Logo DBNL
De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 44 (2012)

De Achttiende Eeuw. Jaargang 44

(2012)– [tijdschrift] Documentatieblad werkgroep Achttiende eeuw–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

Rethinking centres and peripheries in the Enlightenment: toward a global history of science
Lissa Roberts

This essay begins with a focus on how centre-periphery relations have been construed by historians of science since the middle of the twentieth century. It then suggests an alternative view of the historically embedded networks within which knowledge has circulated. Instead of adopting an a priori geography in which scientific ‘progress’ flowed from the ‘centre’ to the ‘periphery’, it argues for recovering the original indeterminacy of historical events as they unfolded by investigating ‘centres of accumulation’ around the world. This approach, illustrated by the cases of eighteenth-century Canton and Nagasaki, allows us to examine how local and quite mundane efforts to manage processes of accumulation and exchange fed the productive circulation of knowledge and material goods. Rather than constructing the history of science out of the rare and unique building blocks provided by scientific ‘heroes’ and their breakthroughs, daily activities are here shown to provide science's fundamental bricks and mortar.

Introduction

This essay begins on a personal note, with a recollection of the moment that first opened my eyes to the problematic nature of the phrase ‘centre and periphery’. While working on my PhD many years ago, I lived in a neighborhood of Los Angeles where a number of Japanese-owned businesses were located. One day, as I was passing a Japanese import shop, I was stopped dead in my tracks by what was displayed in its front window: a world map with the Pacific Rim at its centre. Jolted out of my years of geographical sleepwalking, I began to realize that it was not so much me who was disoriented by this image, as it was the way in which the world was presented in more conventional world maps. For up until that moment, I had simply taken for granted the ‘naturalness’ of the Mercator projections we usually encounter - those that place the Atlantic in the centre. Since then, fortunately, years of scholarship have helped us to appreciate mapping as a cultural activity that infuses the representation of spatial (and other) relations with meaning and significance. Labeling one site a centre and another a periphery is always a matter of choice and perspective. As historians we should be interested in how and why this is done, as well as how such claims are justified and managed.

This is not only true for the history of cartography, but for all activities

that ascribe spatial relations to locations and phenomena - whether in terms of actual or metaphorical distance. With this in mind, what follows focuses on how centre-periphery relations have been construed by historians of science since the middle of the twentieth century. It then goes back to the eighteenth century in order to highlight the roots of much modern thinking about the historical geography of science and suggests an alternative way of considering the historically embedded networks within which knowledge and know-how have circulated.1

Modern geographies of the history of science and their discontents

At least in Western Europe and North America, what historians Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams have called the ‘old big picture’ of the history of science dominated by the 1950s.2 According to this ‘big picture’ narrative, something unique happened in early modern Europe, which set it on a course that would inevitably lead to a position of global leadership. Whether understood primarily in terms of the introduction and spread of the Baconian method of organized experimentation or the mathematization of the world, in which Aristotle's closed and qualitatively heterogeneous cosmos made way for an infinite universe governed, as Newton explained, by a finite number of mathematical laws - the so-called Scientific Revolution laid the groundwork whereby Europeans came to know nature in order that its riches might be harnessed for the benefit of humankind.3 From the seventeenth century onward, according to this narrative, developments in science assured that progress was the byword of human history more generally. Not only did the application of theories and mathematical reasoning to the material world yield a subsequent Industrial Revolution, Europeans' global expansion provided a conduit through which modern science and technology might be diffused to other less advanced areas as well. Enlightenment and prosperity at home followed by enlightenment and prosperity abroad.4

Two quotations help to show how this vision extended beyond the narrow disciplinary confines of the history of science to take centre stage in cultural claims about what came to be called ‘the history of western civilization’. First, an excerpt from a review of Columbia University's post-war undergraduate curriculum:

Through such a study of our past, values emerge: that we live in a free society in which the spirits of justice, love, and scientific inquiry have been the touchstones to social invention; that in such a society the individual has labored to achieve freedom from an arbitrary authority (whether ecclesiastical or political); and that in a climate of experimental science, technology, and liberal-capitalist institutions, man seeks to shape his world to achieve welfare for himself and for constantly growing numbers of the human race.5

Second, snippets from an advertisement for R.R. Palmer and Joel Coulton's classic textbook A History of the Modern World - a book that I not only used as an American undergraduate student but one that I was required to teach with while a visiting lecturer at the University of Groningen a number of years later. The contents of chapter seven, dedicated to the history of ‘the scientific view of the world’ are described as follows:

