Knowledge and Power

Science in World History

William Burns

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351787581
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

Knowledge and Power presents and explores science not as something specifically for scientists, but as an integral part of human civilization, and traces the development of science through different historical settings from the Middle Ages through to the Cold War.

Five case studies are examined within this book: the creation of modern science by Muslims, Christians and Jews in the medieval Mediterranean; the global science of the Jesuit order in the early modern world; the relationship between "modernization" and "westernization" in Russia and Japan from the late seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century; the role of science in the European colonization of Africa; and the rivalry in "big science" between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Each chapter includes original documents to further the reader's understanding, and this second edition has been enhanced with a selection of new images and a new chapter on Big Science and the Superpowers during the Cold War.

Since the Middle Ages, people have been working in many civilizations and cultures to advance knowledge of, and power over, the natural world. Through a combination of narrative and primary sources, Knowledge and Power provides students with an understanding of how different cultures throughout time and across the globe approached science. It is ideal for students of world history and the history of science.

1 Science in the Medieval Mediterranean

Today science is practiced across the globe, and communication between scientists in different countries is quick, particularly with the rise of the Internet. Language barriers still exist, but are much less important than ever before, as English has become the international language of science. In the Middle Ages, the period roughly from the rise of Islam in the seventh century CE to the beginning of European global expansion in the fifteenth century, scientific communication, like communication in general, was slow and often required expertise in two or even three languages. Scientific works were laboriously written and copied by hand, on rare and expensive media. Out of the cultural matrix of the Mediterranean, however, modern science was formed in the contact between civilizations.

Barriers to scientific communication were not merely linguistic. They were also cultural and religious. The three principal civilizations of the medieval Mediterranean were the Latin Christians, the Greek-speaking Byzantine Christians, and the Arabic-speaking Muslims. Each of the societies also had a Jewish population, in them but not of them. In order for science to cross into different civilizations, it had to overcome the hostility between them. The wars of the Byzantines and Arabs went back to the early days of Islam. The twelfth century, in which the earlier trickles of Greek and Arab learning to the Latin West began to swell to a flood, was also the period of the crusades and the Spanish Reconquista, the slow process by which Christians regained territories they had lost to Muslims in the eighth century. An army of Latin Christians, the “Fourth Crusade,” sacked the Greek capital, Constantinople, in 1204. However, there was interchange and cooperation among Muslims, Jews, and Greek and Latin Christians. Within the warring world, the transmission of knowledge continued.

The principal areas for the development of Western science and medicine in the Middle Ages were the Islamic world and, beginning in the late eleventh century, the Latin West. Both areas built on the tradition of ancient Greek natural philosophy and medicine. The ancient authors: Ptolemy in astronomy, astrology, and geography; Galen and Hippocrates in medicine; Euclid, Archimedes, and Apollonius in mathematics; and Aristotle (along with works falsely ascribed to him) in logic (or dialectic), biology, and natural philosophy underlay medieval science.

Classical Science in the Islamic World

From the eighth to the tenth centuries, the dominant military and economic power in the Mediterranean world was the Islamic Caliphate. The initial Islamic invasions of the mid-seventh century had destroyed the Persian Empire and taken much of the Middle East, North Africa, and Egypt from the Byzantine Empire. Stretching from the Pyrenees on the present-day border of France and Spain to the Pamir Mountains in Central Asia, the Caliphate was a space for an unprecedented mixing of global cultures, including scientific and mathematical traditions. Although the science produced in the Caliphate and its successor states and societies is often referred to as “Arab” or “Islamic,” such designations oversimplify the complex mixture that was early medieval Middle Eastern society. Many practitioners were not of Arab descent, and Christians of various sects and Jews, as well as Muslims, participated in science. What universally characterized this science were the Arabic language and its foundations in the Greek tradition.

The areas conquered by the Caliphate in the Middle East possessed scientific traditions, although they were no longer nearly as active as they had been centuries earlier. The most important tradition was that of Greece, dating back to the sixth century BCE and building on the science of the Ancient Near East, particularly Mesopotamia and Egypt. The Greek tradition had strengths in several areas, including natural philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, and medicine. With the expansion of Greek culture following the conquests of Alexander the Great, Greek science had spread to the Middle East, where the city of Alexandria in Egypt became one of its major centers. Although the Romans had defeated the distant successors of Alexander and incorporated several of their kingdoms into the Roman Empire, the dominant culture and science of the Middle East remained Greek until well after the Islamic conquests.

