the idea that 'science' is an unmitigated and inherent social good---a politically neutral and universally beneficial process of accumulating knowledge---is wildly ahistorical and dangerously, wilfully ignorant of the role that science and its purveyors / practitioners have played in imperial and colonial expansion. benedict anderson went so far as to say that colonial medicine was better understood as a discourse of settlement than one of health promotion, & we can see this quite easily in, for example, french doctors' use of the nostalgia diagnosis to guide colonial policy in algeria in the 1830s, attempting to securely settle a french population there; or in the development of a science of 'water cures', spa treatments considered to mitigate the insalubrious effects of foreign (particularly tropical) environments, for which the french army by the 1890s granted routine medical leave because the 'health' of its soldiers was not a matter of individual interest but a state resource.
but medicine is in many ways an easy case when it comes to the relationship between science and the state; all too often we still seem reluctant to acknowledge, for example, the pursuit of economic botany and animal / plant breeding in the early modern period as contributors to discourses of acclimatisation and proto-eugenics, sciences that were given state financial support on these utilitarian grounds & not for any high-minded general pursuit of 'knowledge'; or the development of navigational instruments and knowledge from the 14th century or so onward as a project explicitly funded and intended to permit faster, cheaper, more reliable colonial exploration and travel; or the sheer amount of research in physics and chemistry that has been and is devoted to weapons development or natural resource extraction; or the promise of space travel as a further possibility for obtaining raw materials as well as for settlement---often marketed in terms and visual rhetoric explicitly comparing the 'space colony' to its terrestrial precursor: 'the final frontier', depicted as both lush tropical paradise & as rugged american west, waiting to be conquered & brought to heel.
i am of course not hostile to 'science' in any totalising way; this would be as indefensible a position as the automatic 'defence' of all such practices; they're not monolithic or intrinsically doomed to serve state interests. but it is simply irresponsible to pretend that the scientific inquiry into something---describing it, measuring it, taxonomising it---is inherently a social good, or that the pursuit of 'knowledge' is ever an apolitical endeavour. knowing, seeing, & measuring the world grant immense power; states and empires know this. scientific inquiry is not tangentially related to imperial and colonial expansion; often it is a critical piece of the machinery by which these processes occur. wilful ignorance of this fact in favour of an optimistic conception of science as a universal social good is not just inaccurate but propagandistic & an advancement of state & imperial interests.