[...] Science became modern. Scientific methods were defined, and scientific knowledge was increasingly applied practically [...] Scientific breakthroughs and new knowledge of the world outside Europe [...] led to a questioning of traditional beliefs. Science also influenced political theory, which embraced the philosophy of natural law. Human beings were considered rational, and states were subjected to the rigors of reason as well. The faith in science, progress, reason and rationality would fuel the cultural revolution of the Enlightenment.6

Faith in modern science as the vehicle of progress was generally shared across the political spectrum at this time - Marxist historians of science such as Edgar Zilsel and J.D. Bernal wrote as lyrically about the Scientific Revolution and its benefits (from their own perspectives, of course) as did supporters of liberal democracy, but in the context of the Cold War, theirs remained a minority voice in the West.7 Instead, especially with the professionalization of the discipline, two related tendencies dominated. Historians of science largely concentrated on specialist studies that focused on the internal development of science, understood as a theory-determined endeavor. Behind this stood the claim that scientific knowledge is objective and universally true. It represents, that is to say, the ‘view from nowhere’. At the same time, however, science was either tacitly or explicitly considered a western phenomenon, which marked the superiority of western culture. Its global diffusion could thus both be traced historically and featured in policies for exporting the fruits of progress around

the world.8

Two classic texts, one written by a historian of science and the other by a Washington policy maker, make this position clear. The first is George Basalla's essay ‘The Spread of Western Science’, which appeared in Science in 1967. In this essay, Basalla presented a three-stage model which he argued accounts for the past, present and future of the global diffusion of ‘western science’. During the first stage, non-scientific societies provide(d) raw materials for European scientific research. But this is not to say that science is rooted in the history of colonial exploitation, according to Basalla, who was careful to distinguish between what he took to be the interests of European trade with and settlement of other areas, on one hand, and the man of science on the other.

Trade and the prospect of settlement both influence the European observer's investigation of a new land, but ultimately his work is to be related to the scientific culture he represents. He is the heir to the Scientific Revolution, that unique series of events that taught Western man the physical universe was to be understood and subdued [...] through a direct, active confrontation of natural phenomena.9

During the second phase, scientific activities and developments begin to take place in non-western settings, but they remain dependent on the institutions and traditions of the mother country. Finally, the process of transplanting western science is completed in the third phase as previously dependent nations establish an independent scientific culture and join the ranks of modern scientific societies.10

Alongside building domestic capacity for education and research, according to Basalla, completion of this last phase requires the adoption of western-style, secular values. In the hands of American policy makers, this relationship between science and values was not only a matter of historical requirement; it spoke to a foreign policy goal, stated in terms of the inevitable benefits of science and technology transfer. Though published seven years before Basalla's essay, The Stages of Economic Growth: a Non-Communist Manifesto, written by the Harvard economist and presidential advisor Walt Rostow, provides a roadmap for how, first the West and then the rest, could work toward a future golden age

of peace and prosperity. Again the key event was the Scientific Revolution, which unleashed the method and knowledge behind the subsequent Industrial Revolution and an age of potentially unlimited economic growth in Europe. But this transition to ‘take-off’, to use Rostow's terminology and perspective, was and continues to be only possible if a society's traditional elite is replaced by a new elite willing to trade tradition in for a forward-looking orientation. To quote Rostow, ‘it is essential that the members of this new elite regard modernization as a possible task, serving some end they judge to be ethically good or otherwise advantageous’.11

The geography of enlightenment and wealth production presented by Rostow and embodied in much Cold War rhetoric thus spread out from its birthplace in Europe - Great Britain, to be more exact - to encompass more and more of the globe, pushing the boundaries of poverty, ignorance and inequality farther and farther to the periphery of civilization, so long as far-flung societies were and are willing to cast off their traditions in favor of western-style modernization. If this sounds either quaint or politically objectionable, it might do to recognize that such rhetoric is far from dead. The economic historian Joel Mokyr, for example, published his award-winning book The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy in 2002, in which he offers essentially the same message. Beginning with the claim that ‘the history of science is too important to leave to historians of science’, he offers a vision of historical geography in which Europe first experienced what he calls an ‘industrial enlightenment’ - composed basically of the application of ‘useful knowledge’ to the production of material wealth and the ideas of liberal democracy to social reform.12 Together they marked the cultural uniqueness of the West and propelled its exemplary leadership around the world.

