Stages in the Evolution of a Western European Regime for the Discovery, Development and
Diffusion of Useful and Reliable Knowledge
[Under consideration for publication in the Journal of Global History]
1.
Context: Economic Divergence and its connexions to Technology and the Formation of
Scientific Knowledge
The inspiration for my bibliographical survey is a key metanarrative in global history concerned
with the timing and reasons behind the emergence of contrasts in labour, productivities and
standards of living across economies and polities located to the east and west of Eurasia. A
wave of revisionist historiography that emerged more than a decade ago problematized
explanations for a “Great Divergence” in levels of human welfare based upon Smithian and/or
Schumpetarain models of long term economic growth.1
Counter attacks to this basically successful assault upon a moribund tradition of Eurocentric
global economic history centred on the rise of the west continues to proceed on two fronts.
The first which attempts to undermine the data utilized by the California School, to suggest that
retardation in the east had not set in before the late eighteenth century includes an ongoing
1
The key texts are: D. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (New York, 1998) and K. Pomeranz, The Great
Divergence. China, Europe and the Making of the Modern Economy (Princeton, 2000). An excellent survey covering
a decade of academic debate is by J. Bryant, ‘The West and the Rest Revisited: Debating Capitalist Origins,
European Colonialism and the Advent of Modernity’ in Canadian Journal of Sociology, 31 (2006) pp. 403-44. Two
recent texts are T. Huff, Intellectual Curiosity and R. Bin Wong and J. L. Rosenthal, Before and Beyond Divergence.
The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge, Mass, 2011)
1
programme of statistical research designed to measure differences in average levels of real
wages, human health, literacy and numeracy among polulations resident in large Eurasian
towns over several centuries before 1800.2
The second, not as clearly located within the boundaries of comparative and quantitative
economic history, is exploring recently published histories of European technologies, science
technology, philosophy, religion and cosmographies in order to construct an alternative
metanarrative that could update an explanation for divergence associated with views
formulated decades ago by Max Weber and Joseph Needham. Neither of these great scholars
addressed divergence in the terms currently formulated by economics but both can be cited a
classical references to a historiography that traces its origins to a famous conjuncture in global
history, the Scientific Revolution, when western Europe reordered its belief systems and
established a promotional regime or cluster of institutions for the discovery, development and
diffusion of superior technologies for the cultivation of agricultural produce , the manufacture
of industrial commodities and production of commercial services.3
How, when and why western Europe experienced such a conjuncture before other parts of
Eurasia is a mega question that could only be satisfactorily addressed by a programme of
historical research based upon cogently specified reciprocal comparisons, heuristic concepts,
2
Recent sources with up-to-date bibliographies for this programme are: R. Allen et al (eds.) Living Standards in the
Past: New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe (Oxford, 2005)
3
The bibliography is awesome but vide: Hilaire-Perez and C. Verna ‘Dissemination of Technical Knowledge in the
Middle Ages and Early Modern Era’ in Technology and Culture 47 (2006) pp. 536-65 and the programme of
research on European gilds and apprenticeship convened by S. R. Epstein and M. Prak referenced in Fn. 50.
2
and an aspiration to become global by transcending the myopias imposed by the frontiers and
chronologies of national or continental histories. My essay, which shares the aspiration to
become global, is nevertheless far more limited in ambition. I will simply make a start by
mediating my way through a bibliography of modern secondary sources in the histories of
European sciences, technologies, philosophies, cosmographies and religions in order to
construct a narrative of “stages” that western societies passed through en route to a precocious
scientific revolution. Two sections of that survey will, however, remain superficially global in
focus because the general consensus offered in secondary literatures describing cosmographies
and related institutions for the formation, storage, retrieval and diffusion of knowledge of the
natural world suggest that they look broadly comparable across Eurasia for the millennia
included in the continents Palaeolithic and Neolithic eras. Thereafter (during the axial age c.
800 BCE to c. 700 CE) the literature suggests that Christendom and Islamdom moved onto a
divergent trajectory, which in retrospect has been represented by historians of Europe as an
unintended transition towards a stage of preparation and promotion for the eventual
emergence of interconnected scientific technological and industrial revolutions in the west.
Global historians are now certainly aware that representations of any supposedly unique
European trajectories are all too often based upon a foreshortened chronologies covering the
periods of time when the re-ordering of western culture and the reconstruction of western
institutions could safely downplay histories of prior connexions including sustained and
significant flows of knowledge from the east to the west of Eurasia as explored in Arun Bala’s
3
“dialogue of civilizations”.4 They also appreciate that all claims for the particularities of any
trajectory selected as peculiarly “European” must be subjected to Marc Bloch’s tests for
reciprocal comparisons.5
Meanwhile, and at this stage of an ongoing discourse concerned with the historical evolution of
the range and efficiencies of technologies utilized by Eurasian societies for improvements to
their standards of health and levels of security as well as volumes of material production a
narrative is under construction to explain divergence that became endogenous in Eurocentered
terms, which global historians may find difficult to evade and less easy to challenge that the
Eurocentric histories of yesteryear. That narrative (or rather chapter of a narrative) surveyed
and summarized here is based upon a conception now widely accepted among economists and
modern economic historians of Europe that all technologies can be heuristically comprehended
as related in both ex post and ex ante senses to their actual or potential epistemic bases that
can, moreover, be conceived as manifestations of the varied hegemonic conceptions of the
natural world embedded in different Eurasian cultures. 6 If that conception which conflates
science with technology is accepted then an elaboration of historical explanations for changes
in those cosmographies that they supported forms an essential chapter in metanarratives that
4
A. Bala, The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science (New York, 2008)
P. K. O’Brien, ‘Metanarratives in Global Histories of Material Progress’ in International History Review 2 (2001) pp.
345-67 and R. Bin Wong, China Transformed and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, 1997)
6
B. Allen, Knowledge and Civilization (Boulder, 2004); J. Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena. Historical origins of the
Knowledge Economy (Princeton, 2002); G. D. Snooks, The Dynamic Society. Exploring Sources of Global Change
(London, 1996) and E. Reinert, ‘Exploring the Genesis of Economic Innovations: The Religious Gestalt-Switch and
the Duty to Inventas Preconditions for Economic Growth’, European Journal of Law and Economics 4 (1997) pp.
233-83. An early but still relevant take on the conflation of histories of science and technology was published in a
special issue of Technology and Culture 2 (1961) pp. 305-90
5
4
purport to account for divergent economic trends in labour productivities and standards of
living over centuries of time.
By the eighteenth century a conception of the natural world and prospects for its manipulation
based upon science had received widespread acclaim in western Europe as the foundation
upon which all forms of useful and reliable knowledge were and could be based. This “scientific
knowledge” can be defined in many ways, but throughout history most of it emanated from
“regimes” that can be represented as interconnected institutional systems – varying in scale,
scope and efficiency – established and maintained to generate and/or adopt knowledge with
some recognized potential to become instrumental for the promotion of the health, security,
geopolitical power and above all the material welfare of populations around the world. No
polity or society in prehistoric, ancient, pre-modern or modern times has operated without a
regime of some sort for the formation and dissemination of useful knowledge.
In our times such regimes generate flows of modern science which is reputedly grounded in:
observations, experiments and rigorous reasoning; practised by a plethora of professional
experts attached to a multiplicity of disciplines who are supported and institutionalized as the
best way of understanding the natural world.7 Thus, the origins of different regimes, their
evolution over time and some comprehension of demarcated conjunctures when they made
transitions into systems producing, developing and diffusing ever larger and continuous flows
7
R. Nelson (ed.), National Innovation Systems (Oxford, 1993)
5
of such knowledge is a key question for global economic historians concerned with the wide
(and still widening) disparities around the world in income and wealth to pursue.
