Clare Anderson

Clare Bradford Anderson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Harvard University.  Her Ph.D. dissertation blends history of science, environmental history, and the variegated histories of the British Empire to describe the role of the British Colonial Office in restructuring British ideas about tropical space between 1870 and 1935.  In particular, she argues that turn-of-the-century proto-agricultural development schemes—promoted at various levels of the Colonial Office bureaucracy by scientists, politicians, and businessmen—played an outsized role in the new vision of tropical empire.  Nature and people in tropical colonies became problems to be managed for future imperial prosperity.  Clare is interested in how these late imperial ideas reverberate in tropical conservation institutes and development policy today.

Clare’s dissertation is based on two years of research in twelve archives, across Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.  Her research has been funded by the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies, the Harvard Asia Center, the Harvard Mittal South Asia Institute, and the Harvard GSAS Lee Whittinghill Samuelson Traveling Fellowship program.  Previously, she earned a B.A. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Pomona College.