In the time between Rostow and Mokyr, a flood of critique questioned this value-laden vision of history and historical geography from a variety of standpoints such as feminism, environmentalism and post-colonialism. Each proffered an alternative narrative for the history of science, but what they all share is the suggestion that the Western centre was indeed connected to the periphery through science and technology, though more as a history

of domination and exploitation than of collaboration and progress.13 While these critical voices have been most important in helping dethrone ‘the old big picture’, another critical approach began also to have a major impact by the 1980's. Bruno Latour and other proponents of what is often called ‘actor-network’ theory offered a new way to understand the historical geography of science, one which sought to transcend this oppositional debate. Rather than consider whether western science and technology served as a tool of improvement or exploitation in Europe's relations with its colonies, Latour and like-minded researchers have focused in a new way on the question of centre-periphery relations in science itself. How is it, they ask, that the elements of science all begin with local activities and findings (drawn from around the world), and that science is nonetheless seen as universal - both in terms of the validity of its knowledge claims and in terms of the methods by which it functions? An interesting answer to this question can be found in Latour's book Science in Action, which first appeared in English in 1987.14

Though more a philosopher and sociologist by training, Latour opts for a ‘historical’ approach in which he describes how globally-situated processes of accumulation, translation and travel give rise to a map in which increasingly dominant centres of accumulation and calculation, as he calls them, shape and gain strength from scientific development. To make his claim concrete, Latour provides a rendition of how information gathered by European voyages of exploration accumulated in European metropoles during the eighteenth century, where it was made ‘scientific’ through its subjection to processes of categorization and calculation. Once translated into cartographic, astronomical, botanical or ethnographic ‘knowledge’, it could be embodied in instruments and represented in equally portable charts, graphs and books, all of which accompanied further voyages, greatly strengthening their investigative capabilities and pressing ever-more locations and elements of the world into Euro-centric networks of knowledge production. Like spiders in the middle of an intricate but well-ordered web, then, European ‘centres of accumulation and calculation’ came to house the accumulated resources and activities that were used to translate masses of imported material into compact and mobile vehicles for organizing and interpreting further, often geographically extensive, research and exploration. Western science thus circulated globally, standardizing research methods,

measurements and knowledge claims as it went.

Latour turns to the voyage of the comte de La Pérouse for his prime illustration of this process.15 Imagine if you will, the arrival of La Pérouse and his men in 1787 on the beach of Sakhalin, north of Japan, which had not yet been identified on European maps as either an island or a peninsula. In search of an answer to this question, the French tried to communicate with the local fishermen who came to greet them. One of these locals, an elder in the group, took a stick and drew a rough map in the sand, which indicated that Sakhalin was indeed an island. When the incoming tide threatened to wash his map away, others helped record the image in La Pérouse's notebook so that it could make the long journey back to Paris. Once safely landed in Paris, what Sakhalin's indigenous population valued so little that they were willing to lose it to the evening tide, would be taken up and translated into precious knowledge, represented on mobile charts which helped organize and aid further voyages of exploration, exercises of calculation and knowledgeable control over the globe.

Centres of accumulation and the circulation of knowledge: Canton and Nagasaki

It is inevitable in Latour's tale that communities such as the fishermen of Sakhalin, should become peripheral as their European counterparts move to the centre, growing in knowledgeable strength and manipulative capacity. But is this the only way that we can understand the history through which global encounters and exchanges were taken up into the productive circulation of knowledge? The rest of this essay offers a view that begins by replacing narratives that are structured by a claim of inevitability - whether based on the a priori view of Western cultural superiority, a critique of western science as the handmaiden of imperialism, or on the highly mobile power of western style calculation and standardization. Instead, the goal here is to re-orient our gaze toward the indeterminacy of historical events and activities as we initially confront them. A fruitful way to do this is to recognize that, certainly in the eighteenth century, we can identify a multiplicity of centres of accumulation around the world. This approach allows us to investigate the ways in which a myriad of local and quite mundane efforts to manage processes of accumulation and exchange ultimately fed the productive circulation of knowledge and material goods. Rather than seeking to construct the edifice of the history

of science out of the rare and unique building blocks provided by scientific ‘heroes’ and their breakthroughs, it is daily activities that are here seen as providing science's fundamental bricks and mortar.16