This survey proposes to contribute to that programme by focussing upon literatures dealing
with emergence of a western European regime as it evolved through a sequence of historical
stages and by analysing major forces that promoted transitions from stage to stage.8 I will
proceed along a chronology common to narratives in global history that presume that regimes
for the formation and accumulation of knowledge were essentially similar across Eurasia for
millennia of time, that a plausible and reductionist point of departure has been located when
Christendom and Islamdom made transitions to monotheism during an axial age (ca.600 BCE –
ca. 700 CE) that Eurasian contrasts became salient during a stage of preconditions (ca. 700 – ca.
1500 CE) before clear divergence occurred during a historical conjuncture, namely the
Scientific Revolution in the West (c.1543-1727).9
3. Monotheistic Christianity and its Conflicts with Greek and Islamic Natural Philosophies
as a Stage of Preconditions for a Scientific Revolution in the West
For Western Christendom the protracted process of assimilating classical modes of thought
about the natural world with its own monotheistic belief system evolved over several centuries
of time between, the fall of Rome and the times of Copernicus. Before the Medieval
8
S. K. Saunderson, Social Transformation. A General Theory of Historical Development (Oxford, 1995). For a
discussion of stage theories of long run growth see W. W. Rostow (ed.), The Economics of Take Off into Sustained
Growth (London, 1963).
9
G. Modelski et al (eds.), Globalization as an Evolutionary Process (London, 2008)
6
Renaissance of the 12th century, it was by no means clear that clerical intellectuals in the service
of an increasingly successful church wished to engage seriously with classical perceptions of
nature and with methods for the comprehension of a natural world that the faithful inhabited
for but a short while on their way to eternal salvation or damnation. 10 They knew that God had
created their habitat and everything in it operated according to his divine will and intentions.
Although the patristic Church needed to accommodate its teaching to include the beliefs of
Romanized elites, a long line of Christian fundamentalists (such as Saints Ambrose and
Bonaventure) antipathetic to St Augustine held onto the view that all speculations based upon
modes of thought that elevated reason above revelation could become dangerous to the claims
of the church to possess the truth about human nature, the destiny of man and an
incomprehensible universe that was God’s creation and mankind’s temporary abode. 11
Christianity did not depend, in any large measure, on conquest for its diffusion. In the beginning
of its emergence from a sect to a religion, it was compelled to seek accommodation with
Roman power structures. Thereafter the task of Christianizing the elites and populations of
Western Europe was arguably assisted by the division and collapse of the Roman empire.
Although centralized empires could (indeed from reign to reign in antiquity did) promote
conversions of pagan populations to monothesism, political support alternated with repression
and remained dependent upon the unpredictable decisions of emperors to extend one true
faith. Political units smaller than empires and operating in competitive geopolitical contexts
10
E. Grant, Science and Religion From Aristotle to Copernicus 400 BC – AD 1550 (Baltimore, 2004); D. C. Lindberg
(ed.), Science in the Middle Ages (Chicago, 1978)
11
R. M. Grant, Miracle and Natural Law: In Greco-Roman Early Christian Thought (Amsterdam, 1952); Barnes,
Stages of Thought.
7
probably provided conditions not only more favourable to conversions to monotheism but for
more varied, adaptable and flexible departures from its otherwise fundamentalist and
canonical interpretations of nature.
Pluralism came on stream after several centuries of persistent discourse among rival schools of
Christian theology and also flowed from the post 7th century conflict with Islam – a
monotheistic and serious contender for religious and political hegemony on Europe’s southern
and eastern frontiers – which pushed in the same direction.12 Furthermore, increasing evidence
that the forces of nature could be manipulated technologically to improve the health, security
and material welfare of the faithful also promoted the case for their systematic study.13
Thus and over the centuries as it evolved into a supra-national organization with a privileged
and a quasi-autonomous position within European states, the Roman church recognized that
faith underpinned by the gospels supplemented by a limited range of canonical references,
would not be sufficient to maintain a position of intellectual hegemony either for its persistent
conflicts with Islam and internal heresies, or remain (despite the constitutional autonomy
allowed under constitutions for the separation of Church and State in 1122) functional for
resistance to the encroachments of increasingly powerful political authorities.14
12
B. Lewis, Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims and Jews in the Age of Discovery (Oxford, 1995) and D. C.
Lindberg (ed.), The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical Religious and
Institutional Context 600 BC to AD 1450 (Chicago, 1992)
13
S. R. Epstein and M. Prak (eds.), Guilds, Innovation and the European Economy 1400-1800 (Cambridge, 2008); B.
S. Hall and D. C. West (eds.) On Pre-Modern Technology and Science (Malibu, 1976)
14
S. Gaukroger, The Emergence of Scientific Culture. Science and the Shaping of Modernity 1210-1685 (Oxford,
2006)
8
In short, it had always been difficult for any fundamentalist Roman Catholic belief system to
supplant, suppress or evade the eastern cum classical intellectual heritage of the West or to
deal with secular powers.15 Easier perhaps in the dark ages, preceding the consolidation of
monarchies, before the rise of Islam or over the centuries that it took to translate, transcribe
and reproduce in printed form a body of accessible latinized texts that constituted the core of
that heritage for circulation among literate (including clerical) elites in the west. 16
By the 13th century, the medieval church had come to terms with exogenous pressures to
strengthen its intellectual foundations in order to resist rival infidels, heretics and secular
authorities. Thus it came to pass that under strictly regulated rules and conditions, the papacy
and its bishops allowed (even encouraged) the introduction of faculties and curricula for the
study of natural philosophy, based upon recovered classical texts by Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy,
Galen, Hippocrates and many others. This knowledge emerged along with the establishment of
cathedral schools and monasteries before developing into compulsory courses in institutions
for higher education (prototype universities) that spread across the cities of medieval Europe. 17
Faculties of natural philosophy appeared between the 12th and 15 th centuries in order to
provide advanced education for clerics, lawyers and doctors, bureaucrats and philosophers, not
15
D. Levine, At the Dawn of Modernity. Biology, Culture and Material Life in Europe After the Year 1000 (Berkeley,
2001); D. C. Lindberg and R. L. Numbers (eds.) God and Nature (Berkeley, 1986)
16
S. L. Montgommery, Science in Movements of Knowledge Through Cultures and Time (Chicago, 2000) and A.
Johns, The Nature of the Book: Printed Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998).
17
H. de Ridder-Symoens (ed.), A History of the University in Early Modern Europe 1500-1800 (Cambridge, 1996)
9
only to teach medieval Europe’s professions but to write commentaries upon and to carry
forward to new levels of sophistication the methods and insights derived from a gradually
restored classical heritage of thought that had been primarily concerned with human nature,
but had always included some rudimentary observations upon and recommendations for
rational and potentially heuristic modes of enquiry into demarcated celestial, terrestrial and
biological spheres of the natural world. 18
For some three to four centuries preceding the reformation and times of Copernicus, pagan
texts emanating from Byzantium and in elaborated and improved form from Islamdom flowed
in a succession of waves (Renaissances) into Western Europe. 19 They were translated,
absorbed, accommodated and utilized in different ways and degrees by a multiplicity of
competing institutionalized authorities - secular and clerical, political and ecclesiastical.
Nevertheless, resistance and bouts of suppression marked the propagation of views based
upon the circulation of pagan and Arab ideas that contradicted core tenets of Christianity,
namely that God created and controlled everything in the world and could, through divine
interventions (miracles) suspend the operations of familiar natural forces and events as
observed by common sense and which had been “rationally” explicated by classical
philosophers.20
18
E. Grant, A History of Natural Philosophy from the Ancient World to the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2007)
J. Freely, Aladdins Lamp: How Greek Science came to Europe Through the Islamic World (New York, 2009) and G.
Saliba, Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass. 2007)
20
Barnes, Stages of Thought, op. cit.
19
10
Tensions between revelation and reason remained as an omnipresent and ultimately
irreconcilable source of conflict among and within Europe’s courts and aristocracies and
between the faculties of theology and natural philosophy at universities in the west, where
communities of urban-based intellectuals became charged with emotion in their search for
truth.21 In time and apart from a predictable strand of recidivism, Europe’s “secularised” Roman
Catholic establishments and their obedient theologians found no insuperable difficulties in
accommodating selected, expurgated and reconfigured classical philosophies with Christian
beliefs as set out in the gospels, other canonical texts and exemplified in the lives and writings
of apostles, founding fathers and other saints. They even found analogous notions of God
behind the design and operations of the universe in analyses attributed with ecumenical
ingenuity to Plato, Aristotle and Seneca. They welcomed observations and investigations into
nature that could be read allegorically as signs of God’s presence in the world and interpreted
metaphorically as lessons for personal and political morality.22 Above all, and although they
resolutely insisted upon the sovereignty of revelation over reason, and, by implication, the
superior status of theology, they welcomed and even encouraged the application of syllogistic
logic and mathematical techniques derived from classical concepts of proof to major complex
and counter intuitive elements of revealed Christian beliefs. For example, theologians
anticipated that with help from methods and theories deployed by natural philosophers trained
in classical modes of argument, they too might also construct rational and acceptable proofs for
21
22
Collins, Sociology of Philosophies.
Lindberg and Numbers (eds.), Gods and Nature.
11
the existence of God, the virgin birth, the resurrection, transubstantiation, the trinity, man’s
immortal soul, miracles and other articles of faith.23
As true believers, natural philosophers accepted the primacy of revelation and the subordinate
status of their discipline as a handmaiden to theology. For centuries before, during and after
the Scientific Revolution, most prudentially refrained from entering into disputes concerned
with any of Christianity’s foundational beliefs and concentrated upon translations into latin,
and upon the restoration, analysis, elaboration and critique of classical literatures that before
and after the birth of Christ had attempted to render nature’s celestial, terrestrial and biological
phenomena more intelligible for mankind’s sojourn on earth. Operating within authoritarian
regimes for the accumulation of knowledge of the natural world, confined by personal beliefs
based upon revelation and at risk of repression for heresy from secular and ecclesiastical
hierarchies with vested interests in a sacred canon, the record of natural philosophy in
reordering a Christian cosmography is not nearly so unimpressive as the vehement criticism of
“scholasticism” attracted during periods of Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment that
generations of liberal social scientists and protestant historians have found congenial to
repeat.24
Scholarship now appearing 500 years after the Reformation shows that scholastic philosophers
deferred to prestigious classical authors, particularly Aristotle, but also to Plato, Ptolemy,
Galen, Hippocrates and more courageously referred, to Averroes, Avicenna and other Moslem
23
24
M. A. Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago, 2009)
E. Gellner, Reason and Culture: the Historical Role of Rationality and Rationalism (Oxford, 1992)
12
commentators and critics of Greek and Greek-inspired writings for support and guidance.25
They also deployed classical modes of logical reasoning to persuade ecclesiastical and secular
elites in the west that in a universe created by a Christian God (who could, they all agreed,
intervene at will with its operations in unpredictable and arbitrary ways that ran counter to
common sense) their God had nevertheless constructed and designed a natural world to
operate on intelligible principles open to investigation and explication.26
As the status of natural philosophy evolved at royal courts and noble households, and as well
within Europe’s corporate and quasi-autonomous institutions for higher education, its agendas
widened to include observations and investigations into a wide range of natural phenomena
such as the age, size, shape and limits of planet earth, the sun, the moon and the stars, tides,
climates, earthquakes, minerals, chemical substances, soils, plants, animals and human
bodies.27 A minor persistent strand of natural philosophy even questioned the subordination of
reason to revelation but most natural philosophers prudentially pursued their endeavours for
higher intellectual and political status by promoting rational methods for the study of medicine,
law and even theology. A minority elaborated upon premature and, for theologians,
outrageous arguments for the recognition of two separable kinds of knowledge, each with its
25
J. Bona, The Word of God and the Language of Man: Interpreting Nature in Early Modern Science (Maddison,
1995)
26
I rely on seminal books by Edward Grant: E. Grant, Planets, Stars, Orbs 1200-1687 (Cambridge, 1994) and History
of Natural Philosophy
27
V. Bulloush (ed.), Universities, Medicine and Science in the Medieval West (Aldershot, 2004) and Gillespie, The
Theological Origins of Modernity
13
own mode of reasoning: the metaphysical and the physical (or the sacred and the secular).28
Although theology had embraced dialectical methods and logical arguments and co-existed in a
state of uneasy tension with natural philosophy, clerical intellectuals became disappointed that
classical methods could not substantiate revealed truths. They also remained hostile to the
claims of rival natural philosophers that the latter’s “rational” procedures for the acquisition of
knowledge provided a superior mode of access to understanding the mind and designs of God
for his universe. Despite the ingenuity on display in the writings of Thomas Aquinas and his
Dominican followers, reason and revelation could not be reconciled.
For their part, natural philosophers concentrated upon philological analyses of the classics upon
the theories and semantic abstractions connected with meta-cognition and investigations into
logical and mathematical ways of knowing. A minority (including Roger Bacon, Bradwardine,
Grossteste, Albertus, Oresme, Buridan) produced texts that became posthumously famous
among historians of science for their critiques of Artistotleanism, for anticipating meta-theories
and speculations about the universe, that appeared during the Scientific Revolution including:
laws of motion, the atomic theory of matter associated with Epicurus, Democritus and
Lucretius, early premonitions that controlled experiments, might become superior to reason
and common sense as ways of settling disputes about the operations of the natural world as
well as an embryo heliocentric view of the universe.29
28
Similar arguments had emerged for the economic sphere. Vide: J. Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth
Century (Cambridge, 1998)
29
A. C. Crombie, Grossetest and Theorism of Experimental Science (Oxford, 1962); Lindberg (ed.), Science in the
Middle Ages; Hale, Devaluation in Science
14
To sum up : medieval Christian (embodying assimilated Moslem) contributions to advances
towards a deeper in intelligibility about natural forces, including the anatomies of human
bodies and eyes consisted basically in restoring classical modes of reasoning to politically and
theologically acceptable positions of prominence. They exposed and defined celestial,
terrestrial, biological and chemical spheres of the universe as subjects that could be
investigated and explained in terms that were separable from revealed and sanctified truths
about the origins, operations and limits of the universe as a spiritual, moral and political habitat
for man’s life on earth.30 Linked and deeply indebted to a famous line of Moslem philosophers,
Christian scholastics (under heuristic debate during the quatrocento with their humanist critics
at Renaissance courts) cleared the way for what continues to be represented in European
historiography as a profound gestalt switch in western approaches to conceptualizing,
comprehending, investigating and manipulating everything and anything in the natural world.
4.
A Third and Conclusive Conjuncture in the Global History of Knowledge Formation:
Western Scientific Revolution
Irreversible and fundamental change anticipated during the middle ages, came on stream
during the Renaissance and accelerated between the lives of Copernicus (1473-1543) and
Newton (1642-1727). 31 Around that time the intellectual, philosophical and cosmographical
foundations behind the extension and reconstruction of western regimes for the discovery,
development and diffusion of useful and reliable knowledge became radically transformed in
30
Lindberg and Numbers (eds.), God and Nature and Gaukroger, Emergence of Scientific Culture
T. K. Rabb, The Last Days of the Renaissance and the March to Modernity (New York) and D. C. Linberg and R. S.
Westman (eds.), Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 1990) and M. J. Osler (ed.) Rethinking the
Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, 2000).