The desire to explore and eventually expand this scientific tradition was driven in part by Islam itself, which endorsed the seeking of knowledge as a religious duty. Several of the reputed sayings of Muhammad, such as “Seek knowledge, though it be as far away as China,” called on Muslims to learn and investigate. Islamic religious obligations also raised specific scientific questions. Muslims are required to pray in the direction of Mecca, known as the qibla, which made ascertaining it urgent for Muslims wishing to worship. Many of the advances in trigonometry in Islamic culture were driven by the problem of determining the shortest distance between two points, Mecca and the position of the worshipper, on the surface of a spherical Earth. (The roundness of the Earth was common knowledge in both Islamic and Christian lands.) Muslims were also enjoined to pray five times a day at set times, which made timekeeping important. Eventually, timekeepers would be attached to mosques as permanent officials. Astronomers also determined the proper dates of holidays and the holy month of Ramadan on Islam’s lunar calendar.

However, not all motives driving curiosity about the natural sciences were religious. Astrology was denounced by some Islamic religious authorities, who argued that belief in the power of the stars insulted God’s omnipotence, but it still attracted great interest among Muslims. Many astronomers also worked as astrologers, although the religious condemnation of astrology helped keep astronomy and astrology as separate disciplines. Medicine was also an important discipline in early Islam, and many of the important Arabic philosophers and scientists were physicians. Mathematics, technology, and engineering, used for building, navigation, irrigation, and numerous other necessary functions were also allied to science.

A society wishing to explore an alien scientific tradition has two choices. It can learn the language that the science is written in or it can translate the alien scientific works into its own. The Romans had adopted the first strategy. Romans interested in Greek science learned Greek, and little advanced Greek science was translated into Latin. This meant that when knowledge of Greek was lost in much of the Latin West after the end of the Roman Empire in the West, so too was the knowledge of advanced science. The first translators in the Islamic world adopted the second strategy, fostering translation from Greek and other languages into Arabic and, in doing so, creating a new Arabic scientific vocabulary. (And indirectly, much of the Western scientific vocabulary as well.) The Arabs took pride in their tongue, which in the early days of the Islamic Empire was the language of the sacred book of Islam, the Quran, as well as of an established poetic tradition, but not yet of science. Arabic was particularly useful as an ecumenical language that transcended local regions because it was intimately connected with Islam. Rather than being translated into numerous languages, the Quran was (and is) thought authentic only in its original Arabic. Schools of Arabic have flourished throughout the Islamic world to the present day. Although many of the peoples incorporated into the Caliphate kept their own day-to-day languages, Arabic spread as a learned and religious language among the elite and among converts to Islam. Eventually, even Christian and Jewish writers within lands dominated by Muslims used it.

While translations from Latin to Arabic were rare and had no particular importance for the history of science, ancient Greek thought shaped the Arabic intellectual world through the translations and other activities of the Bayt al-Hikma, the “House of Wisdom,” founded in Baghdad by the Abbasid Caliph al-Mamun (reign 813–833) around the year 832. Initially an expansion of the caliphal library, the House of Wisdom drew upon the massive resources of the Abbasid Empire in scientific manuscripts and expertise, which an earlier caliph, al-Mansur (reign 754–775), had added to through gifts of Greek manuscripts from the Byzantine emperor. It was the initial center of a translating effort that brought hundreds of Greek philosophical, scientific, and medical texts and commentaries, as well as Syriac and Indian works, into Arabic. In addition to Ptolemy, Galen, and Aristotle, the geometer Euclid, the physician Hippocrates, and the botanist Dioscorides were all translated into Arabic, along with a voluminous mass of Greek commentaries on Aristotle. The Bayt al-Hikma also was a center for making copies of the new translations, a very important task in a manuscript culture.

Much of the work of the Bayt al-Hikma and other early translation centers was done by members of a particular religious minority, the Assyrian Church of the East, the so-called Nestorian Christians. The Church of the East had split off from the Christian Churches of Constantinople and Rome over theological issues in the fifth century. As a persecuted religious minority within the Christian Roman Empire, they had a long-standing affinity for loyalty to tolerant non-Christian rulers, such as most of the early caliphs. The church had established educational institutions at the town of Nisibis (in present-day southeastern Turkey) under the pre-Islamic Sassanian Persian Empire, and its intellectual traditions continued into the Caliphate. Familiar with the Greek language yet holding no loyalty to the Byzantine Christian Empire, Nestorians were in an excellent position to lead the translation effort.