Placing the voyage of La Pérouse in historical context provides a concrete example of this. By the time he and his men set sail from the port of Brest in 1785, Europe already had a long history of encounters in Asia. Since the sixteenth century, various European nations and trading companies sought to insinuate themselves in the thriving and well-established intra-Asian trade. As initially marginal players, they were subject to the patterns and regulations of their Asian hosts and trading partners. This led, among other things, to a concentration of activity in the port cities of Canton and Nagasaki. As officially sanctioned centres of international trade, Canton and Nagasaki can certainly be characterized as centres of accumulation.17 By considering the range of accumulation and efforts at management they housed, we can gain an understanding of the roles such centres played in mediating the globally productive circulation of knowledge and know-how. Simultaneously, we can observe how Europeans nonetheless interpreted their experience within this context in a way that reinforced their increasing self-valuation as culturally central and superior to their Asian counterparts.

The analytical distance we have to travel between these two is a telling one, best represented perhaps by contrasting two quotations. The first, recorded in 1656, comes from a scholarly member of the official corps of Japanese translators who were stationed in Nagasaki to serve as intermediaries between the Dutch and the Japanese. According to Genshō Mukai, an accomplished physician, natural historian and astronomer who - among other things - had worked closely with the resident VOC surgeon Hans Juriaen Hancke, Europeans

[...] are ingenious only in techniques that deal with appearances and utility, but are ignorant about metaphysical matters [...] their theory of material phenomena is vulgar and unrefined. But this vulgarity appeals all the more to the ignorant populace, and stupefies them.18

The second quotation comes from John Barrow, who had served as Lord George MacCartney's private secretary during the latter's mission to Beijing on behalf of the British government at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1804 Barrow published an account of his travels through China. Based especially on his stay in Canton, he wrote:

It has been observed [...] that the arts which supply the luxuries, the conveniencies and the necessaries of life, have derived but little advantage [...] from the labours and speculations of philosophers [...] Of this mortifying truth, the Chinese afford many strong examples in their arts and manufactures, and particularly in some of those operations that have a reference to chemistry, which cannot here be said to exist as a science, although several branches are in common practice as chemical arts [...] They extract from the three kingdoms of nature the most brilliant colours, which they have also acquired the art of preparing and mixing, so as to produce every intermediate tint; and, in their richest and most lively hues, they communicate these colours to silks, cottons and paper; yet they have no theory on colours.19

From the perspective of a Japanese scholar who had ample occasion to interact with the Dutch on Nagasaki's harbor island Dejima, Westerners lived in a vulgar material world - the best that could be expected of them was that they observed and measured what came into their hands. Barrow's perspective is an exact mirror image: the Chinese, in his view, were a people of the hand and eye, but not of the mind.

In his well-known book Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age, Harold J. Cook steps back from such claims and argues that the necessarily hybrid commercial and cultural encounters that took place in sites such as Nagasaki between Europeans and their Asian counterparts determined both the kinds of material and cultural goods which were exchanged. Negotiations, whether about the quantity and quality of commodities or the meaning and use of medical drugs and procedures, scientific instruments, natural history specimens and the like, required the establishment of a mutually understandable means of communication. Culturally bound subtleties were destined to resist translation in such a situation, leaving behind a residue that focused on the practical, the tangible and - all too often - the superficially stereotypical.20 The central focus of Cook's analysis is to show that these ‘matters of exchange’ also fed a growing emphasis back in the Netherlands on

values such as objectivity, accumulation and description, taken by Cook to be key components of the scientific revolution. This essay instead considers such exchanges in situ in order to flesh out what it means to speak of Canton and Nagasaki as centres of accumulation.

As the only two officially sanctioned ports for Asian-European trade in China and Japan respectively, it goes without saying that the situations in both Canton and Nagasaki were partially dictated by the policies coming from Beijing and Edo (modern day Tokyo), which were directed toward the strict management of both foreign trade and the impact this had on their own populations. For the shogunate in Japan, this included social concerns borne of experience with and fears of Christianity's disruptive force. Beijing sought to control foreign trade not only because of distrust of foreign traders but even more from a desire to curb the behavior of Chinese who engaged in piracy, smuggling and other anti-social activities. But whatever the motivations behind such policies, their application depended on the abilities and interests of local officials and the various circumstances, parties and interests with which they had to deal. A similar argument can be made for the long-distance attempts at management and control by European foreign offices, the governors of European trading companies such as the Gentlemen Seventeen of the VOC and their (self-interested) representatives in Batavia, Christian missionary organizations and scientific societies, with the added complication that their goals and desires had also to contend with the capricious forces of mighty oceans both en route to Canton or Nagasaki and on the way home.

