Science and Civilisation in China

"I love this book. I have a personal, emotional investment in it because I read it in my teens and it was just such a revelation to have a book that was so broad in its scope and so sharp in its vision. And of course it’s written by a biochemist, not by a professional historian. It’s rather chastening to think of how someone coming from outside the discipline can bring that freshness of perspective, that innovative insight that isn’t always easily attained by people who’ve been through the historical treadmill and been browbeaten into agreeing with their own teachers. So it was a very fresh and new kind of book for me. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Although it’s called Science and Civilization in China and is therefore focusing on just one part of the world, it’s a genuinely global historical book for two reasons. The first is that it makes these marvellous, rich, life-enhancing comparisons across the world—between China and the West and Islam and the Americas. Secondly, because it asks a globally vital question, which is why, given its many centuries of superiority in technological and scientific innovation, did China yield that pride of place to scientists from the West? Why were the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution primarily the work of Westerners? Perhaps not as exclusively as many people suppose, but one has to acknowledge that those great world-shaping movements pretty much started in Europe. Whereas up till that time, China had really been the most influential culture in the world. How did that reversal happen? We’re still arguing about the question Needham asked. In some ways, it’s been the most productive question anybody has ever asked about global history. I don’t want to know the answer because I don’t want to spoil the magic of the problem, but there are some possible answers in the Oxford Illustrated History of the World . I think the critical fulcrum is the so-called Scientific Revolution, the liberation of Western scientists to do a lot of new thinking in the 16th and 17th centuries. Partly that’s the result of the empowerment of practitioners of magic, who in the course of trying to control the universe magically realized they needed to understand how it really worked in order to influence it. That was aided by the world-ranging explorations of Europeans at that time who were able to bring back to Europe samples of geology, flora and fauna, ethnography and readings of the heavens from all over the world and, finally, stimulated by social changes which liberated very rich people from their responsibility for warfare and gave them the leisure to engage in science and scholarship. I think that combination of influences was really responsible for giving Europeans a great boost to their scientific activities at a moment when they also came into contact with the Chinese. They were able to impress China for the first time with the knowledge and skill, ingenuity and innovativeness of people whom the Chinese had previously regarded as marginally relevant barbarians. “If you look at Needham’s list of the technologies the Chinese were first with, they include all the things that we think are the basis of Western supremacy” With industrialization, there are other influences involved. I see the advantage of the West as essentially a matter of demography. This is my own view and you won’t necessarily find many of my colleagues agreeing with me about it. But I think the remarkable thing about industrialization is that it happened in the history of the world at a very surprising moment, when muscle power was increasing. There was a population explosion going on, with global populations multiplying at unprecedented rates in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Also, the number of draught and pack animals was increasing enormously. The total volume of muscle power was growing and yet people started mechanising and shifting a lot of the burden of energy to machines. Why would that happen? You’ve got to look at the demographic context to explain it and my theory is that there’s a demographic threshold. There’s a point beyond which demographic growth stimulates demand for goods more than it stimulates the supply of labour. At that point, people have to shift to mechanical means of production. And I think that point was reached in Europe and not in China. If you look at Needham’s list of the technologies the Chinese were first with, they include all the things that we think are the basis of Western supremacy. You think of communications. Until very recently, printing was the key communication technology along with paper production. Both of those were Chinese before they were European. If you think about military and naval superiority, it all depends on firepower, direction-finding mechanisms and separable bulkheads—all things that started in China and spread to the West. When you think about capitalism, it depends on paper money, which was a Chinese invention that absolutely baffled Marco Polo and other travellers to medieval China from the West. They really had trouble understanding it, it was such an innovation for them. When you think of scientific progress in general you think of empiricism, the theory that knowledge is derived from experiment and observation. The Chinese were practising that consistently over centuries when people in Europe had forgotten about or ignored it. So really almost everything that we think of as basic to Western supremacy we actually got from the Chinese. You ask why that is, and I think part of the answer is that that empirical tradition is very deeply embedded in the Chinese past. I accept Needham’s argument that it originates in Daoism and the idea that nature is divine and that in order to understand God we have to observe nature very closely. That’s really the key to understanding why so much work goes on in science in China when in the west people just aren’t very interested in it. Not really. I think the best unit for viewing global history is the world. All the other units that we conventionally deploy—including that ghastly nation-state unit that you and I both recoil from—all of these, right down to the family and the individual, are part of the structure. You can’t build a vast edifice without having bricks and stones and mortar. So you build your picture up out of details. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter To me, civilization best designates not a particular kind of society, but a process of change, a process of subjecting the natural environment to human priorities. So, when we build cities, we are, in a sense, engaging in a process of civilization because we’re imposing on nature a new pattern of our own devising which is adjusted to our priorities. Or when we cook food, we’re engaging in a civilizing process because we’re turning the raw material that nature provides us with into a new kind of constituent of our lives of our own designing. So that’s what I understand by civilization, although in practice you have to deploy all these different units of study in the service of attaining a global vision. I’m not recommending them in any absolute fashion. They’re not particularly good in themselves. They’re just the best materials that we have to work with. My own preferred technique is comparison. In order to understand the human species as a whole, you have to compare us with other species. To be a really good historian you also have to be a zoologist and especially a primatologist because the other animals that are most like us—and therefore most suitable to compare us with—are other primates. If you make that comparison, you can see that what’s really interesting about us, what is the really key problem for understanding human history, is that we are the most diverse cultural species on the planet. We’ve had this stunningly divergent history that no other species remotely approaches. The key story of our past told in The Oxford Illustrated History of the World is in great part—although there are other stories woven into it—this story of divergence. It’s the story of how humans have parted, have formed different societies and become unlike each other and have developed peculiar traditions and cultures in different places and at different times. If there is a master narrative, one thread which runs through all the arguments and conflicts and mutually contradictory fragments of evidence that fill the book, it’s this story of divergent culture."