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.
Workshop 1
Our first workshop took place in February 2026. Find out more on this Research Project page and read the workshop outputs in our Whose Science? Whose Story? workshop pamphlet:
Workshop 2
Our second workshop took place in June 2026. Devina Dimri reflects on her discussions with fellow researchers, and shares her most meaningful moments:
By Devina Dimri
At the second Colonial Standards workshop, Tools and Measures of the Trade, we were invited to think with museum objects.
The workshop encouraged us to see measurement and standardisation as social and political practices:
- What does it mean to measure land, trade, value, distance or accuracy?
- Who decides what counts as a correct measurement?
- And what is left out when museums organise knowledge through these categories?
One of the most valuable aspects of the workshop was the way participants collectively questioned museum interpretation.
During a discussion about a coin linked to the East India Company or Zanzibar, participants began doing provenance research in real time. One person recognised the East India Company connection, another translated markings on the coin, while others questioned whether the date or attribution attached to the object was accurate.
It was a small but powerful example of what can happen when interpretation is opened up. Expertise did not belong only to the museum or the object label.
East India Company Coin Weight for Copper Half Pice, Bombay, 1791. Inv: 15046
The workshop helped me think more deeply about measurement itself.
Measurement, usually understood as units and precision, is also tied to control. Its systems have never been neutral and have obscured other ways of knowing and valuing the world.
Conversations during the workshop about counting on the creases of our fingers, measuring garments using handspans, estimating ingredients by eye while cooking and older South Asian systems such as the ratti (traditionally used to weigh gemstones) reminded me that measurement is also rooted in everyday practice and embodied knowledge.
These forms of measurement may not appear in museum records or official archives, but they remain important ways of making sense of the world.
The workshop also made me think critically about the language of community participation.
Projects like this often refer to “the community” as if it is a single, unified group. However, everyone in the room had different relationships to South Asia, Britain, museums and colonial histories.
Community is not a monolith and participation alone cannot resolve existing inequalities.
There was also a visible hierarchy between the museum and participants, and between institutional research and lived experience.
The project invited us to contribute to a Reference Guide to the Missing, an ambitious and generous idea.
But co-authorship is complicated. Who decides what enters the guide? What forms of contribution are recognised as knowledge? Reflections, drawings, performances, emotions, silences and disagreements are all reactions. They, however, are not all equally easy to record within institutional outputs.
This is where I felt both the promise and the tension of the workshop most strongly.
We were encouraged to explore alternative knowledge systems, while still largely working through museum and academic frameworks.
A decolonial approach cannot simply add more voices to an existing structure; it must also question how that structure shapes what can be said, recorded, valued, and remembered.
For me, the workshop’s most meaningful moments were not ones of consensus but of uncertainty.
When participants questioned ‘accuracy’, when a coin’s provenance became a collective investigation, and when participants asked what would happen after the project ended.
These moments showed that measurement is not only about standards. It is also about power: who measures, who is measured, and what forms of knowledge become measurable.
Perhaps the Reference Guide to the Missing should not only document what is absent from museum labels, but also what is difficult to capture in museum records at all: uncertainty, disagreement, memory, and the feeling of encountering an object that both does and does not belong to you.
These experiences remind us that standards are never purely technical.