Situated on the coast and subject to regulations coming from the political centres of their respective countries and the assertions of foreign traders, Canton and Nagasaki might at first glance seem anything but central. But port cities hold a unique place in history, on one hand distanced from centres that sought to control their local activities, on the other hand serving as key nodes in international networks of exchange where local sites of production, as well as local acts of mediation, negotiation and exchange maneuvered between and played off against these long-distance assertions of power in ways that had an enormous impact on the circulation of material and knowledge goods.21

What was it that actually accumulated in these port cities? As officially designated sites for international trade, Canton and Nagasaki saw the fluid accumulation of incoming and outgoing goods (both raw materials and manufactured goods), as well as goods produced locally to augment or feed off of

international trade. Thanks to studies such as Timon Screech's The Lens within the Heart and Martha Chaiklin's Cultural Commerce and Dutch Commercial Culture in which they focus on the objects requested by Japanese and either imported by the VOC or brought in for private trade, we can't ignore the significance of the material presence, distribution and (symbolic) appropriation of these goods.22 Screech especially documents the ways in which embodiments of European natural knowledge and inquiry were transformed through their appropriative integration into Japanese culture. But there is still much work to be done; we also need annotated inventories of the things, people, expertise, information, expectations, organizations, institutions, knowledge and skills that accompanied and supported this accumulation and its subsequent dispersal.

The significance of even the most seemingly mundane items and activities can be revealed through such an exercise. Foreigners and native inhabitants alike needed provisions and physically maintained quarters in which to live and operate, for example, the examination of which quickly opens up to the ways in which micro-exchanges of knowledge and skill took place. A highly evocative example of this point in Canton is provided by Paul van Dyke's vivid portrayal of life on the water there and the fact that one of the most irreplaceable characters in this teeming human drama was the floating barber - ‘a walking newspaper’ able to procure most anything - including intelligence - his customers wanted. Barbers' importance can be gauged from the fact that many considered getting a haircut - and filling up on local news - the first order of business when arriving in Canton.23

In Nagasaki, where the number and variety of foreign traders were much smaller and local arrangements were rather different, provisioning and upkeep followed a somewhat different path, but still supported the productive circulation of knowledge, skill and material goods. Little commented upon in the secondary literature, for example, is the fact that VOC quartermasters, servants and slaves sometimes served as intermediaries for such exchanges because a number of them had learned to communicate in Japanese or, in the case of Japanese servants, in Dutch. Official interpreters were thus not the only ones able to communicate with Europeans.24

In Canton, where the movement of foreigners was less strictly regulated than in Nagasaki and where more locals had direct contact with them, Pidgin

facilitated communication and exchange. But in both cities, other, perhaps less likely, individuals also gained enough foreign language proficiency to make a difference. Local prostitutes, for example, learned the language of their foreign customers through a sort of on-the-job training. In Nagasaki, at least, this seems to have brought with it a specialized accumulation and transfer of medical knowledge, as prostitutes were able to pass on information about treatments for venereal disease.25

There is still much research to do before we have a detailed picture of just how all these various elements of Canton and Nagasaki's large and complex cast of local characters contributed to the production, accumulation and exchange of goods, as well as to the local management of these processes. To give a small taste of what this might entail, this essay offers a few examples related to natural history. Everyone knows that a few Europeans, such as Linnaeus' student Carl Thunberg, used their time in Asia to conduct natural history research. But both Canton and Nagasaki housed a much more complex economy of resources and agents who were responsible for the accumulation and translation of natural history specimens, illustrations, knowledge and knowhow.

That natural history was thriving business in Canton was immediately obvious to anyone who first stepped off their ship in the harbor, as they might be greeted by local herbalists and traders who peddled pre-packaged natural history ‘kits’ containing a variety of dried specimens and seeds for European visitors who didn't have enough time to assemble their own.26 Another option was to purchase botanical illustrations that were made locally to suit European tastes and requirements. One could also purchase porcelain, which was decorated by local, highly skilled artisans in Canton and played on botanical themes. Or, as sailors often did, visitors might purchase live specimens such as monkeys and exotic birds to bring back to Europe for companionship or commercial speculation.27

