Field Work

For decades now, scholars specializing in imperial history and decolonization have traced the relationships between the social sciences and European imperial control. 1 Indeed, many scholars working in postcolonial veins now take for granted the deep connections between empire and forms of knowledge production and knowledge legitimization.Imperial control over territory provided privileged spaces and populations for the practice of social science in disciplines such as ethnography, anthropology, sociology, demography, and archaeology to gather data and artifacts, to test hypotheses.One of the key factors that facilitated early twentieth-century British archaeologists' discoveries in Egypt, for instance, was the direct control that British imperial sponsors could exert to support and protect a given excavation.It was Napoleon's French 1 A non-exhaustive list: