A couple of decades ago it was very fashionable in the media and in pop history of science to proclaim in bold capital letters SHOCK! HORROR! Did you know that Isaac Newton, the father of modern science, believed in alchemy? Historians of science would then try to calmly explain that this was a well known and had been since at least 1936, when the famous economist John Maynard Keynes (1883–1946) bought a collection of Newton’s alchemical manuscripts at an auction, which led to him writing an essay, Newton the Man containing the following, in the meantime legendary quote
Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians, the last of the Babylonians and Sumerians, the last great mind that looked out on the visible and intellectual world with the same eyes as those who began to build our intellectual inheritance rather less than 10,000 years ago.
As the history of alchemy became more established this wave of “discoveries” died down and the rabble moved on to exposing other themes about which, historians of science have failed to correctly inform the general public, such recurring news as the fact that Watson and Crick stole the structure of DNA from Rosalind Franklin or that Galileo was tried by the Inquisition because he had “proved” that the Earth orbits the Sun.
It seems that a new topic with which to whip the historians of science is emerging, the history of science is too Eurocentric! By history of science I assume the authors mean, they don’t specify, English language history of science. Now, this was almost certainly the case sometime in the past but it simple hasn’t been true for decades.
Joseph Needam (1900–1995) started his Science and Civilisation in China project in 1948 and the first volume was published in 1954. It had grown to seven volumes in twenty-seven parts by 2004. There was a single volume summary published in 1986 and Colin Ronan’s The Shorter Science and Civilisation: An abridgement of Joseph Needham’s original text was published in five volumes between 1980 and 1995. Nathan Sivin (1931–2022), who original worked together with Needham has also published extensively on the history of science in China, as have numerous other historians.
The history of Islamic science got off the ground a couple of years later with Edward S Kennedy beginning his long series of publications on the topic in 1956. David A. King (1941), who studied under Kennedy, began his even longer series of publication in 1972 and is still going strong. There is a very long list of other historians who have published in English on the various aspects of the history of Islamic science over the decades. Notably, Roshi Rashed edited an excellent three volume Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science published by Routledge in 1986. Other notable historians of Islamic science, who publish in English, include J. L. Berggren, Sonja Brentjes (1951), Petra Schmidl, Donald Routledge Hill (1622–1994), Jan P. Hogendijk (1955), George Saliba (1939).
The literature on the history of science in antiquity from the Mesopotamians over the Egyptians to the Ancient Greeks, who were heavily influenced by both cultures, is vast. It includes classics such as Science Awakening, originally published in 1957, by B. L. van der Waerden (1903–1996), who had been a student of Emmy Noether and The Exact Sciences inAntiquity, also originally published in 1957, by Otto Neugebauer (1899–1990), a mathematician who was brought to the study of Egyptian mathematics by Harald Bohr (1887–1951) mathematician and Olympic footballer brother of Niels. For a more modern update on mathematics of Mesopotamia there is Eleanor Robinson’s Mathematics in Ancient Iraq: A Social History (Princeton University Press, 2008)
Starting somewhat later there is an equally impressive list of English language literature on the history of science in India. For example, Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (1918–1993) History of Science and Technology in Ancient India: The Beginnings with a foreword by Joseph Needham, published in 1977. More modern, Kim Plofker’s Mathematics in India (Princeton University Press, 2009), which also covers astronomy, as many of the most important figures were both mathematicians and astronomers, has a twenty-six page bibliography.
There are books and articles on the history of Aztec science, Inca Science, Native American science, Australian indigenous science, the science of various regions in Africa and so on and so forth.
I could go on but I think I have made my point, the history of science is quite simply not Eurocentric. I hear people saying, ‘yes, but that’s all academic literature’! OK, if people want a simple introduction to an academic topic in this day and age, where do they turn? A large number of them turn to Wikipedia. The history of science on Wikipedia is wide-ranging and extremely comprehensive. Also, contrary to what some people say, who have never bothered to look, of a surprisingly high level of accuracy. Each of the multitude of articles also has a list of references and a bibliography were you can turn to enlighten yourself further if you so wish. For example, the extremely long and wide-ranging article on History of science and technology in Africa has 256 references and dozen of links to other Wikipedia articles expanding on the topics covered.
So, who are these people complaining that history of science is Eurocentric? First off we had Horizons: A Global History of Science (Viking, 2022) by James Poskett, which I reviewed here. To quote part of that review:
On June 22, Canadian historian Ted McCormick tweeted the following:
It’s not unusual for popular history to present as radical what has been scholarly consensus for a generation. If this bridges the gap between scholarship and public perception, then it is understandable. But what happens when the authors who do this are scholars who know better?
This is exactly what we have with Poskett’s book, he attempts to present in a popular format the actually stand amongst historian of science on the development of science over the last approximately five hundred years. I know Viking are only trying to drum up sales for the book, but I personally find it wrong that they use misleading hyperbole to do so.
It doesn’t help that, as I point out on my review, Poskett’s book is in places heavily flawed and could have used some serious fact checking before being published. I actually applaud the endeavour to present a popular book presenting a modern view of the evolution of science over the last five hundred years in a semi-popular style for an educated but non-expert readership but for fuck’s sake get your facts right and don’t pretend that you the author are presenting something revelatory, especially not when what you are writing is totally based on the published writings of other historians.