Turning to Nagasaki, we find that trade in plants and natural history specimens moved in both directions - from Japanese suppliers to the Dutch and vice-versa. A highly revealing example takes us to the Dejima headquarters of the VOC factor where preserved specimens were kept on display. But before we conclude that VOC factors were natural history aficionados or liefhebbers,

it is good to recall what opperhoofd (factory head) Diodati recorded in the Dagregister on 20 May 1721. Asked to give part of his collection to a Japanese dignitary, Diodati explained that the Dutch ‘kept these bottles to satisfy the curiosity’ of their Japanese visitors and thus could not so easily part with them. Given the dignitary's princely position, however, he chose nonetheless to gift three jars. One assumes that the display was restocked, since bottled specimens are mentioned again in later years.28 Whatever the ultimate motivations, then, polite learning, conversation and a desire to entice the Japanese into maintaining good commercial relations intersected in the space occupied by these natural history specimens.

The Japanese, however, were more than simply passive recipients of or amateur dabblers in natural history. While the already mentioned Thunberg, for example, is famous for collecting plant specimens and knowledge for export to Europe, it is important to recall that he was only able to do so in Japan with official permission, which was granted on the condition that he provide examples of every interesting specimen he collected to the local governor.29 This fits well with a number of programs in Japan at the time that were aimed at increasing national self-sufficiency through domestic cultivation of commodities such as ginseng and sugar.30 So too does it fit with widespread involvement with honzōgaku (the Japanese counterpart of natural history) which explicitly linked an interest in knowledge of nature's animal, plant and mineral kingdoms with its application for material and economic benefit. Highly representative here is the multivolume work of Hiraga Gennai, Butsurui Hinshitsu (Categories and Qualities), which grew out of Gennai's organization of a number of natural history exhibitions in Edo and which recorded knowledge ranging from descriptions of domestic plants and minerals to discussions of both foreign commodities such as Prussian blue which he argued ought to be produced domestically and of attempts to domesticate foreign crops.31

Food and drink are a frequent topic of discussion in the diaries kept both by VOC employees on Dejima and visitors to China. We know that they commented upon produce (i.e. fruits, vegetables and herbs), some of which made their way to Europe, and also that the crops Europeans grew in their own gardens excited local interest and sometimes led to local adaptation and cultivation.

James Dinwiddie, for example, the ‘machinist’ who accompanied Macartney on his ambassadorial mission to Beijing and briefly taught a public course on experimental philosophy in Canton, recorded this observation:

Peas, only lately introduced into Macao, were for some time carried to Canton at a great expense. The farmers here, finding a good market, now cultivate them in considerable quantities, and stick them as in Europe. Though in the middle of winter, we have green peas every day to our dinner.32

Alongside the more exalted forms of botany and natural history, then, this brand of practically oriented exchange in the field of agriculture is certainly worth noting, especially in the context of contemporary developments that included China's so-called agricultural revolution, Japanese efforts, as well as agricultural ‘improvement’ movements in various parts of Europe.33

As is now broadly recognized, economic interests were also explicitly tied to European engagements with the plant world, which bore the more polite label of science.34 Alongside the well-known botanical experiences of Thunberg, consider these more salient examples related to Canton. First are the letters sent by Loddiges and Sons, owners of a British nursery, to the Protestant missionary Robert Morrison, asking him to collect, prepare and send a variety of seeds back from China in accordance with their strict and clearly knowledgeable instructions for their preservation.35 Second is John Barrow's experience with transplanting Chinese cotton (previously transplanted to China from India) to the Cape of Good Hope, which he couldn't help but link to a vision of British cultural superiority:

I have raised this particular species at the Cape of Good Hope where, upon the same plant, as well as on others produced from its seed, the pods were as full and the tint as of deep a yellow in the third year as in the first [an improvement, that is, over Chinese practices]. As is generally the case in most of their [i.e. Chinese] manufactures, those of silk and cotton do not appear to have lately undergone progressive improvement. The want of proper encouragement from the government, and the rigid adherence to ancient usage, have rendered indeed all their fabricks [i.e. factories or workshops] stationary.36

Here we find Barrow making three closely related claims that resonated both with growing British imperialist attitudes and with later historians who too unquestioningly accepted the formula of British liberty and industry as a winning combination: 1] Chinese methods of agriculture and manufacture were inferior to British; 2] the Chinese were a rigidly traditional and therefore increasingly backward people and 3] the Chinese government was at least partly to blame for this state of affairs by abdicating its duty to encourage its population toward productivity.

