our hands, recommending their services as washermen, valets, or something worse’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In ‘giving the poor natives a character when they have none’, one critique concluded, the Schlagintweits had clearly violated accepted norms and scientific expectations of the time, as they threatened to erode the ideal image of the sovereign European traveller as perpetuated in the Victorian culture of exploration.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The mocked naivety of presenting their mission as a collective exercise, was, however, the least of the Schlagintweits’ problems, as much more serious accusations were voiced in British circles upon their return.

Imperial crisis and the role of ‘British’ science in India

India's diverse cultural and natural landscapes both attracted significant scientific attention and at the same time were also subject to a long-standing ‘political chauvinism’ that opposed opening-up the territories to outsiders.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Time and again, it was said that the glory of exploring and examining India's material and scientific riches should belong, above all, to the representatives of the ruling power. The British company surgeon Alexander Christie appealed to this sentiment in 1830 when he petitioned to be appointed official geologist in Madras. In referring to the earlier acclaimed Indian travels of the Frenchman Victor Jacquemont, the British candidate suggested that the EIC should take care that ‘the task of investigating the natural history of our Eastern possessions will not be entirely abandoned to foreigners’.Footnote ¹¹⁷

These controversies demonstrated the existence of an imagined link between the achievements of British science in India and Britain's imperial legitimacy. This connection was exposed at moments of crisis, when that very sense of entitlement to rule over South Asia was questioned—by both ‘mutinying’ Indian subjects and European observers alike.Footnote ¹¹⁸ These moments also revealed three different ways in which science functioned in the colonial contexts: the instrumental, the ornamental, and the symbolic.

While the practical benefits of scientific activity in India, including the classification of its material assets, or the completion of charts, maps, and social surveys, mostly reflected the strategic and profit-driven orientation of the East India Company, this powerful body also sought to project an image of itself as an enlightened patron of the arts and learned enquiry. However, such a display of ornamental largesse was, at least in part, an attempt to defend the EIC's political and commercial privileges, to shield itself from further government scrutiny and control, and to direct attention away from the Company's rapid and controversial military expansions in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries.Footnote ¹¹⁹ But many British contemporaries also attached great symbolic meaning to the pursuit of science in the subcontinent, as it was seen as a form of imperial legitimation in the eyes of the ‘colonized’. British papers believed in the necessity of continuously demonstrating to the ‘native mind’, as they put it, ‘our superiority on which the Government of India by Great Britain is said to hang’.Footnote ¹²⁰ In view of this symbolic role that British science was expected to play in the subcontinent, the large presence of continental European foreigners in the Company's scientific service was seen as potentially damaging to the empire's legitimacy.

A more fundamental debate over the EIC's continued reliance on external specialists erupted around the Schlagintweits’ lucrative appointment. As we have seen, the brothers’ initial commission for a geomagnetic precision survey had quickly morphed into an impressive, perhaps unfeasible, combination of enquiries across different fields. Once in India, and through close exchange with colonial servants and leading surveyors, the brothers had furthermore decided to devote considerable attention to more practical concerns. Throughout their mission, they closely followed, for instance, the instructions which the deputy Indian surveyor-general Henry Thuillier provided to Company servants in his widely read and authoritative Manual of Surveying for India (first published 1851), paying particular attention to his instructions regarding the study of rivers for their potential as commercial arteries, depths, velocity, and navigability during different seasons, as potential sites of crossing, and so on.Footnote ¹²¹

Another example of the brothers’ pursuit of more instrumental colonial science and collecting was their accumulation of 1,200 samples of soils from various Asian regions and heights. These were of considerable value to the brothers’ benefactors in Britain. Scientists in London, under the guidance of the director of the East India House Museum, tested the quality of hundreds of samples to assess their agricultural potential. The aim was to gain insights into the potential expansion of flax, rice, wheat, indigo, tea, and cotton cultures in India. John Forbes Watson, the newly appointed ‘Reporter on the Products of India’ at the India Office, received the Gold Medal of the Colonial Exhibition in 1862 in London for their analysis, as the results gave important insights into extending fertile lands and improving the output of the colony.Footnote ¹²² Another noteworthy case in which ethnographic observations and commercial considerations colluded in their project were the unique collections of Asian textiles and papers the Schlagintweits acquired across India and the partly untapped export markets beyond the northern frontier. Bound together in nine volumes, Technical Objects from India and High Asia documented the peoples' habit of wearing different rustic or highly refined fabrics. The accompanying Prospectus explained how Britain could profit from identified trade opportunities when substituting the indigenous manufactures with industrial products. The Schlagintweits’ sample book showed European producers exactly what local societies in the trans-Himalayas ‘consider best suited for their climate and taste in reference to strength, texture and colour, and in what forms a cheaper and in consequence more generally used dress might be offered to the little cultivated tribes surrounding the Indian empire’.Footnote ¹²³