The second case is the more recent The Secret Lives of Numbers: A Global History of Mathematics & Its Unsung Trailblazers (Penguin, 2024) by Kate Kitagawa & Timothy Revell, which argues the Eurocentric case virulently but which is in fact a major trainwreck of a book that I demolished in two very long review essays here and here. I’m not going to repeat myself now. Go look for yourselves if you haven’t already read them.
The second section of Christensen-Dalsgaard’s essay starts thus:
The story typically told in the West is that science was invented in ancient Greece and then, following close to a millennium of intellectual darkness, developed in Western Europe over the past 500 years.
Other cultures might have contributed a clever trick here or there, like inventing paper or creating our modern number system, but science as we know it was developed almost entirely by white men. As such it becomes a story of superiority, one that demands gratitude.
The scars of this way of thinking are all over our geopolitical landscape. It shapes how many western leaders interact with other cultures, apparently entitling them to share their intellectual authority without needing to listen to others. It is a mindset that belittles other civilizations and led to centuries of colonial violence.
Her first link is to Ernst Mayr’s The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Havard University Press, 1982). Now I know who Ernst Mayr (1904–2005) is but I’m neither a biologist nor a historian of biology and haven’t read his book so, I can’t say whether it is Eurocentric or not. However, Christensen-Dalsgaard doesn’t actually tell us either. If you are going to accuse an author of something, you should at least give some quotes to back up your accusation.
Maybe I’m stupid but I don’t quite understand what the highly sarcastic second and third paragraphs here are supposed to tell us. The link on the invention of paper is to an actually very good essay on the topic, whereas the link on the modern number system leads to a series of articles from Britannica apparently selected by Chatbot, which demonstrate quite clearly that the history of mathematics is anything but Eurocentric.
Although the white European colonialists did regard themselves as superior, I don’t think that had much to do with the history of science and the centuries of colonial violence can rather be attributed to greed, economical exploitation, and theft.
Her essay actually opens with what one might call her “chief witness for the prosecution” Ibn al-Haytham. Claiming:
In the 11th century in Cairo, the foundations for modern science were laid through the detention of an innocent man.
Telling the legend of how Ibn al-Haytham supposedly feigned madness having annoyed the caliph al-Hakim and was placed under house arrest during which he wrote his Kitāb al-Manāẓir; (Book of Optics) known in medieval Europe as De aspectibus. Christensen-Dalsgaard then tells us:
In doing so, he developed a scientific method based on controlled, reproducible experiments and mathematics. This would not only change humanity’s understanding of optics and how our eyes actually see, but also later lay the foundations for empirical science in Europe.
Actually, Ibn al-Haytham’s “controlled, reproducible experiments and mathematics” were an extended version of those that can be found in Ptolemaeus’ Optica. Ptolemaeus was of course Greek but Christensen-Dalsgaard is telling us that the Greeks didn’t invent science.
She goes on:
When I started teaching the history of biology, the importance of this pivotal period of scientific history was often diminished in western analysis of science history.
I don’t know when Christensen-Dalsgaard started teaching biology but the two standard books on the history of optics David C. Lindberg’s Theories of Vision from al-Kindi to Kepler (University of Chicago Press, 1976) and A. Mark Smith’s From Sight to Light: The Passage From Ancient to Modern Optics (University of Chicago Press, 2015) both feature the work of Ibn al-Haytham as a central feature in the history of the discipline. Because I mentioned Wikipedia above, in the general article on History of Optics, the section on Ibn al-Haytham is actually longer than that on Johannes Kepler and there are long detailed individual articles on him and on his Book of Optics. For those who don’t want to do the arithmetic, Linberg’s book appear almost fifty years ago and I don’t really think that Christensen-Dalsgaard started teaching history of biology before it was published.
The link in the paragraph above to “he developed a scientific method” is to A. I. Sabra’s English translation of the first three of seven books of Kitāb al-Manāẓir; (Book of Optics). She doesn’t link to Mark Smith’s English translations of all seven books of the Latin De aspectibus. The link on “humanity’s understanding of optics and how our eyes actually see” leads to Dominique Reynard, Studies on Binocular Vision: Optics, Vision and Perspective from the Thirteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries (Springer, 2016) but she never mentions either Lindberg’s or Smiths volumes on the history of optics.
Her essay also links to a Smithsonian Institute video on Ibn al-Haytham’s experiments with light, which is truly awful. It attributes the discovery that light travels in straight line to al-Haytham and also being the ‘first’ to study reflection. Euclid, in the third century BCE, so thirteen hundred years before al-Haytham, already stated that light travels in straight lines and the laws of reflection were discussed in detail by Heron of Alexandria in his Catoptrica in the first or second century CE. Both topics were also delt with extensively in Ptolemaeus’ Optica. Original to al-Haytham is his explanation of the camera obscura, which the video also brings. He didn’t however compare the camera obscura to the eye, as the video suggests, the first to do that was Giambattista della Porta (1535–1615) in his Magia Naturalis (1558–1589).
