The Alchemy of Empire unravels the non-European origins of Enlightenment science. Focusing on the mundane materials of empire-building, this study traces the history of substances like mud, mortar, ice, and paper, as well as forms of knowledge like inoculation. It demonstrates how East India Company employees deployed the field of alchemy in order to make sense of the new worlds they confronted, often resorting to analogy as reason when analysis failed. Rajani Sudan questions the assumptions of the Enlightenment developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focusing on the European notion that