31
15
scope and scale. This geographically bounded transformation continues to be represented by
many scholars, philosophers and sociologists as a conjuncture in global history of profound
significance for any narratives that seek to explain the last three to four centuries of
geopolitical, technological and economic divergence between Asia and Europe.32
Needless to say, historiographical claims for a conjuncture that has been portrayed as
reductively cognitive in character, demarcated as a discontinuity with the past, depicted as
basically western in its proximate origins, and linked to subsequent and divergent
developments in technology and power between Orient and Occident could not expect to
command a consensus among competing tribes of historians. On one side of an unresolved
debate the entire notion of a Scientific Revolution is regarded either as a Eurocentric and
anachronistic concept for the writing of global history or dismissed as merely tangentially
connected to the technological and economic rise of the west - which according to Pomeranz,
only became discernible about a century after the publication of Newton’s Principia
Mathematica in 1687.33 It has become necessary for global historians who opt to mark out this
period as a conclusive conjuncture locatable at the centre of metanarratives concerned with
long term material progress that they remain deferential towards, but unconstrained by, the
now voluminous scholarship published under that label in ongoing debates among historians of
western sciences, technologies, philosophies, and religions. Most will, however, be aware that
32
P. Dear, The Intelligibility of Nature: How Science Makes Sense of the World (Chicago, 2006) and Gellner, Plough,
Sword and Book.
33
H. Floris Cohen, The Scientific Revolution. A Historiographical Inquiry (Chicago, 1994); S. Shapin, The Scienfific
Revolution (Chicago 1996) and M. Oster (ed.), Science in Europe 1500-1800 (Basingstoke, 2002); Pomeranz, Great
Divergence
16
the representation of this period in European history as the conjuncture for divergence, does
not imply that: it came without eastern as well as western antecedents; that its tempo was
either revolutionary in pace or linear in trend; that the reordering of conceptions of the natural
world held by western elites was clear to educated and enlightened contemporaries of the day;
the conjuncture could be not represented as an immediate triumph for rational over religious
and/or hermetic modes of thought; that it became pervasive across Europe or finally
connected, directly without lags, to an ongoing process of technological change in the west.34
To circumvent further confrontation with now tedious political and moral aspersions global
historians will agree that variations in any society’s cognitive capacities to undertake potentially
useful investigations into the natural world are socially, politically and economically as well as
intellectually constructed. For global historians, the Scientific Revolution does not refer to a
“victory” of a progressive Europe over an unenlightened Asia, or the triumph of moderns over
ancients followed by some immediate and extensive uplift in scientific and technological
understandings, let alone an implicit claim for any neural superiority of western minds.35 What
34
The connexions (or conduits) to technologies have been discussed by economic historians for more than four
decades and the historiography is fully referenced in J. Mokyr’s The Gifts of Athena and his text book The Lever of
Riches. Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford, 1990). The connexions were traced decades ago
by M. Boas, The Scientific Renaissance, 1450-1630 (London, 1962) and have been fully elaborated by scholars of
Renaissance Italy. Vide: J. V. Field and F. A. S. L. James, Renaissance and Revolution. Humanists, Scholars,
Craftsmen and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993) and P. Long, Openness, Secrecy,
Authorship, Technical Arts and the Culture of Knowledge from Antiquity to Renaissance (Baltimore, 2001); B.
Ogilvie, The Science of Describing. Natural History in Renaissance Europe (Chicago, 2006)
35
L. Roberts, ‘Situating Science in Global History’ in Itineranio 33 (2009) pp. 1-18; D. Livingstone, Putting Science in
its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago, 2003) but see P. Kurz and T. Madigan (eds.) Challenges to
the Enlightenment. In Defence of Reason and Science (New York, 1994)
I have discussed postmodern and other objections to any form of engagement with comparative styles of global
history in P. O’Brien, ‘Historiographical traditions and moral imperatives for the restoration of global history’ in
17
is evident from a tide of theoretical discourse and wave of experiments that came discernibly
on stream in Europe (but evidently not elsewhere?) from the times when Copernicus, Versalius
and Libavius were constructing their seminal hypotheses for astronomy, medicine and
chemistry through to the times when Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Stahl and Malpighi had
published their research and extensions to fields contained within the domain of a reformed
natural philosophy is something approximating to a pronounced leap forward in the
perceptions, conceptions and confidence of its educated minorities that the natural world had
and could well become even more intelligible and manipulable for improvements to human
health and material welfare than their ancestors had ever imagined.36
Although it’s meaning, provenance and boundaries continues to be contested, historians
seeking to locate their research in a global framework may prefer to retain the Scientific
Revolution as a venerable and heuristic label for an interlude in European history, when
trajectories for the discovery, development and diffusion of useful and reliable knowledge
became more steeply inclined, more productive and potentially universal in their applications.
Trajectories have been plotted as lists of recognized contributions to the accumulation of
variegated, but systemic bodies of knowledge, maturing into specialized disciplines based upon
methods and paradigms for investigation, particular to demarcated problems, phenomena,
Journal of Global History 1 (1996) pp. 3-41; G. E. R. Lloyd, Cognitive Variations: Reflexions on the Unity and
Diversity of the Human Mind (Oxford, 2007).
36
Editors and authors of appraisals and reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution cited above might well agree with
this view which takes contemporary perceptions as the starting point for conceptualizing and historicizing this
period in European History. Vide Focus: ‘Thoughts on the Scientific Revolution’ in a special edition of the European
Review 15 (2007)pp. 439-512. Contemporary perceptions are the starting point for the classic modern texts in the
history of Science: I. B. Cohen, Revolution in Science (Cambridge, Mass, 1985); Hall, Revolution in Science and in
Rabb’s brilliant interpretation of the transitions of the 16th and 17th centuries – Rabb, Last Days of the Renaissance.
18
things and human bodies that have been traced by historians of modern sciences in retrospect
author by author, book by book and subject by subject.37 That body of scholarship certainly
leaves historians of knowledge formation in Europe with a firm impression that between 1543
and 1727, frontiers for speculation, theorizing and observations about the natural world were
extended within established and moved into new areas for investigation. Historians have also
recorded that many more educated and skilled Europeans became involved, networked and
attached to republics of letters, associations, societies and other institutions for the
advancement of such knowledge.38 The have traced pronounced discontinuities in the flows of
printed and better illustrated books, encyclopaedias, manuals and treatises of a proto-scientific
nature published over these years.39
Scholars with the credentials required to trace the evolution of modern sciences in retrospect
have recognized that an increased volume of seminal contributions towards the comprehension
of natural forces operating particularly in the celestial but also in terrestrial and biological
spheres of universe emerged from a line of famous European names active in, research in
astronomy, physics, mathematics, chemistry and medicine during this period. Nearly all of them
were committed Christians, fashioned themselves and presented their observations, theories
and discoveries as innovative. Of their times they nevertheless anticipated a different future
for mankind. They operated, in the words of their most famous promoter, Francis Bacon, as
37
G. E. R. Lloyd, Disciplines in the Making (Oxford, 2009) and Mokyr, Gifts of Athena.
S. Bedini (ed.) Patrons, Artisans and Instruments of Science (Aldershot, 1998); P. Rossi, Philosophy, Technology
and the Arts in the Early Modern Era (New York, 1970)
39
C. Mendelsohn (ed.) The Social Production of Scientific Knowledge (Dordrecht, 1997); D. Headrick, When
Information Comes of Age. Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason, 1700-1850 (Oxford, 2000)
38
19
participants in a loosely connected programme for the production of “a rich store house of
knowledge for the glory of God and the relief of man’s estate”. 40
Whatever historians of modern sciences might, in retrospect, expose post hoc about claims
made in the 16th and 17th centuries and since for their “innovatory” ideas that is how most
proto-scientists of the day saw themselves. It was, moreover, how they were perceived by
their opponents with vested interests in the preservation of established conceptions about the
physical universe, as well as by their “enlightened” patrons and supporters among Europe’s
elites – many of whom had been educated in classical natural philosophy.41
Furthermore, global historians will be less concerned than their colleagues specialized in tracing
the evolution of modern sciences with detecting truly innovative and potentially sustainable
ideas, that can in retrospect be validated as steps towards the consolidation of a
mathematically rigorous and physically plausible astronomy; or as experiments that unravelled
the properties of atmospheric pressure as a new source of energy. They may lack credentials to
understand the wider implications of laws of motion and gravity; or the role of mathematics as
a tool for the discovery of new knowledge. They can see the potential to be realised from the
experiments, of alchemists involved with separating, distilling, liquifying and compounding
organic and inorganic chemical substances. They will observe that improvements to bodily
health derivable from the anatomical dissections exposing circulations of blood and the
40
A. Perez-Ramos, Francis Bacon’s Idea of Science and the Makers Knowledge Tradition (Oxford, 1988) and Cohen,
Revolution in Sciences
41
Gascoigne, Science, Politics and Universities
20
interconnected functions of the human heart, lungs and other organs, matured very slowly.
