58 how can we redefine joseph needham’s 2020 · these two special issues on joseph needham’s...

ISSN 2096-6083CN 10-1524/G

Volume 3 . Issue 1 . M

arch 2020


arch2020

Cultures of Science

Volume 3 . Issue 1 . March

ISSN 2096-6083CN 10-1524/G


arch 2020


arch2020

Cultures of Science


Editorial

3 Note from the co-editors in chiefFujun Ren and Bernard Schiele

Introduction

4 Introduction: Needham’s intellectual heritageJianjun Mei

Articles

11 After Joseph Needham: The legacy reviewed, the agenda revised – some personal reflectionsGeoffrey Lloyd

21 My farewell to Science and Civilisation in ChinaChristopher Cullen

34 Brass tacks on iron: Ferrous metallurgy in Science and Civilisation in ChinaDonald B Wagner

43 The East Asian History of Science Library/Needham Research Institute as an intellectual hub in the late 1970s and 1980sGregory Blue

58 How can we redefine Joseph Needham’s sense of a world community for the 21st century?Vivienne Lo

62 Chinese organic materialism and modern science studies: Rethinking Joseph Needham’s legacyArun Bala

CUL_3-1_Cover.indd 1 22/07/2020 7:40:23 PM

Honorary Director of Editorial Board Qide Han, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Association for Science and Technology, China

Director of Editorial Board Yanhao Xu, China Association for Science and Technology, China

Editors-in-Chief Fujun Ren, National Academy of Innovation Strategy, China Bernard Schiele, Université du Québec, Canada

Associate Editors Zhiqiang Hu, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Zhengfeng Li, Tsinghua University, China Daya Zhou, National Academy of Innovation Strategy, China

Invited Editor of Current Issue Jianjun Mei, University of Cambridge, UK

Director of Editorial Office Xuan Liu, National Academy of Innovation Strategy, China

Managing Editor Ji Zhao, National Academy of Innovation Strategy, China

Coordinating Editor Yanling Xu, National Academy of Innovation Strategy, China

Data Editor Bankole Falade, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Copy Editor James Dixon, Institute of Professional Editors, Australia

Editorial Board Members Martin W Bauer, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK John Besley, Michigan State University, USA Massimiano Bucchi, University of Trento, Italy Rui Chen, China Association for Science and Technology, China Michel Claessens, European Commission, Belgium John Durant, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Zhe Guo, China Association for Science and Technology, China Liuxiang Hao, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Robert Iliffe, University of Oxford, UK Lui Lam, San Jose State University, USA Les Levidow, The Open University, UK

Jianjun Mei, University of Cambridge, UK Gauhar Raza, National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources, India Shukun Tang, University of Science and Technology of China, China Hongwei Wang, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China Xiaoming Wang, Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, China Masataka Watanabe, Tohoku University, Japan Jiangyang Yuan, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Li Zhang, Peking University, China Yandong Zhao, Renmin University of China, China

Journal Description Cultures of Science is a peer-reviewed international Open Access journal. The journal aims at building a community of scholars who are expecting to carry out international, inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural communication. The topics include: cultural studies, science communication, the history and philosophy of science and all intersections between culture and science. The journal values the diversity of cultures and welcomes manuscripts from around the world and especially those involving interdisciplinary topics.

Aims and Scope Cultures of Science is an international journal that provides a platform for interdisciplinary research on all aspects of the intersections between culture and science. It is published under the auspices of the China Association for Science and Technology.

It welcomes research articles, commentaries or essays, and book reviews with innovative ideas and shedding a fresh light on significant issues. Research articles report cutting-edge research developments and innovative ideas in related fields; commentaries provide sci-entific perspectives on emerging topics or social issues; book reviews evaluate and analyze the contexts, styles and merits of published works related to cultures of science.

The topics explored include but are not limited to: science communication, history of science, philosophy of science, sociology, social psychology, public science education, public understanding of science, science fiction, political science, indicators of science literacy, values and beliefs of the scientific community, comparative study of cultures of science, public attitudes towards a new scientific and technological phenomena.

Cultures of Science is published 4 times a year in March, June, September and December.

Contact Information Address: 3 Fuxing Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100038, China. Email: [email protected]

Disclaimer Any opinions and views expressed in the articles in Cultures of Science are those of the respective authors and contributors and not of Cultures of Science. Cultures of Science makes no representations or warranties whatsoever in respect of the accuracy of the material in this journal and cannot accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The accuracy of content should be examined independently. © National Academy of Innovation Strategy 2020 All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, transmitted or disseminated in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher.

Hui Luo, China Centre for International Science and Technology Exchange, China

Volume 3 Issue 1 March 2020

Contents

Editorial

Note from the co-editors in chief 3

Introduction

Introduction: Needham’s intellectual heritage 4Jianjun Mei

11

21

34

43

58

62

00_TOC.indd 1 13/08/2020 3:21:41 PM

Articles

After Joseph Needham: The legacy reviewed, the agenda revised – somepersonal reflectionsGeoffrey Lloyd

My farewell to Science and Civilisation in ChinaChristopher Cullen

Brass tacks on iron: Ferrous metallurgy in Science and Civilisation in ChinaDonald B Wagner

The East Asian History of Science Library/Needham Research Institute asan intellectual hub in the late 1970s and 1980sGregory Blue

How can we redefine Joseph Needham’s sense of a world communityfor the 21st century?Vivienne Lo

Chinese organic materialism and modern science studies: Rethinking Joseph

Needham’s legacyArun Bala

00_TOC.indd 2 13/08/2020 3:21:41 PM

https://doi.org/10.1177/2096608320911761

Cultures of Science2020, Vol. 3(1) 3© The Author(s) 2020Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissionsDOI: 10.1177/2096608320911761journals.sagepub.com/home/cul

Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which

permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://uk.sagepub.com/aboutus/openaccess.htm).

Cultures of Science was launched in September 2018. The six published issues have included theo-retical and empirical studies, and papers on research policy and practice in the field of science culture. All published articles are in open access on the journal’s website.

The journal will enter its third year of publication with its first quarterly issue of 2020. That issue will mark an important change behind the scenes. As of January 2020, SAGE Publishing will be the joint publisher of Cultures of Science, and will globally distribute the journal. Articles will continue to be in open access on the SAGE platform. The six previous issues of the journal will also be available on SAGE shortly.

Our cooperation with SAGE will not change the journal’s mission, which is to provide a platform for international exchange in the field of science culture and to abide by the standards that define an academic journal. We are only making some adjustments to the publishing process to foster the journal’s develop-ment. This will enhance the international character of the journal, allowing it to reach a greater audience.

The 2019 editorial board meeting held in November also marked both renewal of the editorial board and the admission of new members: Michel Claessens (European Commission), John Durant

(MIT Museum), Tang Shukun (University of Science and Technology of China), Wang Xiaoming (Shanghai Science and Technology Museum) and Zhao Yandong (Renmin University of China). We welcome these researchers, whose expertise includes informal education, science communication and sociology. Along with collaboration with the other members of the board, the expertise brought by the new members will enrich the content of Cultures of Science. Science culture is an interdisciplinary field, and the contribution of board members from various disciplines will guarantee a rich diversity in the study of that culture.

The journal is published four times a year. Each issue includes a thematic dossier with contributions from specialists in the field and is introduced by a guest editor (in the near future, it will also publish individual papers). All contributions are double-blind peer-reviewed before being accepted and published. You are invited to suggest a theme and join a list of potential contributors or to submit individual articles.

Fujun RenNational Academy of Innovation Strategy, China.

Bernard SchieleUniversité du Québec, Canada.

Note from the co-editors in chief

911761 CUL0010.1177/2096608320911761Cultures of Scienceeditorial2020

Editorial

01_CUL911761.indd 3 13/08/2020 3:18:49 PM

https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions

https://journals.sagepub.com/home/cul



https://doi.org/10.1177/2096608320924199

Cultures of Science2020, Vol. 3(1) 4 –10© The Author(s) 2020Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissionsDOI: 10.1177/2096608320924199journals.sagepub.com/home/cul

Joseph Needham,1 born on 9 December 1900, was a Cambridge-trained biochemist in his early academic career but later became the greatest Western sinolo-gist and one of the most original and creative histori-ans of science of the 20th century. He is best known for his monumental series Science and Civilisation in China (SCC), the successive parts of which have been published by Cambridge University Press since 1954. By the time of his death on 24 March 1995, Needham had been responsible for 13 separate books published in the series, while three had been pro-duced independently by collaborators. Needham was elected Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1941 for his pioneering contributions to chemical embryology and Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1971 for his pioneering achievements in researching the history of science, technology and medicine in China.

