Rescuing Science from Civilisation: On Joseph Needham's 'Asiatic Mode of (Knowledge) Production

The UCLA Center for Chinese Studies presents a talk by Kapil Raj from School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, focusing on Joseph Needham and the history of Chinese science.

Needham's Grand Question, as it has come to be called, has until now been one of the major determinants in shaping approaches to the rise of modern science, and modernity, in the West and its concordant absence in the East. However, taking a civilizationist approach, the terms of Needham¹s comparison have pitted putatively long-term characteristics of a part of Asia--China-- with supposedly general characteristics of Europe. In addressing the "reverse" Needham question, this essay will instead focus not on any part of Asia taken in isolation, but on the commerce-driven circulation of people, goods and ideas across terrestrial and maritime trade routes and the way in which this circulation was itself the locus of scientific and technological innovation right up to the present. It will show that this "Asiatic mode" of knowledge and material production was spatially distributed across the region's various contact zones (ports, religious and imperial hubs, inland trade cross-roads and their respective hinterlands). Finally, it will point to the success of European long-range trading companies in becoming obligatory passage points in these circulatory processes and their role as significant vectors of knowledge transmission to emerging western European institutions of learning.

The Monday Colloquium in History of Science and Medicine is supported by the Dean of Social Sciences and the Department of History, with support of the Irving and Jean Stone Chair and cosponsorship by the Center for Chinese Studies.

Professor Kapil Raj is Maître de conférences (associate professor) in the history of science at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is attached to the Alexandre Koyré Centre for the history of science and technology. He has published extensively on the reception and practice of modern science in India. His current research concerns the history of field practices (mainly natural history, social statistics and geography) in the context of the European encounter with South Asia.