‘A valuable contribution to a growing literature on food science as well as to a more established set of studies of imperial science and medicine. Malhotra’s approach is fresh, his topic is fascinating and he is focused on figures who have thus far received scant attention. It’s likely to be of interest well beyond history: to policy makers, nutrition and foodways scholars, in science studies and STS.’

Philippa Levine, Queen Mary University of London

‘Imperial Science is a fascinating read. It provides a compelling narrative of colonial science in British India and its links with wider popular science movements in the early to the mid-twentieth century. Malhotra effortlessly melds interdisciplinary methodologies with transnational perspectives and offers a scholarly and engaging narrative of imperialism and agronomy, diet cultures and institutionalized sciences, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.’

Nandini Bhattacharya, University of Houston

‘Ashok Malhotra’s manuscript represents an original and fascinating contribution to the fields of history of science, environmental history and cultural/postcolonial studies. By exploring the intersection of British imperial science in India and the twentieth-century organic movement, this fine storyteller gives a textured sense of the period and the key characters under study. His book breaks new ground by demonstrating how colonial agricultural and nutritional research was selectively interpreted and deployed by organic farming and soil protection movements in Britain and the US’

Claire Chambers, University of York

‘A brilliant, sophisticated and probing account of the colonial pre-history of Anglo-American ecological research and proselytism. Ashok Malhotra’s highly readable volume is an important intervention in global food studies and the history of sustainability, demonstrating the imperial dimension of nutritional and environmental science.’

Miles Taylor, Humboldt University of Berlin