The claim that al-Haytham changed humanity’s understanding of optics and how our eyes actually see is true but he did not do this through his experiments, which were concerned with the reflection and refraction of light. He made two major advances, he argued convincingly, philosophically that visual perception occurs only through light and nothing else and that geometrical optics can be combined with an intromission theory of visual perception. Euclid, Hero of Alexandria and Ptolemaeus, the three creators of geometrical optics had all done so within an extramission theory of visual perception. However, al-Haytham still believed falsely that visual perception took place within the crystalline humour (the lens). On his experiments, Mark Smith argues convincingly that they are mostly thought experiments not actual experiments because with the equipment that al-Haytham had available they would not have worked in reality.
Christensen-Dalsgaard then goes on to explain that Greek science developed over a wide area of Western Asia and North Africa and was influenced by both Babylonian and Egyptian science, as if this somehow supports her argument. However, what she is explaining is actually history of science 101 and can be found in any modern account of Greek science. No stunning revelation here!
Next up we have:
Similarly, Ibn al-Haytham was one of thousands of scholars who, during the golden age of Islam, were engaged in the immense task of translating, combining and developing the world’s knowledge into great encyclopedic texts. They admired Indian and Chinese scholarship and technology but revered the ancient Greeks.
Many Arab scholars, on the other hand, emphasized the importance of experimentally testing ideas and developed scientific and surgical instruments that allowed for significant advances.
Arguably, Arab scholars built the foundations for modern science by developing a method for controlled experimentation and applying it to Greek scholarship combined with knowledge and technologies from all accessible parts of the world.
Later, Latin translations of the Arabic texts would allow science to grow in the West from the intellectual ashes of medieval Catholicism. Texts like Ibn Sina’s Qānūn fī al-ṭibb (Canon of Medicine) would become standard textbooks throughout Europe for hundreds of years.
Ibn Al-Haytham inspired scholars like Roger Bacon to work toward European implementation of the scientific method. This would ultimately lead to Europe’s scientific revolution
Some Greek philosophers shunned the idea of experiments but others such as Archimedes, Heron of Alexandria, and Ptolemaeus, all of whom were very influential, expounded freely on experimentation on science. As already stated above al-Haytham’s experimental programme was modelled on that of Ptolemaeus.
On the general topic of these paragraphs, see the list of historians publishing on the history of Islamic science above but also take a look at The Cambridge History of Medieval Science: Volume 2 Medieval Science (CUP, 2013), the first five papers, covering 167 pages, are dedicated to the history of Islamic science. This is followed by one on Science in the Jewish Communities (21 pages) and one on Science in theByzantine Empire (16, pages). Later there are two papers, totalling 43 pages, on the twelfth-century translation movement. There are two popular books on the market on the history of Islamic science, both of which, of course, feature al-Haytham, Jim al-Khalili, Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Islamic Science (Penguin, 2012) and Jonathan Lyons, The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization (Bloomsbury, 2008). I wouldn’t recommend either of them. So, Christensen-Dalsgaard is telling us nothing new here.
That Ibn Sina’s al-Qānūn fī l-ṭibb (The Canon of Medicine) was a standard textbook in medieval Europe is explained in every standard modern text on medieval science and every standard general work on the history of medicine. There is a massive article about it on Wikipedia, as there are about every aspect of Islamic science, every Islamic scientist, and every aspect of the translation movement. Sorry, Dr. Christensen-Dalsgaard no Eurocentric history of science here.
Attributing the so-called scientific revolution to the influence of Ibn al-Haytham is, I think, a bridge too far.
The final section of her essay is titled Importance of intercultural exchange and opens with the following:
Great civilizations existed all over the world in the beginning of the 16th century, in Africa, the Middle East, the Americas and East Asia. Most had scholarship that was superior to the West’s in at least some respects. Arguably, the most valuable thing Europeans took from the rest of the world was knowledge.
This is basically an advert for James Poskett’s Horizons, which as I stated in my very long review is seriously flawed as a piece of historical writing and more importantly entirely based on western history of science sources. How can western history of science be too Eurocentric if it provides the evidence that the development of science was global?
We then get the story of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and smallpox variolation, which is in so many general history books and books on the history of medicine to bring it as an example of the history of science being Eurocentric is quite simple embarrassing.
Christensen-Dalsgaard suddenly takes a left turn at the end of her essay:
The importance of intercultural exchanges should not be surprising. Scientific data and observations are ideally objective, but the questions we ask and the conclusions we draw will always be subjective, shaped by our prior knowledge, beliefs and past experiences. Different cultures can help each other see beyond their inherent biases and grow beyond the intellectual constraints of individual approaches.
In her book, Braiding Sweetgrass, Potawatomi botanist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer gives a beautiful example of this in the context of how Indigenous approaches can inform modern science.
Nice of her to give a gratis advert for Robin Wall Kimmerer’s, no doubt fascinating book.
A general recommendation to all non-historians of science, if you are going to criticise the discipline for some supposed failings at least do the necessary research to ensure that what you are claiming is actually true and not just a load of ill informed bollocks.