In this introduction, I first provide some back-ground information regarding the organization of these two special issues on Joseph Needham’s intel-lectual heritage, then give a brief introduction of the nine contributions published here, and finally make a few remarks on the relevance of Needham’s intel-lectual heritage to current scholarship.

1. Background: the Needham Workshop in 2015

On 28 February 2019, at the invitation of Professors Martin Bauer and Ren Fujun, I attended a meeting held at the London School of Economics to discuss the development strategy for a new English-language

journal – Cultures of Science – which was estab-lished by the National Academy of Innovation Strategy (NAIS) in China in 2018. During the meet-ing, it was agreed that the journal would publish a special issue in 2020 on Joseph Needham’s intellec-tual heritage to mark the 25th anniversary of his passing, and that I would act as a guest editor and be responsible for inviting scholars to contribute. I con-tacted a number of scholars and received many posi-tive and encouraging responses. After a long process of discussion, reviewing and editing, the final results are now presented to readers: the two special issues of Cultures of Science under the title ‘Needham’s Intellectual Heritage’.

These two special issues include five essays, four research papers and one report written by Dr Needham himself. With the exception of the two contributions from Professor Sir Geoffrey Lloyd and Professor Fu Banghong, seven of the contributions are actually the essays and papers originally pre-sented at the workshop (‘Dr Joseph Needham’s Intellectual Heritage: A workshop to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the death of Dr Joseph Needham’), which was held at the Needham Research Institute (NRI) in July 2015. I wish, there-fore, to give a brief introduction to this workshop so that readers can better understand the initiative that led to these special issues.

Introduction: Needham’s intellectual heritage

Jianjun MeiNeedham Research Institute, UK

Corresponding author:Jianjun Mei, Needham Research Institute, 8 Sylvester Road, Cambridge CB3 9AF, UK. Email: [email protected]

924199 CUL0010.1177/2096608320924199Cultures of ScienceMeiresearch-article2020

Introduction

02_CUL924199.indd 4 13/08/2020 3:19:10 PM



mailto:[email protected]

Mei 5

The initial idea to organize a workshop to com-memorate the 20th anniversary of the death of Dr Joseph Needham came from Dr Peter Lee,2 the then Honorary Secretary of the East Asian History of Science Foundation, Hong Kong (EAHSF- HK), now Chairman of the Joseph Needham Foundation for Science and Civilisation (JNFSC, formerly EAHSF), whom I met in Hong Kong for the first time in May 2013 when I was invited by the EAHSF to deliver the 8th Joseph Needham Memorial Lecture at the University of Hong Kong. After taking over the directorship of the NRI in January 2014, I con-sulted many colleagues and friends about the work-shop initiative and it gradually developed into a solid plan. It was eventually decided that the workshop would be jointly organized by Professor Roel Sterckx, Joseph Needham Professor of Chinese History, Science and Civilization at the University of Cambridge, Professor Angela Ki Che Leung, Joseph Needham – Philip Mao Professor in Chinese History, Science and Civilization at the University of Hong Kong, and me, representing the NRI. The aims of the workshop were as follows: (1) to reflect on Dr Needham’s intellectual heritage, its impact on under-standing the world history of knowledge circulation, and its broad influence on generations of scholars and (2) to assess the role of Dr Needham’s legacy and the institute he founded with a view to future research directions in the field of study he did so much to open up.

Thanks to generous financial support from the EAHSF-HK, about 30 invited scholars attended the workshop held on 4 July 2015 at the NRI (Figure 1). It was organized into four sessions, chaired respec-tively by Geoffrey Lloyd, Roel Sterckx, Angela Leung and Mei Jianjun. The theme of Session 1 was ‘Working with Dr Needham and the SCC project: reflections and reminiscences’, with seven presenta-tions being given by Francesca Bray, Donald Wagner, Rose Kerr, Robin Yates, Georges Métailié, Gregory Blue and Christopher Cullen. Sessions 2 and 3 were focused on ‘Needham’s intellectual heritage and future directions in the field of the history of science, technology and medicine in East Asia’, with 13 papers being presented by Liu Dun, Vivienne Lo, Togo Tsukahara, Chu Pingyi, Dagmar Schäfer, Sun Xiaochun, Tony Butler, Arun Bala, Shi Yunli, Jongtae

Lim, Kam-Wing Fung, Wang Siming and Bridie Andrews. Session 4 involved a round table discus-sion about the NRI and the development of studies of the history of science, technology and medicine in East Asia, exploring ways in which the NRI could continue to play a central role in promoting cutting-edge research and cross-cultural interaction with the wider academic community (Wu, 2015).

Subsequently, the idea of publishing a workshop proceedings was discussed briefly, but then put aside for a variety of reasons. I always believed, however, that the papers were worthy of formal publication, and so was especially delighted when my suggestion to publish a special issue on ‘Needham’s Intellectual Heritage’ was accepted by the Editorial Board of the newly established journal Cultures of Science in February 2019. I promptly wrote to a number of scholars who had attended the 2015 workshop to ask them whether they would consider publishing their presentations in Cultures of Science. I was very much encouraged by the mostly positive responses I received, though I also learned that a few scholars were already committed to publishing their papers in other journals. Those included Chu Pingyi’s paper on ‘Needham in Taiwan: An unexpected turn to STS’, and Jongtae Lim’s on ‘Joseph Needham in Korea, and Korea’s position in the history of East Asian sci-ence’, both which will be published in East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal in late 2020, together with a commentary piece titled ‘Putting Joseph Needham in East Asian context: Commentaries on papers on the reception of

Figure 1. The group photo of the delegates who attended the Needham Workshop.

02_CUL924199.indd 5 13/08/2020 3:19:11 PM

6 Cultures of Science 3(1)

Needham’s works in Korea and Taiwan’ written by Professor Togo Tsukahara and me.3

2. The nine contributions

The nine contributions published in these two spe-cial issues on Needham’s intellectual heritage can be roughly divided into two groups. The first group includes five essays offered by Geoffrey Lloyd, Christopher Cullen, Donald Wagner, Gregory Blue and Vivienne Lo, while the second group includes four research papers contributed by Arun Bala, Shi Yunli, Wang Siming and Fu Banghong. Here, I would like to give a brief introduction to these con-tributions and their authors.

Geoffrey Lloyd’s essay titled ‘After Joseph Needham: The legacy reviewed, the agenda revised – some personal reflections’ is based on the text of his First Needham Memorial Lecture delivered in the University of Cambridge on 28 October 2016.4 Professor Lloyd was a Trustee of the NRI from 1991 to 2019 and Chair of the Trust from 1992 to 2002. As a key figure steering the NRI through choppy waters in the 1990s and the most eminent scholar in residence at the institute, his personal reflections on Joseph Needham and his legacy are unique, far-sighted and full of wisdom. While pointing out that the famous Needham question is simplistic, his essay emphasizes that ‘differing experience of ancient societies can pro-vide lessons that may still be relevant today’.

As general editor of Joseph Needham’s SCC series for nearly two decades (1992–2013), in his essay entitled ‘My farewell to Science and Civilisation in China’ Professor Cullen provides us with vivid observations on the growth of the SCC project since the 1950s, as well as a firsthand descrip-tion of his involvement in coordinating and support-ing the production of some of the SCC volumes, such as those on ceramics, ferrous metallurgy and (ethno)botany. It is worth noting that Professor Cullen has seen 10 volumes through the press to date. His reflections on the experience of this inti-mate involvement with the SCC series are truly pre-cious for a deep understanding of Needham’s intellectual heritage.

In his article titled ‘Brass tacks on iron: Ferrous metallurgy in Science and Civilisation in China’, Dr

Donald Wagner shares with us a personal account of his experience in preparing the SCC volume on fer-rous metallurgy. He first reflects on the theoretical framework of the volume, including Whig history, the social construction of technology, the evolution of technology, and technology in economic history, then briefly discusses the style and structure of the volume, and finally presents a few case studies to demonstrate the importance of checking the basic data in technical studies. The NRI is, in his eyes, ‘the bricks-and-mortar aspect of Joseph Needham’s intel-lectual heritage’.