They will recognise that the taxonomies formulated for the classification of ever extending
varieties of plants, animals, soils, rocks and other physical matter would only eventually provide
an ontological basis for theories of biological and geological evolution.42 Most global historians
might be content however, to restore and to retain an “older” view of the Scientific Revolution
as an explicable but fortuitous reordering of western Europe’s cosmography. That reordering
had profound ramifications for the construction of regimes for the formation, development and
diffusion of useful and reliable knowledge, which over time resituated trajectories upon which
systemic bodies of knowledge could be accumulated on more politically secure, better
endowed, socially elevated, spiritually acceptable and economically productive foundations.43
The accredited and impressive flow of innovations that came on stream during the 16th and 17th
centuries in this sphere of knowledge formation is, moreover, being represented by historians
of science as”potentially” highly significant rather than immediately seismic in character and
outcome44. Thus the meta-questions posed long ago by Max Weber and tackled in great depth
for China by Joseph Needham of why a conjuncture which marked the irreversible onset of an
accelerated trend towards the comprehension of the natural world occurred precociously when
it did to the west, rather than the east of Eurasia remains central for the unresolved concerns of
global economic history, with the origins of technological divergence.45
42
P. Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences (Basingstoke, 2001) and S. R. Jacobs, The Scientific Revolution. Aspirations
and Achievements (Atlantic Islands, 1999).
43
E. Zilsel, ‘The Genesis of the Concept of Scientific Progress’ in Journal of the History of Ideas (1945) pp. 325-99.
Zilsel’s view predates Butterfield’s classic text: H. Butterfield, The Origins of Modern Science (London, 1949).
44
R. Hall, Historical Essays on the Relations of Science, Technology and Medicine (Aldershot, 1994)
45
M. Weber, General Economic History (New York, 1950); M. Weber, The Religion of China (New York, 1951); M.
Weber, The Religion of India (New York, 1967); J. Needham, The Great Titration (Toronto, 1969). For a postmodern
21
In this essay there is only space to elaborate briefly upon a Eurocentered set of answers to the
question of why Europe alone passed by way of a Renaissance through a Scientific Revolution
between the stylized dates of 1543 and 1727? Since that revolution has been defined as a
cosmographical gestalt switch it could only have occurred through the displacement of a
traditional, established set of religious, pagan and (yes, let us include) hermetical set of
conceptions, theories and methods for investigations of the natural world by some alternative
set that over time became widely supported as superior. Claims to truth about the operations
of nature held by educated Christian elites suggest, however, that displacement had, already
been taken forward and upward to a plateau of possibilities through the restoration of classical
texts, Islamic knowledge and logical modes of reasoning into curricula for all forms of higher
education (including the study of theology) and conveyed mutatis mutandis in simplified and
memorable forms into the consciousness of aristocratic, plutocratic and professional elites.
Scholastic forms of Aristolean, Platonic and other ancient modes of thought (infused with and
clarified by Moslem ideas and commentaries) had over the centuries undermined appeals to
the authority about the operations of nature as revealed in the bible, the scriptures and the
writings and the lives of saintly theologians. Furthermore, while Christendom’s natural
philosophers conceded to the omnipotence of God the creator, they had virtually convinced the
secularized and politicized hierarchy of the Roman Church that (apart from the sanctity
surrounding doctrines concerning the trinity, the birth and resurrection of Christ, the eucharist,
view that regards the Scientific Revolution as a “myth about the inevitable rise to global domination of the west”
read the introduction to K. Park and D. L. Daston (eds.), Early Modern Science (Cambridge 2006) and the critiques
of such views in N. Koertge (ed.) A House Built on Sand: Exposing Postmodern Myths about Science (Oxford, 2000)
22
a plethora of episodic but intuitively implausible miracles) that God’s universe was designed on
principles that could be exposed by utilizing the methods for rational investigation outlined in
the expurgated texts of classical authors, particularly Ptolemy, Galen and above all others Aristotle.46 Their agenda had, moreover, been functional for diminishing the appeal of false
truth claims based upon rival hermetical modes of thought derived from ancient sages,
astrological signifiers, occult portents, magic, demonic and other supernatural forces offensive
to God and condemned as both heretical and “irrational” by his church.47
Evidence for the displacement of classical (largely Aristotlean) conceptions of the natural world
has been fully referenced by a library of influential texts that appeared basically within the
established realms of natural philosophy, alchemy (sic) and theology.48 Restored neo Platonic
and related hermetic traditions of writing as well as the revival of a rhetoric of humanism
appearing in the 16th century had contributed battalions of publications to what Jonathan Swift
evocatively referred to as the battle of the books. That literature has been well surveyed, and
evaluated as part of recent and heuristic extensions to traditional boundaries for the cultural
history of European science.49
46
P. Rossi, Philosophy, Technology and Arts and P. Rossi, The Birth of Modern Science (Oxford, 2000)
W. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature. Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton,
1994) and C. Sargah, The Demon-Haunted World. Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York, 1996); S. Westman
and J. E. McGuire (eds.), Hermeticism and the Scientific Revolution (Los Angeles, 1977)
48
Gaukroger, Emergence of a Scientific Culture, op. cit.; T. Sorrell (ed.), The Rise of Modern Philosophy. The
Tensions Between New and Traditional Philosophies from Machievelli to Leibniz (O.U.P. 1993) and R. S. Westfall,
Science and Religion in Seventeenth Century England (Ann Arbor, 1973).
49
W. R. Newman and A. Grafton (eds.) Secrets of Nature Astrology and Alchemy in Early Modern Europe
(Cambridge, Mass, 2001) and J. V. Field; F. A. J. L. James (eds.) Renaissance and Revolution; M. J. Osler, ‘Mixing
Metaphors: Science and Religion or Natural Philosophy and Theology in Early Modern Europe’ in History of Science,
March (1991) pp. 91-111; R. F. Jones, The Battle of the Books (St. Louis, 1936).
