British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences

Writing the History of the Global

British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1

21-22 May 2009

How Do We Write a Global History of Science when Isaac Newton is European and Chen Chun is Chinese?
Timothy Brook (Chinese Studies, Oxford University)

This paper is based on a passing comment by Chen Chun, an utterly obscure scholar from the North China Plain, which appears in an equally obscure local publication in 1689. I use this comment, on the uncertainty of astronomical knowledge, to speculate on the problem of unevenness in global history; the problem, that is, of attempting to write a global history—in this case, of science—when the core narrative of that field is based entirely, and not surprisingly, on what happened in Europe. Of all historical writing about the early modern world, the history of modern science is the extreme case, given the almost perfect congruence between the histories of ‘European science’ and ‘modern science’. It has been chosen precisely for that reason, to shed the harshest possible light on the virtual absence of the experience of cultures outside Europe.