The late 1970s and 1980s were a crucial period for the development of the NRI, or the East Asian History of Science Library (EAHSL), as it was then known. As a research associate of the NRI during the period from 1977 to 1990, Professor Gregory Blue was a key witness to many events and crucial changes of the period. His essay titled ‘The East Asian History of Science Library/Needham Research Institute as an intellectual hub in the late 1970s and the 1980s’ is thus both fascinating and of great historical value, beca-use it presents his personal recollections of Joseph Needham, Lu Gwei-Djen5 and many other scholars and their activities at the NRI/EAHSL. Through his account, readers can gradually gain a clear picture of how and why the NRI/EAHSL could act as an intel-lectual hub, attracting so many researchers of diverse academic backgrounds during that time.

In her short essay on Joseph Needham’s sense of a world community, Dr Vivienne Lo, senior lecturer and convenor of the UCL China Centre for Health and Humanity, points out that the attraction of Joseph Needham’s vision is not just its de-centring of the Eurocentric narrative of the history of science, but also his quest for a better world. One important aspect of Needham’s legacy is his compelling vision of ‘All under Heaven as One Community’,6 which, in her opinion, was ‘grounded in socialist, Christian and 20th-century scientific utopian belief’.

An important aspect of Needham’s intellectual heritage is his use of ‘organic materialism’ to charac-terize the philosophy of Chinese science. In his paper titled ‘Chinese organic materialism and modern sci-ence studies: Rethinking Joseph Needham’s legacy’, Professor Arun Bala, the author of The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science (Bala,

02_CUL924199.indd 6 13/08/2020 3:19:11 PM

Mei 7

2006), offers a detailed discussion of the conception of Chinese organic materialism and its wider impact. He argues that ‘Chinese organic materialism not only nurtured Chinese science in the past, and hin-dered the emergence of modern science in China, but can also be part of a synthesis of late modern science transcending early Western science’.

How do we appreciate, review and even criticize Needham’s work in the light of recent scholarship? Professor Shi Yunli, Head of the Department of the History of Science and Scientific Archaeology, University of Science and Technology of China, offers an excellent example in his paper titled ‘Chinese astronomy in the time of the Jesuits: Studies following Science and Civilisation in China’. In con-trast to Needham’s overall claim about the role and results of Jesuit activities in the development of astronomy in China, Professor Shi argues that

What happened to Chinese astronomy in the time of the Jesuits cannot be understood as a gradual integration of Chinese astronomy into modern science, but rather as an integration of early modern science into the traditional framework of native Chinese astronomy.

This new perspective is significant for a better understanding of early modern scientific exchanges between Europe and China.

What inspiration did Joseph Needham and SCC bring about in China to stimulate research into the agricultural history of China? Professor Wang Siming, Director of the Institution of Chinese Agricultural Civilization, Nanjing Agricultural University, examines this issue in great detail in his paper titled ‘Joseph Needham’s inspiration for research on agricultural history in China’. It not only highlights extensive interactions between Needham and a group of Chinese historians of agriculture, such as Shi Shenghan, Wan Guoding, Hu Daojing, Wang Yuhu and Liang Jiamian, but also demon-strates that Needham’s work has had far-reaching influence on research into the Chinese history of agriculture, especially with regard to institutionali-zation and the transition from a technical narrative to a concept of ‘comprehensive agriculture’, taking ancient Chinese agriculture as an organic combina-tion of cropping, forestry, husbandry, fishing and sideline production.

The last paper I would like to introduce here is the one contributed by Professor Fu Banghong of the Department of the History of Science and Scientific Archaeology, University of Science and Technology of China. This paper is a specially invited contribu-tion, because it focuses on a secret report written by Joseph Needham in 1945 to Chiang Kai-shek, the then national leader of the Republic of China. Needham’s report was titled Report to His Excellency President and Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek on the Position and Prospects of Science and Technology in China. It has been known about among a small group of scholars for some time and was translated into Chinese by Professor Fu a few years ago (see Li, 2008), but its original English text has never been previously published. When I began to think about a special publication to commemorate the 25th anni-versary of Needham’s passing, I came up with the idea of publishing his original report, because some observations made by him 80 years ago are still rel-evant to the development of science and education in present-day China. I also felt that a research paper on Needham’s report would be useful for readers to gain a better understanding of its background, moti-vation and impact during the late 1940s and beyond.

To that end, I contacted Professor Fu, a specialist in the history of science and technology and scien-tific policy in modern China who had devoted con-siderable time to the study of Needham’s report, and invited her to make a contribution. She was delighted to accept my invitation and subsequently contributed the paper titled ‘Science, society and planning: Joseph Needham’s report to Chiang Kai-shek in 1946’. In it, Professor Fu first highlights the histori-cal context in which the report was produced, then examines its main content, features and essentials, and finally discusses its impact and significance. She suggests that ‘Needham’s report has universal sig-nificance for the development of science – not only in China at the time, but even globally today’.

3. Needham’s intellectual heritage

In 2019, as a joint initiative, two top journals in the field of the history of science and technology, Isis and Technology and Culture, published eight articles

02_CUL924199.indd 7 13/08/2020 3:19:11 PM


in the form of a forum titled ‘A Second Look at Joseph Needham’.7 Why should a second look be necessary now? H Floris Cohen (2019), the editor of Isis, states in his editor’s introduction that

One of the most impressive enterprises ever undertaken since the scholarly investigation of the history of science came of age is surely Joseph Needham’s multivolume Science and Civilisation in China (SCC) . . . It is the goal of the reflections that follow to honor the lasting achievement of one of the great historians of science of the twentieth century by exploring what his work still means for us today. (pp. 91–92)

This sense of a clear need to revisit Needham’s work is shared by Florence Hsia and Dagmar Schäfer (2019), the forum organizers, who believed that the Second Look forum could probe ‘the contributions that Needham’s work can still make to ongoing debates’ (p. 94).

The joint forum publications on Joseph Needham by Isis and Technology and Culture are not an iso-lated phenomenon. Over the past two-and-a-half decades since his death, scholarly interest in Joseph Needham and his work has never died away. As Florence Hsia and Dagmar Schäfer (2019) observe:

While some researchers continue to wrestle with the perennial ‘Needham question’—Why did modern science develop in Renaissance Europe, and not elsewhere?—others refute its counterfactual, comparativist, or civilizational premises in order to launch alternative approaches to writing global histories of science. (pp. 94–95)

In their introduction to the Second Look forum, they list a dozen major research publications relat-ing to Needham’s work or the ‘Needham question’, mostly emerging after 1995 (Hsia and Schäfer, 2019: 95).

It is understandable that, in the eyes of some schol-ars, Joseph Needham has become or is becoming an out-of-date figure, because of the amount of new research work that has been carried out since 1995. In 1998, in a special issue of Osiris titled ‘Beyond Joseph Needham: Science, technology and medicine in East and Southeast Asia’, the editor, Morris Low, sug-gested that we think beyond Needham and a unitary

science and break out of the framework imposed by studies of modernization (Low, 1998: 4). Mark Elvin (2004: xxiv)) also reminded readers in his introduc-tion to Volume VII, Part 2 of SCC, published in 2004, that

As scholarship has advanced, not everything that Needham wrote, forty or more years ago, on the social and economic history of China now seems as solidly based as the greater part of his reconstructions of Chinese technical practice and scientific theory. The reader needs to exercise a certain caution here, searching at times less for information than for inspiration. (p. xxiv)

What inspiration, then, can contemporary schol-ars search for in Needham’s work? Or what intellec-tual heritage can current scholarship inherit from Joseph Needham and his collaborators? Worth not-ing in connection with these questions is that raised by Francesca Bray (2019):

How did Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China . . . project relate to the radical critiques that were then and have remained the raison d’être of STS, encouraging it to speak truth to power, sustaining its reflexivity, and keeping it ‘open-ended and never-at-rest-with-itself’? (p. 317)

In his long paper titled ‘How deep is love? The engagement with India in Joseph Needham’s histori-ography of China’, Leon A Rocha (2016) has elo-quently encapsulated the deep relevance of Needham’s work to ongoing scholarship:

There is a political vision, a spirit of openness, an ethical imperative embedded in Needham’s idea of ‘oecumenism’ that may be worth inheriting: that modern science and medicine (as we currently know them) are not a complete and settled project; that they may not have a monopoly on ‘truth’; that there is still the possibility that non-Western cultures can revise our ways of knowing and seeing; that doing the history of science and medicine in those non-Western cultures (China, India . . .) may help towards building a pluralistic science in the future that fully acknowledges the complexity of nature and reality and that encompasses the partial perspectives from different classes, genders, ethnicities and cultures. (p. 39)

