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When Science Became Western: Historiographical Reflections Author(S): by Marwa Elshakry Source: Isis, Vol When Science Became Western: Historiographical Reflections Author(s): By Marwa Elshakry Source: Isis, Vol. 101, No. 1 (March 2010), pp. 98-109 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/652691 . Accessed: 01/04/2013 12:49 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Isis. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 160.39.148.241 on Mon, 1 Apr 2013 12:49:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions When Science Became Western Historiographical Reflections By Marwa Elshakry* ABSTRACT While thinking about the notion of the “global” in the history of the history of science, this essay examines a related but equally basic concept: the idea of “Western science.” Tracing its rise in the nineteenth century, it shows how it developed as much outside the Western world as within it. Ironically, while the idea itself was crucial for the disciplinary formation of the history of science, the global history behind this story has not been much attended to. Drawing on examples from nineteenth-century Egypt and China, the essay begins by looking at how international vectors of knowledge production (viz., mission- aries and technocrats) created new global histories of science through the construction of novel genealogies and through a process of conceptual syncretism. Turning next to the work of early professional historians of science, it shows how Arabic and Chinese knowledge traditions were similarly reinterpreted in light of the modern sciences, now viewed as part of a diachronic and universalist teleology ending in “Western science.” It concludes by arguing that examining the global emergence of the idea of Western science in this way highlights key questions pertaining to the relation of the history of science to knowledge traditions across the world and the continuing search for global histories of science. HE CONTINGENCY OF THE TERM “SCIENCE”—shaped by different eras, geog- T raphies, and epistemological traditions—means that it is not always clear what histo- rians of science are or even should be studying. This is a point that medievalists and early modernists have long debated, and it has lent the discipline methodological depth by historicizing the very subject of its inquiry and by suggesting, in particular, what is modern about modern science.1 Yet some contingencies have mattered more than others. Imagine a map of the world as represented by the profession: it would be a largely Anglo-American and Eurasian one, with a severely truncated southern hemisphere and the Atlantic world predominating in the northern one. Ironically, this wasn’t the picture of the world that the discipline began with: indeed, * Department of History, Columbia University, 611 Fayerweather Hall, New York, New York 10027. 1 For the best example see Peter Dear, “What Is the History of Science the History Of? Early Modern Roots of the Ideology of Modern Science,” Isis, 2005, 96:390–406. Isis, 2010, 101:98–109 ©2010 by The History of Science Society. All rights reserved. 0021-1753/2010/10001-0005$10.00 98 This content downloaded from 160.39.148.241 on Mon, 1 Apr 2013 12:49:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions F O C FOCUS—ISIS, 101 : 1 (2010) 99 U S early professional historians of science often made much of the fact that they were taking the ecumenical view. But the price of such geographic capaciousness was a serious narrowing of the very idea of science itself. The “many rivers, one sea” of modern science analogy of the early historian of science Joseph Needham—who himself did much to introduce China to the wider world—meant that science was said to have a distinct coherence and flow after all.2 Nowhere is the problem of contingency and disciplinary cohesiveness more acute than across the entire range of studies often classed as “non-Western” science (or sometimes “extra-European” or “non-European” science). The division of the world into the West and the rest has a long history, of course—and the history of science has played a major part in that too. Indeed, in many ways the history of science itself started off by asking if science was the specific product of Western civilization or—in the language of a slightly later era—of the West. Early scholars argued that it was not, while current historians don’t bother to ask the question at all and would probably recoil at the antiquated Eurocentrism embedded in it. Some, though perhaps not as many today as a few decades ago, might even challenge the singularity of the term “science.” Once one begins to speak of a plurality of sciences the question has much less bite—though perhaps also less meaning. The specter of recurring “relativistic nightmares” meant that the postmodern turn never really caught on in the history of science—or, rather, that it did not ultimately impact our epistemological and disciplinary categories in the way that it has for other disciplines. This essay attempts to offer another way out of the twin predicaments of constructivism and relativism by asking how the very concept of “Western science” as the equivalent of “modern science” got established in the first place.3 Concomitantly, it asks how the “history of [this] science”—as opposed to the “history of the sciences”—has shaped our disciplinary categories and range. In order to do this, it will consider the corollary: What did people outside Europe make of the idea of “Western” science? How did their understanding of this change ideas, practices, and disparate categories of knowledge—as well as belief—more broadly?4 I begin by examining nineteenth-century conceptions of modern European sciences in Egypt and China, as seen in particular by Western Christian missionaries and local technocrats. Both Ottoman Egyptian and Qing centers of learning underwent rapid transformations in their communities and institutions of knowledge. Both also had ven- erable traditions of learning of their own that would later come to occupy an important role in the disciplinary origins of the history of science itself. While playing an increasingly important role in official curricula, early discussions of modern sciences did not so much replace older disciplines or traditions of knowledge as redefine them. The very translation of the terms and concepts of these sciences, after all, involved a kind of conceptual syncreticism. Nevertheless, a new notion—and narra- tive—of Western science was also gradually emerging. 2 Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1954–), Vol. 1: Introductory Orientations, p. 16. See also Roger Hart, “Beyond Science and Civilization: A Post-Needham Critique,” East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine, 1999, 16:88–114. 3 These points—and the reference to “relativistic nightmares”—are building on Peter Dear’s discussion; see Dear, “What Is the History of Science the History Of?” (cit. n. 1), pp. 392, 406. 4 For more on the distinction between knowledge and belief—and its relevance for the history of science, which I will here touch upon only briefly—see Mary Baine Campbell, Lorraine Daston, Arnold Davidson, John Forrester, and Simon Goldhill, “Enlightenment Now: Concluding Reflections on Knowledge and Belief,” Common Knowledge, 2007, 13:429–450. This content downloaded from 160.39.148.241 on Mon, 1 Apr 2013 12:49:23 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 100 FOCUS—ISIS, 101 : 1 (2010) By the interwar era, what was nascent would soon become more concrete: at the hands of early historians of science, the global reach of “science” was equally emphasized. But it was intended for the sake of a universal humanism that might bridge worlds, “East” and “West.” In the process, a much more specific and, in turn, a more universalizing notion of Western science was forged. This conception proved highly resilient, as the use of geographically dichotomous terms like “Western” and “non-Western” demonstrates. This division, moreover, goes well beyond mere expediency; rather, it has a very concrete history of its own, and it is one that may ultimately help us to define what has come to count as science and what has not. Only by setting the history of the sciences in a comparative perspective in this way can we come to appreciate how the concept of “science” gained its particular meaning and power around the world. Viewing the European sciences from outside Europe also allows us to learn something of the ways in which mutual claims on and engagements with the idea of science helped concepts to move across geographic and communal boundaries with astonishing rapidity and, at times, with unexpected synchronicity. After all, one of the main paradoxes in this story is that it was outside “the West” that the concept of “Western science” was itself first developed.5 SCIENCE GLOBALIZED How, then, was the idea of science as simultaneously “modern,” “universal,” and “West- ern” generated—and this despite the fact that there exist some seeming contradictions between these qualifiers? In the nineteenth century an entirely new global discourse around the idea of science emerged.
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