47
23
Prior to Newton’s death in 1727 the reordering of the education and cultures of western elites
was exemplified by a definitive reconfiguration and confinement of God’s role in the operations
of the natural world; the derogation of understandings of that world as printed in the canonical
texts of both roman and reformed Christian religions; and above all by a conceptual, empirical
and logical demolition (anticipated by medieval critiques) of beatified classical knowledge about
the universe and its observable properties and operations that was by the time of its final phase
of recovery and restoration during the Florentine Renaissance over 2000 years old. 50
Predictably many historians – bunkered in national archives, constrained by myopic
chronologies and antipathetic to any notion of macro discontinuity in modes of conceptualising,
comprehending and investigating the natural world that, for a brief interlude, was dominated
by the west – continue to contest and obfuscate the very notion of such a conjuncture. Their
references to antecedents eastern as well as western are well taken. Scepticism towards the
idea of a “revolution” that took the relatively short span of two centuries to run its course and
remained for a very long time concentrated in the consciousness of elites, and far longer to
trickle down into folk wisdoms, are, however, not tenable because commitment to novel ideas
from less than trustworthy intellectuals that could undermine religion and/or contradict
classical authorities could only have occurred gradually in pre-modern times. Furthermore,
educated elites with interests in the status quo continued to be the principal agents involved in
50
M. Feingold, The Jesuits and the Scientific Revolution (Princeton, 1997); W. O’Malley (ed.), The Jesuits:Cultures,
Sciences and the Arts 1540-1735, (London, 1999); Grant, History of Natural Philosophy; Lindberg and Westman
(eds.) Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution
24
patronizing the personnel and institutions behind the accumulation and diffusion of knowledge
leading to divergences in technological development, material progress and geopolitical power
that became visible after the death of Newton. Finally, assertions that significant areas of what
are now classified as modern scientific endeavours, such as chemistry, geology, botany,
medicine and engineering remained on systemic bases, that were only marginally improved any
innovatory contributions contained in the proto-scientific knowledge that appeared during the
16th and 17th centuries have been exposed as exaggerated by recent research into the plethora
of manuscripts, manuals, printed books and contemporary records of discourses in alchemy,
natural history, medicine and the mechanical arts.51
Again there will be no need to survey specialized debates here. Let us consider in general terms
what many (and possibly a majority, of educated Europeans) may well have read, considered
and believed about the intelligibility of nature following Iberian voyages of discovery;
Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, French, British and Scandinavian expansion overseas; the
intellectual vibrations of the Renaissance; the turmoil of the Reformation and the horrendous
catastrophes of religious warfare that occurred between the times of Luther and the peace of
Westphalia in 1648.
First and foremost they believed in a God who had created and designed his universe on
rational principles which he could, but rarely did, revoke at any time. Those principles were,
51
H. Selin (ed.), Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Medicine and Technology (Dordreeht, 1997); Gaukroger,
Emergence of a Scientific Culture; W. R. Newman, Atoms, Alchemy and Chymestry and the Experimental Origins of
the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 2006)
25
moreover, accessible to rational investigations, to explication and to potential manipulation for
geopolitical power and ultimately for the welfare of populations existing in poor states of
health, low levels of literacy on the margins of subsistence. For millennia before the Scientific
Revolution, people had lived in a world surrounded by an enormous variety of organic and
inorganic matter which they could see, touch, smell, understand with their senses, reflect upon
with their minds and systematize and store in many ways as useful knowledge.
Following Aristotle, other classical texts, and elaborations upon them by scholastic and moslem
philosophers, educated Europeans had for several centuries classified and comprehended an
extending proportion of such matter bit by bit in terms of its perceptible attributes, substances,
forms, colours and above all by way of the teleological purposes or functions of all natural
things contained within their specific environments.52 Change proceeded in stages that for a
reordering of cultures and comprehensions based upon common sense could never be short
sharp discontinuities. First came a Renaissance that in retrospect has been recognised as a
period of preparation for a Scientific Revolution.53 Then over the course of the 17th century,
Aristotleanism as an intuitively plausible conceptually satisfying and universal way of
understanding forces and phenomena in nature came under sustained and ultimately
successful attack from precursors, followers and developers of a Cartesian cosmography that
52
D. Levine, At the Dawn of Modernity. Biology, Culture and Material Life in Europe after the Year 1000 (Berkeley,
2001)
53
T. Rabb, The Last Days of the Renaissance op.cit.; C. B. Schmidt, The Aristotelean Tradition and Renaissance
Universities (London, 1984 and S. J. Schechner, Comets, Popular Culture and the Birth of Modern Cosmology
(Princeton, 1999). My comprehension of new cosmographies that preceded and developed between the times of
Copernicus and Newton has been greatly enriched by H. Floris Cohen’s magnus opus How Modern Science Came
into the World (Amsterdam, 2010).
26
historians of philosophy and science call mechanism and which culminated in the acceptance of
a Newtonian synthesis over the course of the 18th century. 54
“Mechanism” and related natural philosophies developed on the assumption that the best
way of including all the manifold organic and inorganic things observed in the world in one
universal and acceptable theory would be first to degrade Aristotlean, and other classical views
either as erroneous, superficial or useless. After a prolonged rhetorical and philological assault,
natural philosophers became free to construct and refine a radically different cosmography as a
foundational basis for the study of the natural world. Within this cosmography it was perceived
to be more rational, and potentially more useful, to conceive of everything in nature as
aggregations of particles at rest or in motion that could be described and predicted in
mathematical terms. Cartesians of several persuasions proclaimed that this new atomic theory
of the universe (with respected antecedents in Greek and Arab philosophy) constituted the best
of all possible representations of God’s creation and design. It would, they maintained,
stimulate all manner of enquiries into organic and inorganic matter. They wrote polemically in
order to move the dominant natural philosophy of Christendom forward from what they
asserted to be limited, opaque and unsystematic, classical and scholastic observations. They
parodied scholastic classifications, trivial disputes and ontologically unreal depictions of diverse
natural phenomena in terms of their purposes. To replace this hegemonic and piecemeal
teleological Aristotleonism, a famous line of natural philosophers (Beeckman, Mersenne,
Gassendii, Hobbes, Huygens, Rohault and pre-eminently Descartes) constructed a metaphysical
theory of the universe based on axioms that corpuscules, particles or atoms could be construed
54
Gaukroger, Emergence of a Scientific Culture; M. Jacobs, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West
(Oxford, 1997) and M. Jacob, The Scientific Revolution. A Brief History with Documents (New York, 2010)
27
to represent the composition, structure and motions of all natural phenomena. They
anticipated that such an operational, non-observable premise about the natural world,
together with the systematic deployment of a priori but logically compelling mathematical
models would lead, case by case, problem by problem to a wider, deeper and more useful
foundation for knowledge about all natural forces – including the operations of the human eyes
and body. God, most believed, and some prudentially added, had created a universe composed
of particles that clustered moved and interacted according to his rational designs to operate
like the mechanisms of a clock. Slowly but surely this meta theory with its evocative
metaphors, together with the cognitive imperialism of mathematics, overcame and displaced
both religious and beatified classical cosmographies for making nature intelligible and for
conducting and widening investigations into the operations of the natural world.55
In their explanations for the changes in the scale, scope and modes of conducting investigations
into that world that occurred during and following the Scientific Revolution historians have
accorded different weights and emphases to the circumvention of ecclesiastical authority
coupled to its reigning Aristotlean cosmology based upon commonsense, syllogistic logic, the
taxonomical, and intuitive appeal of teleological thought by another metaphysical theory. That
theory posited that all observable changes in the natural world could be explained as the
motions of unseen particles that could, moreover, be exemplified by deploying novel and more
55
Cohen, How Modern Science Came into the World, Dear, Revolutionizing the Science M. Osler, Divine Will and
Mechanical Philosophy. Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (Cambridge,
1994)
28
rigorous forms of mathematics.56 Nevertheless, among Western Europeans (and for entirely
explicable historical reasons that remain under programmes of investigation only among
Europeans?) this image, metaphor or cosmography of a mechanistic universe constructed by
their very own divine clockmaker or geometer that could be modelled mathematically became
intelligible, plausible, acceptable and matured over time into folk wisdom and a secular religion
for the west. Gradually it served to promote more extensive and ultimately more instrumental
investigations and controlled experiments into the operating of the natural world than,
anything derivable from its displaced Aristotlean and other classical predecessors.57
Europe’s new cosmography retained (indeed in some ways strengthened) a belief in the divine
origins of the universe which satisfied the spiritual needs of Christians. With God in place as as
the ultimate cause, then initially in a Cartesian form and, by the 18 th century, as a Newtonian
synthesis of mathematical axioms with controlled experimental methods it became acceptable
as the foundation for the construction of more directly related, systemic paradigms and
procedures for research within which western physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine, botany,
biology, geology, mechanics and other sciences developed, proliferated and operated during
and over the two centuries that followed the Scientific Revolution. Fortuitously but fortunately
mechanistic vocabularies and metaphors also appealed to engineers and artisans.58
56
Perhaps because the displacement owed more to Descartes than Newton who never endorsed the
corpuscularian theory of the natural world – Dear, Revolutionizing the Sciences, and Gaukroger who concludes his
study of the Emergence of a Scientific Culture before the publication of the Principia.