02_CUL924199.indd 8 13/08/2020 3:19:11 PM

Mei 9

While acknowledging the value of Needham’s work, Florence Hsia and Dagmar Schäfer (2019), however, also observe the need for departing from it and seeing and doing things differently:

Yet there are clear parallels between current debates in the history of science, technology, and medicine (HSTM) and the themes, methods, and approaches that Needham took seriously and, in many cases, pioneered, although clearly his terms are not ours: against Needham’s vision of traditional and culturally specific sciences converging into modern world science stand our diverse perspectives on a globalizing HSTM; his historical materialism has turned into our ‘materiality’; inherent within our practice/theory debates are the lines he tried to draw between technology and science. (p. 95)

Even today, 25 years since he passed away, the presence of Joseph Needham and his legacy, like a mountain standing in the field of the history of sci-ence and technology, cannot be lightly brushed aside. Rather than simply ignore or skirt around it, the best way to deal with the mountain is to climb up and appreciate its grand vistas and fascinating details. As Du Fu, the Tang poet wrote, ‘When shall I reach the top and hold, all mountains in a single glance’.8 It is my belief that ‘Needham’s intellectual heritage is unique, substantial, and multidimen-sional, and it will surely continue to encourage and inspire new generations of inquisitive minds’ (Mei, 2019: 603).

Acknowledgements

Without the strong support of many people, the publica-tion of these two special issues on Joseph Needham would never have been possible. My grateful thanks go to Geoffrey Lloyd, Christopher Cullen, Donald Wagner, Gregory Blue, Vivienne Lo, Arun Bala, Shi Yunli, Wang Siming, and Fu Banghong for their excellent contribu-tions; to Sally Church and Yu Jia for their hard work in preparing the text of Needham’s report based on a typed version; and to Peter Lee, Angela Leung, Roel Sterckx, John Moffett, Sue Bennett and Wu Huiyi for their crucial contributions to organizing the 2015 Needham Workshop. I am especially grateful to the following scholars for their great generosity in providing review comments and even help with editing the manuscript texts: Geoffrey Lloyd, Christopher Cullen, John Moffett, Catherine Jami, Roel Sterckx, Lim Jongtae, Wu Huiyi, David Killick and Du Xinhao. Finally, I wish to thank the Editorial Board of

Cultures of Science for their encouragement and profes-sional support during the whole process of carrying out this initiative.

27 March 2020, Cambridge.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. 李约瑟.2. 李励生.3. I would like to thank Dr Kuo Wen-Hua, editor of

East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, for sharing the information concerning the publication of Professors Chu Pingyi and Jongtae Lim’s papers. I would also like to thank Professor Togo Tsukahara for his support.

4. Professor Lloyd’s Needham Lecture text has already been translated by Dr Fu Yang into Chinese and pub-lished in Taiwan. Please see Luo (2019).

5. 鲁桂珍.6. 天下大同.7. Please see Isis, volume 110, number 1, 2019, pp. 91–

136 and Technology and Culture, volume 60, number 2, 2019, pp. 553–624.

8. 会当凌绝顶，一览众山小.

References

Bala A (2006) The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bray F (2019) From Needham to EASTS, or why history matters. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 13: 317–321.

Cohen F (2019) Editor’s introduction. Isis 110(1): 91–93.Elvin M (2004) Vale atque ave. In: Robinson KG (ed.)

Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 7, part 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xxiv–xliii.

Hsia F and Schäfer D (2019) History of science, tech-nology, and medicine: A second look at Joseph Needham. Isis 110(1): 94–99.

Li Y (2008) (Joseph Needham) The position and prospects of science and technology in China, translated by Fu Banghong. Science & Culture Review 5(5): 5–29.

02_CUL924199.indd 9 13/08/2020 3:19:11 PM


Low M (1998) Beyond Joseph Needham: Science, tech-nology, and medicine in East and Southeast Asia. Osiris 13: 1–8.

Luo J (2019) (Geoffrey Lloyd) After Joseph Needham: The legacy reviewed, the agenda revised—Some personal reflections, translated by Fu Yang. Newsletter for Research in Chinese Studies 38(3): 1–9 (in Chinese).

Mei J (2019) Some reflections on Joseph Needham’s intellectual heritage. Technology and Culture 60(2): 594–603.

Rocha L (2016) How deep is love? The engagement with India in Joseph Needham’s historiography of China. British Journal for the History of Science, Themes 1: 13–41.

Wu H (2015) Brief report on the workshop on Needham’s intellectual heritage. Chinese Journal for the History of Science and Technology 36(4): 509–513 (in Chinese).

Author biography

Jianjun Mei is a professor at the University of Science and Technology Beijing and Director of the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge. He is also a Fellow of Churchill College, University of Cambridge. His current research focuses on non-ferrous metallurgy in ancient China as well as the history of technological exchange and interactions between the East and the West.

02_CUL924199.indd 10 13/08/2020 3:19:11 PM



https://doi.org/10.1177/2096608320917579


For Western scholars, Joseph Needham founded a sub-ject – the comparative history of science and technol-ogy. No one before him had even begun fully to appreciate China’s contribution. I had the privilege and honour to have many conversations with him, espe-cially when – after unsuccessfully approaching some five or six other individuals – he finally turned to me to succeed Lord Roll as Chair of the East Asian History of Science Trust, the body responsible for overseeing the work of the Needham Research Institute (NRI). Even though I was sixth or seventh choice for the job (I was and am no captain of industry, after all, which

was really what he was looking for), and although at the time most thought the NRI was moribund (some were already writing its obituary), I was very happy to do what I could to resuscitate it. Restoring it from intensive care in the late 1980s to its present state of moderately rude health took determination and team-work – the collaboration of individuals with very

After Joseph Needham: The legacy reviewed, the agenda revised – some personal reflections

Geoffrey LloydThe Needham Research Institute, UK

AbstractWe all owe Joseph Needham an immense debt for discovering Chinese science and technology for Western scholars. But his famous question (Why did the Chinese, who had been so far in advance of Europe until the 17th century, fail to produce modern science independently?) is simplistic.

•• Needham’s discussion relied on categories (‘physics’, ‘engineering’, even ‘mathematics’) that are largely anachronistic.

•• He was preoccupied by questions of priorities (who did what first).•• We should recognise that the historical record brings to light many breakthroughs in the development of science,

in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, ancient Greece and ancient China, as well as in Europe in the 17th century and beyond; they all call for detailed analysis of the different social, political, economic, institutional and intellectual factors at work.

•• One topic of particular importance and current interest concerns the factors that enable innovation to flourish, where the differing experience of ancient societies can provide lessons that may still be relevant today. The new agenda for the history of science should have a global remit.

KeywordsJoseph Needham, science, China, the West

Corresponding author:Geoffrey Lloyd, Needham Research Institute, 8 Sylvester Road, Cambridge CB3 9AF, UK. Email: [email protected]

917579 CUL0010.1177/2096608320917579Cultures of ScienceLloydresearch-article2020

Article

03_CUL917579.indd 11 13/08/2020 3:19:26 PM





different backgrounds and interests, some based here in Cambridge, others across the world. It would be invidious to try to name them all, though we all shared a devotion to the Great Man. For my part, I made it my business to discuss at length with Joseph the future of the NRI and the prospects for the history and philoso-phy of science in general; we did so many times in his declining years.

My acquaintance with Joseph goes back to the 1960s. My first contact with him was when I received one of his famous index cards, which posed the question: ‘When was the first Greek or Roman div-ing bell?’ This came with the instruction to reply on the card itself, which was to be returned to Joseph. I believe he approached me because his usual adviser on Graeco-Roman matters, Arthur Peck, was on sab-batical at Princeton, and Peck knew that I was one of the very few people in Cambridge at the time with any interest in Greek science, medicine and technol-ogy. But I was in luck with that question, for the answer concerning the first extant evidence of a Greek diving bell is clear: it comes in the text called the Problemata, Book 32, Chapter 5, which describes how divers use cauldrons which retain the air inside them, provided they are maintained in a vertical position. The Problemata is a text in the Aristotelian Corpus, but not by Aristotle but by one of Aristotle’s pupils, and it mostly dates to the late 4th or 3rd cen-tury BCE. Voilà. Problem solved.