Not all the translations made into Arabic were traceable to the Greek tradition. India, which also bordered on the Caliphate, had a rich body of scientific texts. An astronomical work was translated from Sanskrit to Arabic as early as 732. Although Arab scientists and physicians ultimately preferred to build on Greek rather than Indian scientific traditions, Arab, and eventually Western, mathematics and science benefited immeasurably from the adoption, improvement, and standardization of the Indian system of decimal numerals. The Indian numerals were far easier to use than previous numbering systems such as Roman numerals or the Greek use of letters of the alphabet for numerals. The new system, known to the Arabs as “Hindu,” became known in the West as “Arabic.” Some Indian arithmetic, such as elements of what al-Khwarizmi (died ca. 850), a mathematician who worked at the House of Wisdom, called al-Jabr (algebra), were also imported into the Islamic world, and eventually absorbed into the mainstream of Islamic mathematics.

From Greek to Islamic Science

Baghdad was transformed in 762 into the capital of a new dynasty of caliphs, the Abbasids, who had come to power in 750. As the Caliphate established itself, it adopted a more eastern orientation, toward Persia and Central Asia and away from the Mediterranean. The Abbasids eventually lost control over their western territories. In the tenth century, new Islamic Caliphates were established in Egypt and Spain. Following the Abbasid precedent, the Fatimids of Egypt and the Umayyads of Spain viewed the patronage of learning and translation as part of their cultural program. They established massive manuscript libraries in their capitals of Cairo and Cordoba. This westward diffusion would be particularly important in making Arabic science available to Western Europeans.

Figure 1.1 Astrolabe, Arabic navigational instrument, thirteenth century.

Ancient Art and Architecture/Alamy Stock Photo.

Sciences drawn from the ancient Greek and other pre- and nonIslamic traditions were known as “foreign sciences” or “ancient sciences.” They were distinguished from “Islamic sciences,” which included such studies as Sharia (Islamic law), Quranic interpretation, Arabic grammar, and similar disciplines. Islamic sciences always had far more institutional support and cultural prestige than ancient sciences, although many scholars were viewed as experts in both.

Medieval Islamic thinkers, notably Ibn Sina (980–1037) and Ibn Rushd (1128–1198), known in the West as Avicenna and Averroes respectively, further developed and systematized Greek thought, as well as introducing innovations. Ibn Sina and Ibn Rushd were both physicians, a common career choice for scientists in the Islamic world. Areas in which thinkers in Islamic-dominated areas (who included Muslims, Jews, and Christians) were able to significantly advance on the Greeks included mathematics, optics, and astronomy. Arab astronomers had the most sophisticated astronomical theories and techniques in the medieval world, as well as the most accurate body of astronomical observations available in the West before the late sixteenth century. Astronomical observatories, buildings with a good location for viewing the stars and possessing a variety of expensive astronomical equipment, were themselves an Islamic invention. The first was the observatory at Baghdad, built by al-Mamun around 828. It became common for rich rulers in the Muslim world to found observatories and sometimes to take an interest in astronomy themselves. Among the greatest was the observatory founded by the Mongol Il-khans of Persia at Maragha in 1259, which brought together the leading astronomers of the Islamic world and a library of manuscripts looted when the Mongols had taken Baghdad and other major Islamic centers. Islamic astronomers became increasingly conscious of the flaws and contradictions in Ptolemaic astronomy and made many innovations within the Ptolemaic system, while not challenging the Earth-centered universe of Ptolemy and other Greek astronomers and natural philosophers. The superiority of Islamic astronomy was recognized by other civilizations; not only did the Latin Westerners eagerly acquire Arabic treatises, but the Chinese Empire established an “Islamic department” within the Bureau of Astronomy. As late as the eighteenth century, the Indian Hindu ruler Jai Singh built an observatory on the Islamic model.

