CLASSIFY AND CONTROL COLONIAL SCIENTIFIC POLICY

After the first decades of the 20th century, where the investment focused on geographic and cartographic knowledge of borders and their rectifications, the Cartography Commission was extinguished in 1936. In its place, the Board of Geographical Missions and Colonial Investigations was created to promote the so-called “occupation colonies”, promoting science to improve knowledge and exploit the natural and human resources of colonising territories. Allying with universities, the Board has encouraged studies in different scientific areas over several decades, from Botany to Zoology and Anthropology, from Hydrography to Pedology and Agronomy, promoting the development of extractive sectors aimed at foreign trade.

A profusion of research centres, organisations, collaborators, and publications appears, trying to meet international demands and pressures. Scientific missions were an indispensable means of this process.

Colonial science thus becomes an instrument of power and domination.