While the Schlagintweits had already expended extraordinary sums during their travels, the second—and no less expensive—act of such exploration schemes involved the careful ordering, analysis, and publication of the scientific results and museological artefacts in Europe. For this crucial step to secure public attention and scientific kudos in Victorian Britain, colonial India, and continental Europe, the Schlagintweits had to secure a second lavish contract from the East India Company. Hermann Schlagintweit therefore made the strategic decision to present their, in fact, extremely diverse scientific interests as being driven almost exclusively by considerations of material profit, opportunities for white settlement, and political and military usefulness to the Court of Directors in September 1857. This peculiar portrayal of their scientific mission as an allegedly purely imperial endeavour is captured in a petition to East India House, entitled ‘Practical Objects connected with the Researches of the MM. Schlagintweit, under the Orders of the Hon. Court of Directors’.Footnote ¹²⁴

The Schlagintweits’ noteworthy ethnographical observations and Oriental-humanistic scholarship in Asia were entirely left out, and the presentation of their results in their application—including every other branch of scientific activity, from botany and meteorology, to topographical surveys and geology—was geared towards colonial benefits. The submission thus perversely reduced their far-reaching pursuits in all of these realms to what they assumed the Company most valued. Their geological researches can be taken as pars pro toto. The Schlagintweits had collected numerous fossils when trying to determine the comparative age of the different sedimentary strata and to establish their order of superposition—all rather disinterested enquiries. For the purposes of the application, they now couched the rationale for these activities in instrumental terms: ‘The general practical results, everywhere indispensable, from geological researches, allow particularly brilliant hopes for India, where the riches of ores in the Himalayas, long expected, could be confirmed in numerous instances … Besides ores and coals … the determination of the best materials for roads and buildings may be mentioned.’Footnote ¹²⁵ The Schlagintweits had, in fact, visited different quarries for jade stone, had inspected diamond mines, and proven the existence of exploitable coal seams, yet these practical considerations had never determined their activities, as they implied in front of the Court. The brothers’ blunt and calculated alignment of their work with the Company's material interests ultimately secured them another round of significant financial patronage from the EIC in its final year of existence.Footnote ¹²⁶ Hermann's submission to the Company was part of a significant amount of evidence on the Schlagintweit mission, which stemmed from perceptibly self-serving, indeed self-aggrandising, lectures, memoranda, and notes where the implied audience of the material dominated the question of the accuracy of the brothers’ accounts.

However, these ingenious but self-serving German outsiders had by then accumulated enemies within East India House. The Schlagintweits’ secret submission was leaked to the British press. The Athenaeum, by now the central organ for debates over their case, smugly reprinted the entire ‘petition these gentlemen prefer to the India Company for more money, patronage, and power’.Footnote ¹²⁷ The submission quickly became critically discussed in numerous London journals, alongside a much-criticized lecture the brothers had presented to French geographers in Paris about their Asian feats in the autumn of 1857.Footnote ¹²⁸ The characterizations of the brothers’ expedition in their French lecture ignored several facts: that the expedition had ultimately been realized only through the extensive and close cooperation of the scientific institutions and services of colonial India, up to the level of the surveyor- and governor-general; that the expedition was deeply embedded within colonial structures; and that the brothers profited from the knowledge of previous British engagement with Indian natural history and ethnography. These aspects were all strikingly silenced in both their contract application and the presentation to French geographers. Both documents differed markedly in the way they presented their enterprise—as a completely disinterested scientific investigation (in the Paris lecture), on the one hand, and as a pragmatic effort focused on resource identification and exploitation, British commercial expansion, and white colonization (in their Company submission), on the other. Both accounts converged in their total lack of acknowledgement of British science and its long history and accumulated results in India.