The Arabs, notably al-Kindi (died 873), one of the earliest scholars associated with the Baghdad House of Wisdom, and the astronomer, mathematician, and religious scholar Ibn al-Haytham (965–1040), known in the West as Alhazen, also went far beyond the Greeks in optics, mechanics, and mathematics. (Al-Haytham was the first to describe a camera obscura.) Much of the modern mathematical vocabulary is derived from Arabic, including “algebra” and “algorithm.” The term “algebra” comes from the title of a book by Muhammad Ton Musa al-Khwarizmi, Al-Kitab al-muhtasar fi hishb al-gabr wa-l-muqabala (The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing), written around 820. With their development of algebra, Arabic mathematicians broke with the Greek tradition, in which the dominant element in mathematics was geometry, and laid the foundation for modern mathematics.

Greek and Arab Medicine

Medicine was greatly developed by Islamic practitioners and theorists. There was a medicine indigenous to Islam, the so-called “Medicine of the Prophet.” This was a systematization of Quranic verses and hadiths, or sayings ascribed to Muhammad and his Companions, that related to medical issues. The Medicine of the Prophet was the first text studied by Muslim medical students, but it dealt with a limited range of issues, such as recommending cold water for fevers, and did not provide a theoretical framework.

Figure 1.2 Avicenna’s Canon.

Image courtesy of The National Library of Medicine/Public Domain.

This gap was filled by translations from the Greek and, to a lesser extent, the Indian medical tradition. Early Arabic medical writers (many of them Christian) built on the medicine of Jundishapur, a medical center in southwestern Iran established by the pre-Islamic Sassanian rulers of Persia in the sixth century CE. In this city, Greek, Persian, and Indian medical traditions met. Jundishapur’s medical community was not at first greatly affected by the Islamic conquests, but dwindled as the Abbasid caliphs drew more of the leading physicians to their new capital at Baghdad. Choices made by the Arab translators would influence the development of medical theory in both the Islamic and Latin worlds for centuries. Galenism, founded by the second century CE Greek physician Galen, had been only one of several competing schools of medical thought in the Roman Empire, but by translating over a hundred Galenic texts into Arabic, the House of Wisdom ensured it would dominate medicine in the Islamic world and eventually the West for centuries. Although the Arabs did not initiate a new theoretical framework for medicine, they made great advances in pharmacology and surgery. Medieval Islamic civilization also developed physicians who were among the leading philosophers of their time, whether Muslims like Ibn Rushd or Ibn Sina or Jews like Moses Maimonides (1138–1204). Arabic-speaking physicians pioneered the creation of systematic compendia of medicine. Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine was the most complete and best organized treatment of Galenic medicine available anywhere, and became the standard medical text in both the Islamic and Latin Christian world.

Greco-Arab Science in the Medieval Latin West

The Latin West in the early Middle Ages (ca. 600–1000) was too poor and rural to produce significant science and theoretical medicine. After most of Latin Europe lost the ability to read Greek, what was left was the Bible in Latin translation, biblical commentaries that dealt with natural science, and a few copies of the voluminous but unsystematic and uncreative Latin works of Roman and a few early medieval compilers, such as Pliny the Elder’s Natural History or the encyclopedic writings of Isidore of Seville (died 636). What little investigation did take place was driven by religious considerations. Like Islam, Christianity posed some technical problems that led to scientific investigation. The problem of fixing the date of Easter attracted many of Europe’s leading minds and led to the development of a form of calendar reckoning known as the “Computus.” However, these efforts did not extend to an interest in science in general outside religious applications.

The revival of Western science can be traced to the growing prosperity of the West in the eleventh century. New technologies increased agricultural production. The age of barbarian invasions finally ended with the conversion of the last barbarian invaders, the Magyars from Central Asia who settled in Hungary and the Vikings of Scandinavia. More people had the time and leisure to explore scientific matters. Ancient Roman and early medieval writings in Latin were read in monasteries and taught in “cathedral schools,” the dominant institutions of higher education before the rise of the university in the late twelfth century. The curriculum of the cathedral schools was dominated by the Seven Liberal Arts, a grouping of arts and sciences handed down from antiquity. They were “liberal” because they befitted a free man or liber homo. The liberal arts consisted of the trivium (literally the plac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• 1 Science in the Medieval Mediterranean
• 2 The Jesuits and World Science, 1540–1773
• 3 Westernization, “Modernization,” and Science in Russia and Japan, 1684–1860s
• 4 Africa in the Age of Imperialism and Nationalism, 1860–1960
• 5 Big Science, the Superpowers, and the Cold War
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index