Then, when I was Senior Tutor at King’s College in the turbulent days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, I saw Joseph as an important and prestigious ally in the furore that raged about student representa-tion on college councils and faculty boards, the sit-in in the Senate House, and the protests at the Garden House Hotel in 1970 when it was used to promote Greek products and so to support the dictatorial rule of the Greek colonels.1 He was kind enough to give me and my colleagues great moral support in our attempts to calm things down, but he explained that he could not actively engage in the work of the com-mittees set up to consider various aspects of univer-sity reform. Why? Because Science and Civilisation in China (SCC) took precedence. Absolutely right. Nevertheless, he came to my rooms at King’s several times to discuss the problems – always clandestinely: I was sworn to keep those visits confidential. All a

touch reminiscent of the cloak-and-dagger intrigues of the Warring States, but without the daggers.

The multiple volumes of SCC are truly monu-mental. Yet the plan and execution are, as we all know, very much of their time, and this has certainly contributed to its relative lack of influence in history and philosophy of science circles in the West – in contrast to the continuing mass of attention it still attracts in China itself. Joseph decided to organise the work according to Western categories: astron-omy, mathematics, physics, engineering, medicine and so on. He was convinced not just that science is now universal but that those disciplinary boundaries can be used in relation to the science of much earlier times, where he had, of course, quite a preoccupation with who made which discovery first (by the time SCC 7.2 was published in 2004, the list of Chinese ‘firsts’ had grown to more than 250; it did not, inci-dentally, contain any mention of a diving bell). He famously and repeatedly depicted the contributions of different ancient traditions as a plurality of differ-ent streams and rivers all eventually converging in the great ocean of today’s unified science.

But over and above the distractions of that ques-tion of priorities, there are two main problems with that way of organising the material. First, as Joseph well knew, the ancient Chinese themselves did not have exactly (in some cases not even approximately) the same concepts as ours of the disciplines in which they engaged or of the boundaries between them. We may have little difficulty identifying what we call Chinese ‘medicine’, but even there we must be care-ful not to assume that what counted as ‘health’ or ‘well-being’ for them in any given period is what we may count as such (and that is problematic too if we stop to think about it, not just in terms of the tricky issues involved in ‘mental health’).

Second, the Chinese in premodern times did not have our modern Western concepts of the causes of disease (pathogens) and how to combat them – and I have no need to remind you that our thinking on those subjects had a long struggle to emancipate itself from the legacy of Graeco-Roman, Islamic and medieval notions. Nor do you need reminding of the ongoing controversies, in China and elsewhere, of the status and viability of so-called ‘alternative’ medicine, where it is important, in my view, not to

03_CUL917579.indd 12 13/08/2020 3:19:26 PM

Lloyd 13

lump together all the practices associated with tradi-tional Chinese medicine (TCM) to attempt some overall verdict on its validity, however much some practitioners of biomedicine, and indeed some of TCM, may urge us to do so. Not all of TCM is as straightforwardly efficacious as the traditional use of a species of artemisia (qinghao) as a treatment for malaria.

Again, although some scholars have proposed that Chinese studies of the heavens, tian wen (the patterns in the heavens) and li fa (calendar studies) are roughly equivalent to the contrast we draw between astrology and astronomy, that is highly problematic. The ‘pat-terns’ are not investigated just to yield predictions for events on earth, and while calendar studies certainly apply mathematics and in that resemble our astron-omy, they do not extend to geometrical models of heavenly movements or other aspects of astronomi-cal theory as it has been practised in the West. So tian wen and li fa do not map at all happily onto ‘astrol-ogy’ and ‘astronomy’, any more than do Greek astro-logia and astronomia. Yet the Greeks could and did distinguish between (a) predictions of heavenly movements and (b) predictions about events on earth on that basis, even if those two Greek terms can also be used interchangeably.

Analogously, any attempt to find a single Chinese category that corresponds to our ‘physics’ is bound to force all sorts of issues (where again exactly the same point applies to the ancient Greeks). In prac-tice, of course, what came to be included in the sev-eral volumes of SCC that were labelled ‘Physics’ covered a multitude of different fields of research and practice, both theoretical and practical; and the same was true of the various sections devoted to ‘Chemistry’.

This question of the original indigenous Chinese conceptual categories is no mere quibble. The issue that SCC tended to finesse but which has to be pressed is this: if we cannot, on pain of anachronism, use our modern categories, then we have to ask what the Chinese researchers themselves thought they were doing, and why. What did they imagine to be the pay-off? How did their work reflect on or interact with the values of the society in which they lived? They could not have entertained the ambition to become ‘scientists’, for no such category existed

– indeed, it emerged in the West only in the 19th century.

Thus, we face an apparent gap in our grasp of what may have motivated those investigators who made such important contributions to an understand-ing of the world around them. Nor should we imag-ine that the answer to those questions is uniform in every period and across all the fields that interested them, such as the heavens (the movements of the sun and moon, and solar and lunar eclipses), the calen-dar, music, the body, health and disease, plants and animals, change and transformation, to mention just a few examples. This point about heterogeneity is crucial (and I shall return to it) as it concerns not just China but also ancient Greece and other ancient societies, as well as modern science.

So, my first issue with the organisation and struc-ture of SCC relates to indigenous category bounda-ries. But my second problem follows on from the first. Needham’s perspective was resolutely teleological: he looked at China and other ancient societies from the point of view of the eventual development of sci-ence as we know it today, and it was that breakthrough in the 17th century, the so-called Scientific Revolution, that inspired his big question – why it happened in the West and not in China. But if we adopt the perspective of the ancient investigators themselves, we get a very different and more fundamental agenda. We can iden-tify many different contributions to an understanding of the world from China and other ancient civilisa-tions: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece, India, Islam and Mesoamerica. But why are there such divergences in what our records offer? What does the complex and varied history of the development of inquiry in ancient civilisations tell us about human cognitive develop-ment in general? We should not limit ourselves to China and the West, nor indeed to ancient literate civi-lisations, though I know I shall be considered fool-hardy for proposing that further extension of the agenda.

Yet, after all, we all came out of Africa, even though that has often been caricatured. True, the ques-tion of when and where those movements occurred continues to be fiercely debated. There is general agreement that the break with our nearest relatives among the hominids happened at some specifiable time and place. But if all humans share a common

03_CUL917579.indd 13 13/08/2020 3:19:26 PM


origin (if you go back far enough) and if there are powerful commonalities in what humans strive to make sense of, such as the environment, plants and animals, life and death, then why historical human struggles for understanding have been so diverse is a question that may seem crushingly naive but cannot be ignored. After all, if we accept Joseph’s image of the common global ocean of modern scientific under-standing, why that needed to be fed by such a multi-tude of different streams and rivers (let alone a few stagnant pools) is a question that does not go away. Starting with ancient China and ancient Greece, we can open up questions about human endeavours to understand the world more generally, although we should not assume that those endeavours all reflect the same ambitions, or even the same conception of what ‘the world’ comprises, let alone the same social, institutional and intellectual circumstances.

Of course, widely differing types of explanatory factors have been invoked in grand global theories to account for what happened. Some fancy physical differences, others social or economic ones, and yet others factors to do with language and literacy. I will say something about each of these, just to give a sense of how the diversity of human efforts to under-stand the world has been tackled and with such shockingly limited results.

To a small degree, differences in understandings can be explained by differences in what there was to be understood: the physical environment, for exam-ple, the flora and the fauna, of different parts of the earth. You cannot expect humans to be concerned with the structure of a snowflake if they have no acquaintance with snow. Over and over again, some classification of plants that was presumed compre-hensive has had to be upended following the discov-ery of previously unknown kinds. That was more a problem in the West than in China, given the West’s greater pretensions to produce a universal system of plant taxonomy – a far less prominent preoccupation for Li Shizhen in the 16th century. In point of fact, it only gradually dawned on European botanical tax-onomists north of the Alps that much of what they found in the texts of their main authorities, the Greek botanists Theophrastus and Dioscorides,2 related to species limited to the Mediterranean area and, con-versely, that some northern European species did not figure in those compendia.

Again, there are also important differences between the various primary modes of subsistence that humans have relied on, as between hunter-gath-erers, herders and farmers. We now have a much firmer grasp of the major changes that occurred at different times and places, and of the shifts and tran-sitions in theoretical and practical knowledge as various areas of technology came to be developed, in agriculture, textiles, metallurgy, water management, urbanisation and so on. Much of the latest knowl-edge comes from research undertaken at the NRI or by scholars associated with it, inspired by Professor Mei Jianjun. This helps us a little to understand the nature of progress in human knowledge and its une-ven tenor in different societies, but much remains unexplained.