57
Cohen, How Modern Science Came into the World and Dear, Intelligibility of Nature
58
R. Friedel, A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millenium (Cambridge, Mass, 2007); Hall,
Essays on the Relations of Science, Technology and Medicine; D. Landes, Revolution in Time. Clocks and the Making
of the Modern World (Cambs, 1983)
29
Furthermore and following the advocacy of Francis Bacon, and leads taken by a line of famous
Renaissance men (architects, engineers and humanist projectors) as well as the acclaimed
examples of Galileo, Hooke, Boyle, Beekmans, Huygens and Newton more and more
“scientists” active during this period began to reflect upon, consolidate and to unify their form
of knowledge, traditionally included under the prestigious label of natural philosophy, with the
mundane practices of mechanics, craftsmen, artisans, doctors, alchemists and other
practitioners more directly engaged with the manipulation of natural forces for practical
political and commercial purposes. 59
Many of the famous scientists of the period visited arsenals, foundries, workshops and engaged
in praxis. Some appreciated how indebted they were to “humble” craftsmen for the
development of a range of instruments, devices and experimental apparatus that made
innovations possible and in effect validated their hypotheses.60 In these and other ways, praxis,
mathematical models, mechanistic philosophies and clock-like metaphors operated as a more
powerful stimuli for promotion of technological progress than Aristotle’s counter- productive
separation of knowledge between episteme and techne as well as his organic conceptions of
nature and teleological methods for its investigation had been or might have become.
In the retaining Scientific Revolution as a heuristic label for the radical reordering of the
cultures of European elites who were educated in natural philosophy, revered mathematics but
59
Rossi, Birth of Modern Science; D. B. Meli, Thinking with Objects: Mechanics in the Seventeenth Century
(Baltimore, 2006); Hilaire-Perez, ‘Dissemination of Technical Knowledge’
60
Roberts, Mindful Hand; Bedini, Patrons, Artisans and Instruments of Science
30
remained deeply serious about their religious beliefs, top weight should be accorded to the
contributions made by mathematical astronomers to an understanding of a quasi spiritual
celestial sphere of the universe through which they and their patrons hoped to pass through en
route to heaven. With indispensible assistance from the development of telescopes and
micrometers they clearly degraded Aristotle’s errors about voids above and mountains on the
moon. A famous line of astronomers (Copernicus, Kepler, Brahe, Galileo and Newton) observed
that the heavens contained an infinite number of stars and satellites, comets and planets. They
published mathematical proofs that planets (including man’s own planet, earth) were,
propelled along routes that circled the sun by moving in predictable response to Newton’s
mysterious physical force - gravity that operated in terms of divine laws of motion in both the
celestial and terrestrial spheres of the universe and could be represented by a parsimonious,
accessible and ultimately convincing mathematical formula. 61 Earth’s route in space, time and
its position in relation to other planets and the stars could be mapped and predicted with
increasing precision that proved to be useful, not simply for the refutation of all pervasive
astrological fantasies, for marking the seasons or constructing calendars but for the potentially
more valuable purposes of navigating the oceans.62 As ecclesiastical hierarchies (protestant as
well as catholic) recognised the new astronomy represented vivid threats to canonical
interpretations of the universe. But astronomers circumvented the dangers associated with
heresy by presenting their models and theories as congruent with God’s creation and design.
By the mid 17th century their discoveries had become famous as an inspirational (or fearsome)
61
Schechner, Comets, Popular Cultures and the Birth of Modern Cosmology
T. S. Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought
(Cambridge, Mass, 1957) and C. Wilson, Astronomy from Kepler to Newton (Aldershot, 1989)
62
31
portent for science and the irrestible rise in the prestige of mathematical forms of natural
philosophy associated with Archimedes, Kepler, Galileo and Newton. 63
Finally, the discourse and controversies at the core of the Scientific Revolution culminated in a
consensual view that had been long debated among generations of natural philosophers
concerned with procedures for the validation of claims to truth about the attributes and
operations of natural phenomena. For example, many claims based on accepted truths (but
left undefined as sacred by ecclesiastical hierarchies) that were nevertheless published in the
bible and in other in canonical texts of the Christian religion could be reconfigured as allegorical
or prudentially set aside. At the same time ancient and previously venerated classical
authorities could be undermined as outdated, weakened by ever increasing flows of systematic
observations, defeated by logical arguments especially by those elaborated in rigorous
mathematical forms displayed by Kepler, Galileo and Newton. As time went on they could be
degraded by demonstrations based upon transparent experiments that moved anatomy
towards physiology and alchemy into controlled experiments in chemistry, medicine towards
biomedicine, the mathematics of motion towards mechanics and the latent potential of
atmospheric pressure towards steam power.64
63
D. C. Lindberg and R. L. Numbers (eds.) When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago, 2003) and A. Cromer,
Uncommon Sense. The Heretical Nature of Science (Oxford, 1995); R. Olson, Science Deified and Science Defiled.
The Historical Significance of Science in Western Culture, Vol. 2 (Berkeley, 1990)
64
Russo, Forgotten Revolution; R. Olson, Science Deified and Science Defiled and M. Jacob, The Cultural Meaning of
the Scientific Revolution (New York, 1988) and D. Cardwell, ‘Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century’ in
History of Science 1 (1962) pp. 30-43
32
To sum up: core features of the Scientific Revolution as it proceeded in the west between the
times of Copernicus and Newton are no longer be located in any comprehensive range of
dramatic and innovative breakthroughs in knowledge about the properties and operations of
wide ranges of natural phenomena. Clearly there were some like planetary motion that had
profound and relatively rapid cultural outcomes.65 The re-discovery of a new and ultimately
highly significant source of energy, atmospheric pressure, that flowed from a long sequence of
controlled experiments following the translation of Heron’s classical treatise into latin in 1571
and the demolition of Aristotlean rejections of the vacuum and Galen’s reification of the liver
must surely count as leaps forward ?66 Connexions between alchemy and chemistry, anatomy
and medical science are, moreover, being revised and included as part of the Revolution.