Conclusion

This small number of examples certainly cannot do no more than hint at the kind of ‘double history’ that is needed to put things in proper perspective. On one hand, the history of science needs to be developed as an integrated part of global history. But ‘global history’ should not be taken to mean an approach that entails comparisons between different parts of the globe... especially not narratives that are structured as stories of ‘the West and the rest’. Rather, we would do well to concentrate on the ways in which often globally extensive networks of exchange were constructed and operated. This will require us to replace questions of regional comparisons, which are so often skewed by historians (think of the dominant trope of comparing Europe and China), with an investigative emphasis on interconnections. While such an approach cannot ignore the unequal distribution of power, which grew out of and exerted so much influence on how this history developed, it invites us to replace unquestioning talk of centre-periphery relations with an investigation of multiple local centres of accumulation and translation, where markets teeming with accumulated resources, expertise and interests combined to give direction and substance to the global circulation of knowledge and know-how. It further invites us to augment the historiographical tendency to focus on theoretical knowledge, breakthrough discoveries and innovations, with attention for the micro-experiences of mundane activities and exchanges which cumulatively propelled historical development.

At the same time - and this is what is here meant by ‘double history’ - we need to account for the ways in which actors experienced and projected the unfolding history in which they were taking part. It is here, as this essay has tried to indicate, where we find the roots of culturally bound interpretations that all too often re-presented the multi-centred world of global circulation as one in which reason and cultural superiority were concentrated on one side of

the world, leaving the rest to house exploitable resources and populations that, at best, possessed mindless skill.

About the author

Lissa Roberts is professor of long-term development of science and technology at the University of Twente. Her research is oriented around three broad themes: 1] the historical evolution and transgressions of the (claimed) divide between ‘science’ and ‘technology’; 2] science and technology as co-evolutionary constituents of global history; 3] entrepreneurialism and innovation in historical context. A strong believer in collaborative work, her recent edited volumes include The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization (2007); The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820; and Centres and Cycles of Accumulation in and Around the Netherlands (2011). Email: l.l.roberts@utwente.nl.