Joseph himself pinned his hopes on a combina-tion of economic and political factors, adapting the Marxian notion of differences in the modes of pro-duction and the role of ‘bureaucratic feudalism’. But, as many commentators have observed, most pointedly perhaps Mark Elvin in his contribution to SCC 7.2 (Elvin, 2004), that combination is a fairly crude tool to discriminate between China and Europe, and it has the signal disadvantage of imply-ing a static economic and social regime in China down the ages. True, throughout pre-revolutionary China the political ideal remained the benevolent rule of a sage king, but ideas and practices about how to achieve this varied greatly. In his final sum-mary of his views in SCC 7.2 – where he reprints some of his earlier essays, mostly with very little modification – Joseph wrote extensively on the rise of the bourgeoisie in the West, leading to the growth of capitalism, the scientific method and the indus-trial revolution ‘one after another’.3 But again, as he half admitted, that was subject to severe qualifica-tions as a global explanatory factor.

Indeed, none of the available considerations I have mentioned so far is really fit for the heavy-duty work of explanation that Joseph was looking for in relation to his question, let alone for the further issues raised by the immense variety of actual ways of being in the world and of attempting to under-stand it, to which the historical and ethnographic records give us access.

But what about what have sometimes been thought to be the more promising differences, in the

03_CUL917579.indd 14 13/08/2020 3:19:26 PM

Lloyd 15

technology of communication, in language itself and in degrees of literacy associated with different modes of writing (a favourite with Jack Goody (1977) and indeed a factor that Joseph targeted, though not in relation to him (Needham, 2004a: 230f.)? This too is a topic where the waters have been much muddied by some highly superficial speculations, and I do not just mean the common accusation often voiced by those with no firsthand knowledge of Chinese: namely, that it is a hopelessly ambiguous language. Sometimes that view is a grotesquely extravagant inference from the comparative lack of morphology in Chinese, but more often it just stems from down-right prejudice. Ancient and modern Chinese writers and thinkers were and are usually perfectly capable of expressing whatever they want to express, and with the degree of precision they think appropriate. For sure, there are numerous ambiguities in the clas-sical texts, but ambiguity can be useful: it leaves open a range of interpretations that wait to be explored. Indeed, in classical Chinese rhetoric this is often a deliberate, quite cunning ploy that is exploited to excellent effect.

At one stage it was proposed that the Chinese lan-guage does not countenance counterfactual condi-tionals, and that was imagined to be crucially relevant to the development of ‘science’, given its heavy dependence on exploring counterfactual hypotheses.4 Yet it did not take long for that to be exposed as a gross mistake. From the earliest times, Chinese writers contemplated counter-to-fact situa-tions – there are some fine examples in the 2nd cen-tury BCE compendium Huainanzi and even earlier in the 4th–3rd century BCE texts of the Gongsun Longzi.5 There is even a linguistic form that marks these out, jiashi, which is roughly translatable as ‘falsely supposing’ (see Harbsmeier, 1998: 117). The shi corresponds to ‘if’ but the qualifying jia indicates that this is counterfactual. Nothing could be a clearer counterfactual than Gongsun Long’s ‘if there were no things within the world’.

We can and should concede that the range of dif-ferent modes of conditionality that are expressible in a highly inflected language such as ancient Greek can be conveyed only by paraphrase or elaboration in a language such as classical Chinese. Yet, as my colleague Robert Wardy showed rather conclusively,

when they were faced with the problem of translat-ing the Latin versions of Aristotle’s texts in the 16th and 17th centuries, the Chinese certainly did not find that impossible (Wardy, 2000). In fact, their perfor-mance was comparable to that of Latin translators when they faced the equivalent task of rendering his Greek into their Latin.

As for the second factor that linguistic determin-ists are prone to cite, namely, the effects of literacy on the rise of a critical and sceptical spirit, I can be brief, for two reasons. The first is that written texts, especially when treated as canonical, let alone sacred, can stifle criticism, not foster it. Second, lit-eracy as such does not, of course, discriminate between quite a few different ancient civilisations across the Eurasian landmass (see Lloyd, 2014: 116–139).

My all-too-rapid critique of just some of the fac-tors invoked to account for the different trajectories of modes of thought and inquiry in premodern socie-ties should not be taken to imply that I dismiss them all out of hand. As I said, we can see the limited rel-evance of different items – physical, economic, social, institutional, intellectual – at different junc-tures. But what none of them singly, nor the whole gamut collectively, provides is the makings of a grand global history of those trajectories. In particu-lar, they do not enable us to answer Needham’s ques-tion of why modern science did not occur independently in China. Indeed, with no single over-all explanation coming near to commanding any-thing like a consensus – despite the very considerable efforts expended over the past 50 years or so – we might conclude that the question as posed is incapa-ble of resolution.

The conclusion looms that what Joseph continued to be preoccupied with was really an unanswerable question to which he failed to find a fully satisfac-tory solution. At points in his contributions to SCC 7.2, he effectively admits that definitive answers are not, as yet, forthcoming.6 Yet what we can take away from his monumental research is not a simple – over-simple and ill-formed – particular problem, but a wealth of detailed data offering marvellous possible areas for investigating the complex factors at work at different points in the diverse endeavours that differ-ent individuals and groups made to understand the

03_CUL917579.indd 15 13/08/2020 3:19:26 PM


world around them – whatever they took that to be, and indeed, different views were entertained on that subject.

This is where a new agenda begins to emerge from the ashes of the old. We should not think that their notions of how to go about understanding, and even what understanding entails, were all the same. Indeed, the evidence shows that they had many different goals – a point that applies not just within ancient China but also within and between ancient Greece, Egypt, Mesopotamia and India. Heterogeneity again.

So what I propose as an alternative to the Needham question starts by problematizing what ‘science’ itself can be taken to include. We are used to thinking of it as a well-defined endeavour, unified by a single determinate ‘scientific method’. Joseph himself focused on ‘mathematised hypotheses’ com-bined with ‘relentless experimentation’.7 But this is yet another oversimplification. A case can be made, as I have detailed elsewhere (Lloyd, 2009: 153–171), that science just calls on a particular systematisation of cognitive capacities that we all possess, at least potentially. One can, in fact, find both experiment and the application of mathematics to understanding physical phenomena in both ancient China, for example, in the Zhoubi Suanjing at the turn of the millennium, and ancient Greece. Systematic obser-vation differs from merely looking and seeing but can be said to be continuous with the latter. Controlled experiment owes much to ordinary trial-and-error methods, and deductive argument is just a tidier and more self-conscious version of common-or-garden arguing and inferring. I have accordingly defended the view that to seek the origin or origins of ‘science’ itself may be misleading. The simple but crucial point is that different areas of scientific endeavour draw on different techniques – and that is still true today. In some areas, such as the explora-tion of distant galaxies, direct experiment is neither necessary nor even possible. But all that variety tends to be brushed aside when we attempt to encap-sulate exactly what ‘the’ scientific method com-prises, armed with which some set out to judge both the West and China as if each was a determinate monolithic entity.

Until such time as we can produce a satisfactory account of what ‘the’ ‘modern’ scientific method

consists in, we shall not be able to identify what was ‘missing’ in China or in any other ancient or modern society which we tend to regard as ‘pre-scientific’. So on the view I would favour, the way to tackle the Needham question is to unravel it. We would not then face what is supposed to be a single massive – but quite unmanageable – problem that lumps together everything that went into ‘the’ ‘Scientific Revolution’ and demands that we satisfy ourselves on the character of ‘the’ ‘scientific method’ that brought ‘it’ about in the West but failed to do so in China or anywhere else. Rather, we would have a whole series of very difficult but more focused issues, concerning details of the inquiries undertaken at any one period or in any civilisation. Although China and the West have dominated scholarly atten-tion, other ancient societies (and indeed modern ones, as revealed by ethnography) are not only inter-esting in their own right but can also be used to test hypotheses we might propose on the relative impor-tance of different factors at different junctures in the development of systematic investigations.

