Imperial History, Science and Power: The Anglo-Brazilian Border Dispute

ABSTRACT This article deals with science as a vehicle able for producing a truth speech on the diplomatic dispute over geographical boundaries between different nations in the nineteenth century. The change of status that science acquired since the eighteenth up to the nineteenth century as a tool for conflict resolution is specifically analyzed in the case of the Anglo-Brazilian dispute of Pirara, the borderland between Roraima and British Guiana, a meeting point between the Essequibo River basin and the Amazon Basin. In the frontier dispute with Brazil, English science produced a very well-drawn cartographic mapping, constructor of a discourse of the true about the territory. The graphic representation, more than the human occupation, had legitimizing function of the territorial possession in the judicial dispute of Pirara. The discourse of the scientific authority was established from the cartographic work produced by Robert Schomburgk (1840; 1841; 1843), whose passage through the region could be defined as the point of inflection in this dispute.