Recent research into the writings of a plethora of major and minor figures actively engaged
with unscientific and possibly disreputable branches of early modern knowledge such as
alchemy and astrology, as well as the praxis of primitive anatomy, hopeful pharmacology and
improbable cures for specified diseases has brought to our attention an impressive list of
innovators and innovations that now appear in comprehensive histories tracing evolutions
towards chemistry, astronomy, physiology and biochemical medicine.67 Some of these
neglected scholars aspired to fashion their practices, experiments and know how in the
vocabularies of Cartesian and Newtonian theories and natural philosophies and to wrap them
65
J. North, Astronomy and Cosmology (London, 1994) and H. Margelis, It Started with Copernicus. How Turning the
World Inside Out Led to the Scientific Revolution (New York, 2002)
66
I. Inkster (ed.), Special Issue of History of Technology 25 (2004) on the steam engine
67
B. Moran, Distilling Knowledge. Alchemy, Chemistry and the Scientific Revolution (Cambridge, Mass, 2005) and
Lindberg and Western, Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution and J. Golinski, Science as Public Culture: Chemistry
and Enlightenment in Britain 1762-1820 (Cambridge, 1992)
33
in a mantle of systematic quantification.68 Others conducted anatomical dissections that
degraded the almighty Galen’s classical authority about the organs of the human body. 69 Most
continued to observe, to count, to experiment with minerals, salts, acids, sulphurs, mercuries,
alum and other substances which they melted, cooled, compounded, distilled, fermented and
generally transmuted into metals, dyes, medicines and other products of value and utility. 70
Too many represented this potentially useful knowledge and praxis in all kinds of mysterious,
magical and mystical ways in order to sell themselves and their products to the credulous
consumers of early modern Europe. 71
Latterly, historians have recognised that these arcane traditions steeped in curiosity as well as
fantasy and fraud were engaged with methods for acquiring natural knowledge that anticipated
the transparent and proto-type controlled experiments of modern science. They have revealed
how alchemists, herbalists, numerologists, even astrologers, added to and diffused flows of
useful data that served wider and deeper possibilities for the long run development of systemic
knowledge in botany, chemical science, biochemical medicine, engineering and eventually
biology. 72 Thus, post hoc re-examinations by historians of such flows of potentially useful
knowledge coupled with the spread of semi efficient and transparent methods for the
controlled investigations of the natural world have exposed tributaries of the Scientific
68
A. W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality, Quantifications and Western Society (Cambridge, 1997)
H. Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime (Ithaca, 1986)
70
Newman, Atoms and Chemistry: R. Starkey, Boyle and the Fate of Helmontian Chemistry (Chicago 2002)
71
G. E. R. Lloyd, Demystifying Mentalities (Cambridge, 1990)
72
S. McKnight (ed.), Pseudo Science and Utopianism in Early Modern Thought (Columbia, 1992); Newman and
Grafton, Secrets of Nature; Kuhn made this point in 1976: T. Kuhn, ‘Mathematical vs. Experimental Traditions in the
Development of Physical Science’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 7 (1976) pp. 1-31
69
34
Revolution that a historiography concentrated upon histories of celestial and terrestrial physics
had neglected to include as an integral part of that important conjuncture in global history.73
In recent historiography the Scientific Revolution is emerging as something less than a short,
sharp discontinuity in the accumulation of scientific knowledge and more of a profound
conjuncture locatable for its time in European history when methods for the discovery,
development, testing, diffusion and presentation of such knowledge were being gradually but
systematically transformed. It is also being plausibly represented as a period when the
dispositions of Europe’s ruling classes, the cultures of aristocratic, plutocratic and even
ecclesiastical elites became more hospitable, even promotional toward the reconstruction of
cosmographies and institutions for the production of useful and reliable knowledge. In the
fullness of time those “regimes” spawned disciplines (physics, chemistry, engineering, geology,
biology, botany, pharmacology, agronomy) producing new forms of energy (steam and
electrical power) as well as the systemic bodies of knowledge required to promote and assist in
the conception and construction of improved technologies for agriculture, industry, commerce,
transportation, health, human welfare and alas, the endemic resort to warfare and imperialism
by the western states.
Of course, the conjuncture, long labelled as the Scientific Revolution which demoted religions
displaced classical views and degraded hermetic beliefs on how to comprehend and investigate
73
L. Stewart, The Rise of Public Science. Rhetoric Technology and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain
(Cambridge, 1992)
and B. Moran (ed.) Patronage and Institutions. Science, Technology and Medicine at the European Court
(Woodridge, 1991)
35
the natural world did not emanate merely from a transformation in Europe’s cosmography. Its
deeper intellectual origins have been properly located in Indian, Chinese, Arab and Persian
thought. Although its medieval antecedents can be traced back to Christian monotheism and
positioned in the study of natural philosophy and theology, it was also linked to praxis and
fields for investigation grouped under disreputable labels such as alchemy, astronomy and craft
secrets. Powers vested in traditional ecclesiastical institutions to resist more rational and
ultimately more instrumental investigations into natural phenomena had to be circumvented,
circumscribed and ultimately replaced by a regime with greater potential to promote
transitions into modern forms of science.
Yet and despite its famous sequence of innovations, its manifestations in the form of seminal
books, documentation from republics of letters, papers delivered to associations of professional
and learned men, cosmographical displacement and institutional change could not occur simply
as an outcome of an intellectual discourse confined to an arcane quasi autonomous realm of
natural philosophy. Familiar and major historical forces peculiar to Western Europe are also
chapters in any narrative that seeks to explain the location, timing, trajectory and momentum
of its precocious Scientific Revolution. For example, early attacks on the pretensions towards
claims to truth emanating from religious sources and classical phenomena contained in worlds
beyond Europe have been plausibly connected to new information, observations and artefacts
that flowed back into European maritime cities following from the voyages of discovery and
commerce initiated by the Portuguese as early as 1415.
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Intellectual assaults on Aristotleanism was part of the process. Nevertheless religious and
canonical based authority could have been weakened more severely by the Reformation which
effectively destroyed the control of the Roman Catholic hierarchy over theological beliefs and
moral codes (including by extension its “repressive tolerance” towards views about the natural
world) for a large protestant segment of the European intelligentsia.74 Five centuries after the
outbreak of reformation it has now, however, become clear that most of the protestant
churches and sects which emerged out of the turmoil unleashed by Martin Luther displayed no
greater tolerance than the Roman hierarchy towards the claims of rational compared to
revealed truths or faith.75 Historians who continue to evoke protestant origins for modern
science seem to be a declining into a minority even if it can be plausibly claimed that the
Reformation had left Europe without a single hierarchical authority capable of enforcing flexible
but orthodox, monolithic and acceptable views of nature across the length and breadth of the
continent. 76 Was it not the barbaric and highly destructive wars of religion which continued on
and off down to the peace of Westphalia in 1648 that pushed many Europeans (Catholics and
Protestants alike) towards states of anxiety and stands of scepticism towards the claims to truth
and authority from all religious hierarchies.77 By then the latter had anyway lost a great deal of
power to proscribe on philosophical as well as moral matters to secular rulers, whose interests
74
U. Rublack, Reformation Europe (Cambridge, 2005).
75
M. Bagioli (ed.) The Science Studies (Reader) (New York, 1999); W. O. Malley (ed.) The Jesuit Cultures, Sciences
and the Arts 1540-1735; M. Feingold (ed.) Jesuit Science and the Republic of Letters
76
I. B. Cohen (ed.), Puritanism and the Rise of Modern Science. The Merton Thesis (London, 1990). Peter Harrison
links the advance of science to biblical based doctrines about the fall of man: P. Harrison, The Fall of Man and the
Foundations of Science (Cambridge, 2007).
77
R. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Savonarola to Boyle (Oxford, 2003)
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lay in harnessing useful knowledge to serve political, geopolitical and economic ends rather
than moral or spiritual purposes.
In short, the ground for the displacement of a religious and classical cosmography by another
and potentially more productive way of conceiving, comprehending and manipulating the
natural world had been well prepared by Iberian, Dutch, French and British reconnaissances,
commerce and imperialism overseas, by humanist attacks on the sterility of scholasticism and
by a Reformation that unleashed truly horrendous episodes of religious warfare. For historians
currently seeking global perspectives Europe’s Scientific Revolution can be plausibly retained as
a conjuncture in history of profound significance for the welfare of mankind. On the
assumption that over the long run histories of sciences and technologies can be heuristically
integrated it could also become the core chapter for metanarratives dealing with technological
and economic divergence. Even so the mega question posed decades ago by three great
scholars in modern global history (Max Weber, Marshal Hodgson and Joseph Needham) of why
it occurred to the west rather than the east of Eurasia and during a time of intensified upheaval
and violence, remains, however, as a problem that only a book length narrative embodying
reciprocal comparisons between Western Europe, India, China, Byzantium, Japan and above all,
Islamdom could seriously and comprehensively address Meanwhile this survey has attempted
to use an awesome bibliography of secondary literature from European history to construct a
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negotiable narrative that restores the Scientific Revolution in the West to a place of significance
and debate for history that aspires to be global. 78
78
A. Bala, The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science (New York, 2006). For a recent text that is
explicitly comparative vide: Huff, Intellectual Curiosities and the Scientific Revolution
39