A significant thrust of the ensuing British critique therefore was that the German explorers, in a sense, seemed to ‘colonize’ Indian territories by claiming scientific discoveries that British officers and men of science had long since established.Footnote ¹²⁹ As a derisive review of their travels remarked, the Schlagintweits

What explains the forcefulness of this and other British responses to what were, in actuality, partly pioneering excursions into High and Central Asia, and also ground-breaking climatological and geomagnetic results in the subcontinent, is the fact that the German explorers presented their findings during the most critical phase of the Great Indian Rebellion. In the autumn of 1857, Company rule in India was on the verge of collapse and the historical place and achievements of the British in India were being widely questioned.Footnote ¹³¹ While all parties to the war committed massacres during the Rebellion and its slow and violent suppression, science itself became a rhetorical battlefield on which to protect Britain's supposed imperial legitimacy. Indeed, long genealogies of British scientific triumphs in South Asia were presented as a comforting source of the confidence needed to continue colonial rule in the future. After all, it was claimed, ‘[o]ur scientific corps in India consists of men unequalled in their own studies and their own work […]. Their Trigonometrical Survey is one of the noblest scientific labours of our generation.’Footnote ¹³² Why, then, did the British imperial authorities adopt ‘the policy of engaging foreigners to do what they could have done so well?’ one author reproachfully asked about the Schlagintweits’ costly recruitment. Favouring continental personnel over British subjects seemed outright dangerous to the imperial project as a whole: ‘Is this the way to impress the native mind with the superiority of English intellect and with the justice of English rule?’Footnote ¹³³

The attempted exclusion of outsiders did not stop, however, on the level of rhetoric. While the Schlagintweits had for years visited and mingled among London's scientific establishment, the detachment of many British scientists from these controversial figures also meant their marginalization in higher circles of gentlemanly science. While the brothers had prepared for their Indian mission in London in 1854 and had met with a warm reception at the prestigious Athenaeum Club, their return to this haven of learned sociability was now frowned upon.Footnote ¹³⁴ Joseph Hooker, although a close correspondent of their mentor Humboldt, in particular criticized the Schlagintweits’ recent inclusion and sought to attack their status as gentlemen and as able scientists wherever he found an opportunity.Footnote ¹³⁵ He further disapproved of the Company's decision to give these foreigners access to collections previously acquired by British naturalists: ‘What have our public Scientific Establishments got for this Expenditure of £18000? &, what is worse, what have they not lost by the withdrawal of Every Shilling & Every Sympathy on the part of the Indian’ government from British travellers, ‘whose results are Either destroyed by neglect, or are now to be placed at the disposal of these men, who have not the feelings of gentlemen in such matters, & far less ability’.Footnote ¹³⁶

In response to accusations that the brothers pursued mercenary, corrupt strategies for self-enrichment and had added next to nothing to the advancement of science, the octogenarian Humboldt felt the need to defend their achievements in a number of interventions with leading British geographers. He even successfully urged the RGS president Roderick Murchison to include long, praising passages about their mission in his widely received annual address.Footnote ¹³⁷ This mediated recognition of their exploits in Britain in turn exposed Murchison himself to charges of having given undeserved praise to non-nationals and having ignored British exploratory triumphs of the past.Footnote ¹³⁸ Worse, those British men of science who had close connections with Humboldt and had supported the Schlagintweits’ mission from the start were now openly called upon to explain their actions in front of the tribunal of public opinion in the charged atmosphere of war. The insinuations of crooked diplomatic influences depriving deserving British men of plum positions were accompanied by calls for an official inquiry to throw light on the ‘scandal of this Schlagintweit affair’.Footnote ¹³⁹ In trying to break down long-established Anglo-German relations of trust with blatant charges of corruption and favouritism, it was even claimed in the press that the testimony of Britons such as the widely respected Royal Society man Edward Sabine, who had received—as was noted—‘Prussian decorations’ in the past, could not be believed.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

The frictions of transnational science that surfaced at this particular moment of political crisis were debated on the national stage both in Britain and Germany, yet they did not result in only negative consequences for the sojourners. In England, the Schlagintweit case created such a private and public stir precisely because their appointment was seen as the casus belli, as, at best, the endpoint of a wave of seemingly parasitic foreigners entering the country and its empire in search of well-funded positions. The German press, in turn, quickly picked up on the brothers’ defamations in no uncertain terms. While some journals suggested moderate voices should prevail, since ‘all national feeling should cease in the field of science’, most German newspapers soon adopted a bellicose rhetoric, too, seeking to debase British travellers and claiming German superiority in the field of overseas exploration.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Germany was faced with its own political divisions and relative industrial backwardness in comparison with Britain, the leading nineteenth-century power. But the proclaimed global achievements and international renown of ‘German science’ became a unifying trope for contemporary Germans, in which a national hubris became ever more strongly expressed.

In the escalating war of words between British critics and German supporters of the brothers, the former ultimately regarded the Schlagintweit mission as the ‘grossest imposture that has ever been … dignified with the name of science’, while the latter interpreted it as one of the ‘laurel wreaths of German science’ [Ruhmeskränze deutscher Wissenschaft]—as a shining and eternal example of the claimed supremacy of German exploration of extra-European lands.Footnote ¹⁴² In 1859, while the brothers were being viciously attacked from different quarters in England, they received the Gold Medal of the Parisian Geographical Society for their Himalayan explorations, its highest honour. In the same year, the Bavarian king knighted them. This honour was purportedly for their outstanding scientific deeds. However, the correspondence between the Schlagintweits, Bavarian officials, and King Maximilian II leading up to their ennoblement tells a different story.Footnote ¹⁴³ The documents show that the brothers used Anglo-German friction over the fate of their rich material collections for their personal advancement. Specifically, they were able to persuade the king that receiving this distinction would improve their negotiating position in London. Being elevated to the rank of noblemen, the brothers argued, would improve their chances of convincing the British authorities to allow them to send larger parts of their collections to Bavarian museums.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ This again points to how the brothers were able to manufacture opportunities out of the multinational tensions inherent to their endeavour.

Clearly, while the brothers’ scientific accomplishments were ambivalent, combining important findings in certain fields with rather wasteful pursuits in others, their prominent mission—partly undertaken and publicly discussed amid the heat of the Indian Rebellion—showed that contemporaries drew very different meanings from such exploratory schemes.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ Critics and supporters either used their case to consolidate their own status as expert advisers in distinct branches of science (as did Hooker in the realm of philosophical botany), to attack the perceived injustice of the Company system of support (Nathaniel Wallich, Hooker, and others), to defend the merits of Humboldtian, interdisciplinary enquiry at a time of growing specialization in various fields of study (Humboldt himself), or to create—in the figures of the controversial explorers—icons of an increased German presence in the extra-European world (the German press). The latter indeed boasted over and over again that German travellers would not only enhance British, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Russian investigations of new worlds, but would excel to such degree that these other powers would have to stand in the shadows of German overseas achievements: ‘We do not possess one foot of land in foreign continents, but we know those more thoroughly than any other people.’Footnote ¹⁴⁶ In unfolding a global panoply of German mastery of the world through science, the journal continued:

The memory of German explorers and scientists in foreign imperial service could thus be turned to very different purposes. Whereas the British press defended the historical achievements in India of British scientists and surveyors, living and dead, against the preposterous claims of ‘discovery’ by recruited outsiders, it thus portrayed science as service, and science as national sacrifice. The authority of British science, in this view, justified their civilizing mission and colonial rule. In contrast, a growing colonial movement in the German lands since at least the 1840s was soon to claim the suffering, hardships, and breakthroughs made by Germans for overseas exploration as Germany's own. The exploratory feats by their countrymen, even when accomplished in the service of a foreign power, now seemed to justify Germany's own colonial ambitions and bolstered their claims to various rights overseas. Adolph Schlagintweit, the sharpest mind of the Bavarian trio, who had personally assisted Humboldt with his Cosmos, never returned from Asia, as he was captured as an agent of the Company and beheaded by a Muslim warlord in the central Asian town of Kashgar in 1857. His tragic fate, equally bemoaned in both countries, was invoked for German political ends: when Formosa (Taiwan) was opened up to Western science and colonization in the late 1860s, the rallying cry went out: ‘who is better qualified to exploit it than the German people, which has long ago acquired the entitlement to its own colonial possessions with the health and life of his most noble sons’.Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In creating a pantheon of national heroes of science, it was indeed asserted that: