Overview
Jessica Ratcliff works on the history of science and technology. She specializes in social and material approaches to the history of knowledge, with a focus on Britain and its former empire from the 17th through the 19th centuries.
Her new book, Monopolizing Knowledge: The East India Company and Britain’s Second Scientific Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2025) is about the East India Company’s role in the growth of science in Britain. In the nineteenth century, an ambitious new library and museum for Asian arts, sciences and natural history was established in the City of London, within the corporate headquarters of the East India Company. Funded with taxes from British India and run by Company employees, the library-museum was located thousands of miles away from the taxpayers who supported it and the land from which it grew. Professor Ratcliff documents how the growth of science at the Company depended upon its sweeping monopoly privileges and its ability to act as a sovereign state in British India. She further explores how “Company science” became part of the cultural fabric of science in Britain and examines how it fed into Britain’s dominance of science production within its empire, as well as Britain’s rising preeminence on the scientific world stage.
Prior to 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. 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.
Currently Professor Ratcliff is working on two new areas of research. One involves a study of information technologies and cultures at the India Office (the state successor to the East India Company) in London, c. 1860-1960. In the other, Professor Ratcliff is examining how recent IT developments (particularly generative AI, gaming and digitization) are reshaping the work of the historian and society's relationship to the past.
For further information on Professor Ratcliff’s 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
“Accounting for Empire: Statistics, Slide Rules and Imperial Self-Knowledge” in Scientific Instruments as Cultural Artifacts (Yale University Press)
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)