Bibliography

A College Program in Action: A Review of Working Principles at Columbia College (New York 1946).
Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology and Ideologies of Western Dominance (Ithica 1989).
John Barrow, Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen and on a Subsequent Journey through the Country from Peking to Canton (London 1804).
George Basalla, ‘The Spread of Western Science’, Science 156 (1967) 611-622.
J.D. Bernal, Science in History (London 1954).
Leonard Blussé et al., The Deshima Diaries Marginalia 1740-1800 (Tokyo 2004).
Leonard Blussé, Visible Cities: Canton, Nagasaki and Batavia and the Coming of the Americans (Cambridge 2008).
Francesca Brey, ‘Science, Technique, Technology: Passages between Matter and Knowledge in Imperial Chinese Agriculture’, British Journal for the History of Science 41 (2008) 319-344.
Frank Broeze (ed.), Brides of the Sea: Port Cities of Asia from the 16th-20th Centuries (Kensington 1989).
Martha Chaiklin, Cultural Commerce and Dutch Commercial Culture: The Influence of European Material Culture on Japan, 1700-1850 (Leiden 2003).
Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago 1994).
Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven 2007).
Andrew Cunningham and Perry Williams, ‘“De-centring the “Big Picture”: “the Origins of Modern Science” and “the Modern Origins of Science”’, The British Journal for the History of Science 26:4 (1993) 407-432.
Matthew Edney, Mapping an Empire: The Geographical Construction of British India, 1765-1843 (Chicago 1997).
Fa-ti Fan, British Naturalists in Qing China: Science, Empire and Cultural Encounter (Cambridge 2004).
Hiraga Gennai, Butsurui Hinshitsu (Osaka 1763).
Jack Goldstone, ‘Feeding the People, Starving the State: China's Agricultural Revolution of the 17th/18th Centuries’, Paper prepared for a conference in London, September 2003, sponsored by the Global History Network and the Leverhulme Foundation, http://www.ata.boun.edu.tr/ehes/istanbul%20conference%20papers-%20may%202005/goldstone-feeding%20the%20people.pdf (18 July 2012).
Linda Gordon, David Hunt and Peter Weiler, ‘History as Indoctrination: a Critique of Palmer and Colton's History of the Modern World, History Teacher 21:1 (1987) 53-103.
Daniel Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York 1981).
Robert Hellyer, Defining Engagement: Japan and Global Contexts, 1640-1868 (Cambridge 2009).
Reinier H. Hesselink, ‘A Dutch New Year at the Shirando Academy’, Monumenta Nipponica 50 (1995) 189-234.
Joseph M. Hodge, ‘Science and Empire: An Overview of the Historical Scholarship’, in: Brett M. Bennett and Joseph M. Hodge (eds.), Science and Empire: Knowledge and Networks of Science across the British Empire, 1800-1970 (London 2011) 3-29.
Stanley Hopkins Jones Jr., ‘Scholar, Scientist, Popular Author Hiraga Gennai, 1728-1780’, Dissertation (Columbia University 1968).
Lisbet Koerner, Linnaeus: Nature and Nation (Cambridge 1999).
Simon Kuznets, Economic Development, the Family and Income Distribution: Selected Essays (Cambridge 2002).
Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge 1987).
Robert Liss, ‘Frontier Tales: Tokugawa Japan in Translation’, in: Simon Schaffer et al. (eds.), The Brokered World: Go-betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770-1820 (Sagamore Beach 2009) 1-47.
‘Liste d'Arbres et de Plantes les plus agéables ou utiles qui croissant dans le voisinage
de Canton et qui sont inconnus dans les Jardins de l'Europe’, Archives Nationale, F/10/201 and Bibliothèque Centrale du Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris, MS 56.
Hubert Maës, Hiraga Gennai et son temps (Paris 1970).
Kenneth McPherson, ‘Port Cities as Nodal Points of Change: The Indian Ocean, 1890s-1920s’, in: Fawaz, Bayly, Ilbert, (eds.), Modernity and Culture: From the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean (New York 2002) 75-95.
Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (New York 1980).
Joel Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton 2002).
Eliza Morrison, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of Robert Morrison (London 1839).
Shigeru Nakayama, A History of Japanese Astronomy: Chinese Background and Western Impact (Cambridge 1969).
Joseph Needham, The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (Toronto 1969).
William Jardine Proudfoot, Biographical Memoir of James Dinwiddie [...] Embracing some Account of his Travels in China and Residence in India (Liverpool 1868).
Lissa Roberts, ‘Contact Zones and Global Networks of Exchange’, in: Lissa Roberts (ed.), Local Encounters and the Global Circulation of Knowledge, 1750-1850, Special issue of Itinerario 33 (2009) 9-30.
Lissa Roberts, ‘Centres and Cycles of Accumulation: an Introduction’, in: Lissa Roberts (ed.) Centres and Cycles of Accumulation in and Around the Netherlands (Berlin 2011) 3-27.
Lissa Roberts, ‘Re-Orienting the Transformation of Knowledge in Dutch Expansion: Nagasaki as a Centre of Accumulation and Management’, in: Susanne Friedrich, Stefan Ehrenpreis and Arndt Brendecke (eds.), Transformation of Knowledge in Dutch Expansion (Pluralisierung and Autorität), (Berlin and New York 2012).
Lissa Roberts, ‘The Circulation of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe: Embodiment, Mobility, Learning and Knowing’, History of Technology 31 (2012) 47-68.
Walt Whitman Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth: a Non-Communist Manifesto (New York 1960).
‘The Scientific View of the World’, http://highered.mcgra hill.com/sites/0072316551/student_view0/chapter7 chapter_overview.html (16 July 2012).
Timon Screech, The Lens within the Heart: The Western Scientific Gaze and Popular Imagery in Later Edo Japan (Honolulu 2002).
Steven Shapin, ‘Placing the View from Nowhere: Historical and Sociological Problems
in the Location of Science’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 23 (1998) 5-12.
Emma Spary, Utopia's Garden (Chicago 2000).
Carl Peter Thunberg, Travels in Europe, Africa and Asia Performed Between the Years 1770 and 1779, vol. 3 (London 1796).
Paul Van Dyke, The Canton Trade: Life and Enterprise on the China Coast, 1700-1845 (Hong Kong 2005).
Frits Vos, ‘Forgotten Foibles: Love and the Dutch at Dejima, 1641-1854’, Festschrift für Horst Hammitzsch zu seinem 60. geburtstag (Weisbaden 1968) 614-633.
Edgar Zilsel, ‘The Sociological Roots of Science’, American Journal of Sociology 47 (1942) 544-562.

Vorige Volgende

Over dit hoofdstuk/artikel

auteurs