Overview
Jessica Ratcliff works on the history of science and technology. Her research aims to improve our understanding of the political, economic and cultural aspects of scientific and technological change. She specializes in Britain and its former empire from the 17th through the 19th centuries.
Professor Ratcliff’s most recent book is Monopolizing Knowledge: The East India Company and Britain’s Second Scientific Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2025.) In it, she traces the changing practices of knowledge accumulation and management at the British East India Company, focusing on the Company’s library, museum and colleges in Britain. Although these institutions were in Britain, they were funded by taxes from British India and they housed, so it was argued, the “national” collections of British India. The book examines how these institutions emerged from the Company’s unique form of monopoly-based colonial capitalism. It then argues that this “Company science” would go on to shape and eventually become absorbed into Britain’s public (i.e. state-funded) science in the later nineteenth century.
“This compelling, meticulously researched account is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand today's informational monopolies and their genesis in the practices of colonial capitalism, informational accumulation and knowledge prospecting enacted by the world's first truly global corporation: the East India Company.”
Bronwyn Parry - King's College London
For more reviews and info, please see the book’s website.
Available online via Cambridge Core.
Professor Ratcliff is also the author of The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016 [2008]), (see the book’s website here) which examines the technology, culture and politics of scientific expeditions and argues for the critical role of the British Admiralty in the growth of science in late-Victorian Britain.
Professor Ratcliff is also interested in finding new ways for history workers to engage with and influence current trajectories of IT development (generative AI, gaming and museum/archive digitization), as well as in evaluating how these developments are reshaping society's relationship to the past.
Before joining Cornell, Professor Ratcliff was an Assistant Professor at Yale-NUS College in Singapore, and, before that, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois. Prior to her academic career, she worked as a programmer during the first internet boom. Her research has been supported by the University of Sydney, the Huntington Library, the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science, the National Maritime Museum London, the Singapore Ministry of Education, and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ.
For further information on Professor Ratcliff’s writing, teaching and research, please see the CV listed here.
Publications
Books
Monopolizing Knowledge: The East India Company and Britain’s Second Scientific Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2025)
The Transit of Venus Enterprise in Victorian Britain
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016 [2008])
Forthcoming / in progress
"Artificial Histories: From Empires and Museums to Big Tech and AI" (essay draft)
"The Geography of Membership at the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1825-1925" (essay draft)
"Colonial Science and Frontier Capitalism in Early Colonial Singapore" (essay draft)
“Colonial Political Economies of Information: The East India Company and the Growth of Science in Britain” in The Routledge Handbook of the History of Information" (forthcoming)
“Accounting for Empire: Statistics, Slide Rules and Imperial Self-Knowledge” in Scientific Instruments as Cultural Artifacts (Yale University Press) (under review)
Peer-reviewed articles and book chapters
“Hand-in-Hand with the Survey: Surveying and the Accumulation of Knowledge Capital at India House during the Napoleonic Wars.” Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science 73 (2) (May 2019)
“Travancore’s Magnetic Crusade: Geomagnetism and the Geography of Scientific Production in a Princely State.” British Journal for the History of Science (June 2016)
“The Great Data Divergence: Global History of Science within Global Economic History” in Global Scientific Practice during the Age of Revolutions (Dan Rood and Patrick Manning, eds., University of Pittsburgh Press) (2016)
“The East India Company, the Company’s Museum, and the Political Economy of Natural History in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Isis 107(3) (2016)
“’Art to Cheat the Common-Weale’: Inventors, Projectors and Patentees in English Satire, c. 1630-80.” Technology and Culture 53(2) (2012)
“Models, Metaphors, and the Transit of Venus in Victorian Britain” Special issue: “The astronomical event of the century? Social history of the transits of Venus, 1874-1882.” Cahiers François Viète 11—12 (2007)
“Samuel Morland and his Calculating Machines c. 1666: The Early Career of a Courtier-Inventor in Restoration London.” British Journal for the History of Science 40(2) (2007)
