Whose Science? Whose Story?
Colonial Standards is a UKRI-funded research project supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC).
The project explores how systems of measurement, surveying, and standardisation—often developed in colonial contexts—continue to shape scientific collections, museum practices, and everyday life today. Working collaboratively with communities, researchers, and practitioners in the UK and India, the project asks how museums can better recognise multiple forms of expertise and knowledge, and how collections can be reinterpreted in ways that are accurate, ethically grounded, and publicly meaningful.
A key starting point for the museum’s work is the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India, a vast nineteenth-century project that set out to map the subcontinent using precise instruments, measurements, and calculations.
The History of Science Museum holds significant collections connected to this period, including surveying instruments and related materials that reflect how scientific authority and accuracy were established through measurement.
What is often missing from these collections, however, is the wider context: the people, practices, and consequences connected to this work, and the longer legacies of colonial surveying for land, governance, and everyday life. Colonial Standards begins from the collection and asks how these objects can be understood more fully by bringing historical context, lived experience, and multiple perspectives into conversation.