So the Needham question as traditionally con-ceived looks all too seductively simple yet is any-thing but. In fact, I believe it turns out to be an obstacle insofar as it tends to distract attention from where the real work lies – investigating the activities and achievements of different individuals and groups in the particular complex situations in which they worked, on which, of course, Needham has masses of important comments to make in the many thou-sands of pages of SCC. But there were many crucial turning-points in the history of the development of science, and they all deserve our attention.8 To call them ‘Revolutions’ dramatises them, but none was a well-defined historical event like the Storming of the Bastille or of the Winter Palace.

Besides, those major scientific changes occurred at different times and places depending on the sci-ence we are discussing. In the study of the heavens, the regularities in planetary motion were first discov-ered in Babylonia in the 8th century BCE (see Rochberg, 2016). With that major breakthrough, the reappearance of a planet after a period of invisibility became predictable. Then my colleague Nathan Sivin in a famous article (Sivin, 1995 [1982]) pointed first to the work of the astronomer and polymath Shen

03_CUL917579.indd 16 13/08/2020 3:19:26 PM

Lloyd 17

Gua in the 11th century and then identified a revolu-tion carried out by the mathematician Mei Wending and his associates in the 17th century.9 Meanwhile, in my own work (e.g. Lloyd, 2002) I have discussed at length what different ancient Greeks managed or did not manage in different fields at different periods, and not just Aristotle proving the earth’s sphericity and cutting up octopuses to investigate their repro-ductive system, Archimedes in his bath, and Aristarchus failing to persuade his contemporaries that heliocentricity was the answer (to which I will shortly return). In every case we need to identify the specificities of the social, political, institutional and intellectual circumstances in which individuals or groups worked and allow the diversity in the answers to those questions, not just as between Archimedes and Shen Gua and Copernicus but also between Copernicus and Galileo and Kepler and Harvey and Newton. They were all great investigators, for sure, but the ways they were great differed.

I repeat that these are difficult questions, but one topic where I think we can make some progress con-cerning the conditions of possibility for innovation, where the different trajectories of science in the ancient Graeco-Roman and Chinese worlds may even have some relevance for the situation we all face today. Let me end with some observations on that, focusing particularly on the study of the heavens.

The issue turns on the question of state support in ancient and modern scientific research. In astron-omy, especially, the contrast between Mesopotamia and China on the one hand and Greece on the other is striking. In the first two civilisations, astronomy was an affair of state, but Greek astronomers were very much on their own. Two ingenious characters called Eudoxus and Callippus were responsible for excellent work on determining the length of the tropical year in the 4th century BCE. But they held no official position, and their results were only half-heartedly implemented even in the city-state where they lived (Athens). This contrasts starkly with China, where already in the Han dynasty there were officials supported by the State who were responsible for astronomical observations, fore-shadowing the later Astronomical Bureau which in Ming times offered employment to literally hun-dreds of researchers.

The advantages and disadvantages of the two kinds of set-up – strong state support and its com-plete absence – are (I suggest) mirror images of one another. With state support, the astronomers in Mesopotamia and China had to work to the state’s agenda, but they had regular employment and, in China especially, teams of assistants. With no such help or recognition, the Greeks had far more free-dom to propose their own agenda, but had to earn a living as best they could – mostly by casting horo-scopes. The main alternative was teaching or lectur-ing; their exhibition lectures, called epideixeis, served as publicity to attract customers to undertake and pay for the more extensive and expensive courses they offered.

Naturally, in such circumstances, the ambition was to produce startlingly original ideas, which I hold to be one reason why they are so common in ancient Greek thought in general. Among the crazy ideas the astronomers came up with was the highly counterintuitive hypothesis that the earth moves round the sun. Aristarchus was the first to propose that, but even before him, in the 5th century BCE, the Pythagorean Philolaus had suggested that the earth is just another planet, moving not round the sun but what he called the Central Fire. But look what happened. Heliocentricity was rejected in ancient Greece, not because it offended the authorities (as in the days of Galileo) but because the ancient astrono-mers themselves could not accept it. If the earth rotated on its axis once every 24 hours (a necessary assumption for the hypothesis to work), that could be expected to have dramatic effects on the earth’s atmosphere. Clouds or missiles – that is, javelins or bolts hurled by catapults – could never move east-wards (Ptolemy said in the 2nd century CE)10 because they would always be overtaken by the movement of the earth itself.

Of course, the understanding of physical phe-nomena was in its very early days in both ancient China and ancient Greece, but the tension between orthodoxy and innovation has remained a problem ever since. With today’s massive support for science across the world, there is every chance that any decent new idea will be taken up and developed. After all, the ambition to succeed, to make a name for oneself, to win that coveted Nobel Prize, is as

03_CUL917579.indd 17 13/08/2020 3:19:26 PM


strong now as it ever was. (Competition still drives innovation, as does necessity if one thinks of the threat to the world’s ecology.) But three points give cause for concern.

First, today’s scientists must prove themselves masters of what passes as received wisdom, jumping successfully through the hoops of BA, MA and PhD degrees and post-doc positions. It is dangerous to display too much originality too soon in your career, as that may not be recognised and you may find yourself marked down. Without a straight-A record, how will you be accepted by your preferred graduate school? Recall that both Darwin and Einstein had very undistinguished undergraduate careers. Indeed, Darwin had not long graduated from Cambridge with an ordinary degree (he did not even take hon-ours) when he embarked on his extraordinary voy-age of discovery on the Beagle. How many nowadays could live that poor academic record down to go on to do brilliant research?

Second, the major innovations of 20th-century science were not accepted with open arms. I lived through both the plate tectonic and DNA discoveries in Cambridge; in both cases, the principal propo-nents were initially treated with suspicion, even hos-tility, and their scientific credentials were called into question. When Crick was proposed for a fellowship in my own College (I was at King’s at the time), the Provost consulted the current leading biochemists and was told that Crick’s ideas were a flash in the pan and that in a month or two nothing more would be heard of them.

Third, what gets taken up and sponsored reflects commercial and military interests as often as it does the disinterested pursuit of the truth. In all of this, I think we still have much to learn from both the ancient Chinese and Greek models; from their con-trasting strengths and corresponding weaknesses. There are clear advantages to massive state support for science (as in ancient China) but also disadvan-tages in outside influences (whether governmental or commercial) on the agenda. Conversely, in ancient Greece, individuals were free to go it alone, but then they had to, since there were no state institutions to back them up. In particular, we moderns, in both China and the West, have to continue to worry about striking the right balance between state support and

the individual’s freedom of manoeuvre, particularly in relation to scientific research that raises acute moral problems. You should not think that this is an exclusively modern phenomenon – the pros and cons of stem-cell research certainly are, but already in Greek antiquity the practice of human vivisection for medical research raised an outcry, in some quarters at least.

Let me return to the main point and recapitulate. I started with the problems I have with Joseph’s anachronisms, his teleology and his preoccupation with the supposedly key event of the 17th-century scientific revolution in the West that did not happen in China. We should, I suggest, widen our remit to include the history of human attempts to understand the world and their experience of it more generally (which would allow me to discuss the full range of ancient Greek achievements). When we thus broaden the agenda, we encounter many limited break-throughs across different cultures and periods. I cast doubt on grand theories of the trajectory of human endeavours in general, but ended with some very summary remarks on one topic where some progress in our understanding of the impact of different insti-tutional regimes seems possible, namely in the study of the conditions of possibility for innovation, where we are still faced, today, with finding a balance between individual freedom of manoeuvre and cor-porate or state support.

Those who yearn for a single definitive answer to what they imagined to be the simple Needham ques-tion will, no doubt, be taken aback at my twin insist-ences on complexity and specificity, and I certainly concede that it is harder work.11 But it should release us from any idea that we should focus more or less exclusively on that one supposedly simple explanan-dum when we have so much other work to do to investigate the shifting fortunes of scientific investi-gation down the ages. That hard work chimes, how-ever, with the ambitious plans being entertained by the new Director of a revived NRI, where enthusias-tic young scholars drawn from many different coun-tries and with many different skills and interests are engaged in inspiring studies of a considerable vari-ety of topics, involving increasingly significant col-laborations with different faculties and institutions in the university, including the faculties of Asian and

03_CUL917579.indd 18 13/08/2020 3:19:26 PM

Lloyd 19

Middle Eastern Studies, History and Philosophy of Science, Archaeology, Classics, Social Anthropology and CRASSH (the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities), to name but six.

For me, revising the agenda means being prepared to look closely at all the complexity and specificity I mentioned – the work of famous individuals and of anonymous craftsmen. But reviewing the legacy means continuing the investigations that Needham launched, not in precisely the way he organised them but recog-nisably in line with the spirit that animated his work, insofar as he set a shining example of the most pro-found cross-cultural and interdisciplinary investigation of human endeavours to comprehend the world.

Acknowledgements

This is a slightly modified version of the first Needham Memorial Lecture that I delivered on 28 October 2016. I am most grateful to the sponsors, Jing Brand Co. Ltd, and also to Professor Roel Sterckx and Clare College for host-ing the event. My thanks also go to John Moffett and Jenny Zhao for their help in preparing the lecture.



Funding


Notes

1. This led to the arrest of 15 students, who were tried at the Hertfordshire assizes. Eight of them were sen-tenced to between 9 and 18 months in prison.

2. Theophrastus’ great botanical treatises date from the 4th century BCE. Dioscorides’ De Materia Medica was written in the 1st century CE.

3. ‘It is the rise of the bourgeoisie in Western Europe from the 15th century onwards which decided that Europe . . . would strike out in a new direction, devel-oping capitalism, scientific method and the industrial revolution one after another’ (Needham, 2004a: 229).

4. See Bloom (1981), extensively criticised by Harbsmeier (1998: 116ff.).

5. ‘Supposing that within the world there were no point-ing out of things, what would we have the opportunity

to call not the pointed-out? If within the world there were no things, what would we have the opportunity to call the pointed-out?’ (Gongsun Long, Zhiwu lun, discussed by Graham, 1989: 91–94).

6. ‘In sum, I believe that the analysable differences in social and economic pattern between China and Western Europe will in the end illuminate as far as anything can ever throw light on it, both the earlier predominance of Chinese science and technology and also the later rise of science in Europe alone’ (Needham, 2004b: 23, italics added). He later added that such questions as ‘why did the Roman Empire fall?’ are stimulating . . . but ‘they have no definitive answers’ (Needham, 2004a: 231).

7. ‘If I were asked to define modern science, I would say that it is the combination of mathematised hypotheses about natural phenomena with relentless experimen-tation’ (Needham, 2004b: 1 note 2).

8. Important pre-modern ‘breakthroughs’:

Babylonia 8th century BCE: Recognition of the regu-larities in planetary movements and predictions of visibility/invisibility.

Greece: Philolaus (proposed non-geocentric system) 5th cen-

tury BCE Eudoxus (concentric spheres hypothesis) c. 365 BCE Callippus (modified Eudoxus) c. 330 BCE Aristotle 384–322 BCE (proves sphericity of earth) Aristarchus of Samos (heliocentricity) c. 275 BCE Archimedes 287–212 BCE

China: Huainanzi (compendium of knowledge) 139 BCE Zhoubi suanjing (cosmology and cosmography) c. 50

CE Shen Gua (astronomer and polymath) 978–1052 CE Li Shizhen (plants/pharmacopoeia) 1518–1598 CE Mei Wending (mathematician and astronomer) 1632–

1721 CE 9. ‘In two decades of study, teaching and public lectur-

ing on Chinese science and medicine, I have encoun-tered no question more often than why modern science did not develop independently in China, and none on which more firmly based opinions have been formed on the basis of less critical attention to avail-able evidence’ (Sivin, 1995 [1982]: 46).

10. Ptolemy, Syntaxis (otherwise known as the Almagest). See Heiberg (1898), Book 1, ch. 7, p. 24.

11. Arguments very similar to mine have subsequently been advanced by contributors to the issue of ISIS (an international review devoted to the history of

03_CUL917579.indd 19 13/08/2020 3:19:26 PM


science and its cultural influence) (101.1, Spring 2019) devoted to a ‘second look’ at Needham’s leg-acy. On the one hand, it is agreed that the framework within which to carry out our investigations needs to be modified to avoid the pitfalls of anachronism and of treating either ‘China’ or ‘the West’ as homogene-ous entities. On the other hand, this does not mean we should abandon Needham’s ambition to engage in deep comparative studies to elucidate specificities of the developments in different places and times in human endeavours to understand the world.

References

Bloom A (1981) The Linguistic Shaping of Thought: A Study in the Impact of Language on Thinking in China and the West. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Elvin M (2004) Vale atque Ave. In: Robinson KG (ed.) Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 7, part 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. xxiv–xliii.

Goody J (1977) The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Graham AC (1989) Disputers of the Tao. La Salle, IL: Open Court.

Harbsmeier C (1998) Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 7, part 1, Language and Logic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Heiberg IL (1898) Claudii Ptolemaei opera quae exstant omnia, vol. 1. Leipzig: Teubneri.

Lloyd GER (2002) The Ambitions of Curiosity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lloyd GER (2009) Disciplines in the Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lloyd GER (2014) The Ideals of Inquiry. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Needham J (2004a) Modern science: Why from Europe? In: Robinson KG (ed.) Science and Civilisation

in China, vol. 7, part 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 224–231.

Needham J (2004b) Science and society in East and West. In: Robinson KG (ed.) Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 7, part 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–23.

Rochberg F (2016) Before Nature: Cuneiform Knowledge and the History of Science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Sivin N (1995 [1982]) Why the scientific revolution did not take place in China – or didn’t it? (originally Chinese Science, 1982, 5: 45–66). In: Sivin N (ed.) Science in Ancient China: Researches and Reflections. Aldershot: Variorum.

Wardy RBB (2000) Aristotle in China: Language, Categories and Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Author biography

Geoffrey Lloyd is Emeritus Professor of Ancient Philosophy and Science at the University of Cambridge, where from 1989 to 2000 he was Master of Darwin College. He has been a Trustee of the NRI from 1991 and he was Chair of the trust from 1992 to 2002. He has held Visiting Professorships in North and South America, in Europe, in the Far East and Australia and holds Honorary Doctorates from Athens, Oxford and St Andrews. He is the author of 23 books, most recently The Ambivalences of Rationality: Ancient and Modern Cross-Cultural Explorations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), and he has edited a further seven. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Anthropological Society since 1970, of the British Academy since 1983, and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1995. He was awarded the Sarton Medal in 1987, the Kenyon Medal in 2007, the Dan David Prize in 2013 and the Fyssen Prize in 2014. He was knighted for ‘services to the history of thought’ in 1997.

03_CUL917579.indd 20 13/08/2020 3:19:26 PM

https://doi.org/10.1177/2096608320921615




1. The conception of Science and Civilisation in China

The aim of this essay is to share some of the experi-ences I had as General Editor of Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilisation in China series in the 22 years that I fulfilled that role between 1992, when Joseph Needham and Ho Peng Yoke (then Director of the Needham Research Institute) asked me to take on this responsibility, and my retirement in 2014.1 A remark often wrongly attributed to Otto von Bismarck says, in effect, that if people knew how sausage was made, nobody would want to eat any.2 In this essay, rather than discussing the schol-arly significance of Science and Civilisation in China, which many have done before me, I shall try to make use of my experience as editor of the series to describe something of ‘how [at least some parts of] the sausage was made’ – hoping that, despite the fears wrongly ascribed to Bismarck, this will

not deter readers from wanting to serve themselves another slice. First, it will be helpful for me to outline the early stages of the Science and Civilisation in China (SCC) project – and how the series developed from its original sim-plicity to the complex series of books that it eventually became. In May 1943 – the year that he arrived in China – Joseph Needham sketched an ‘ideas map’ (Figure 1). Such was his normal practice whenever he wanted to plan an article or a talk. This one, however, was the most important ideas map of his entire career, for although he did not know it at the time, the project that grew from it was to occupy the great majority of his time and energy for the next half-century.

My farewell to Science and Civilisation in China

Christopher CullenNeedham Research Institute, UK; Darwin College, UK

AbstractThe author served as General Editor of the Science and Civilisation in China series from 1992 to 2014. He reviews the history of this scholarly project since its inception by Joseph Needham in 1943, and discusses some of the problems that had to be solved in the production of such a complex and far-ranging publication. He illustrates the discussion with reference to three of the books in the series that appeared under his editorship – those dealing with the topics of ceramics, ferrous metallurgy and ethnobotany.

KeywordsJoseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, Needham Research Institute

Corresponding author:Christopher Cullen, Needham Research Institute, 8 Sylvester Road, Cambridge CB3 9AF, UK. Email: [email protected]

921615 CUL0010.1177/2096608320921615Cultures of ScienceCullenresearch-article2020

Article

04_CUL921615.indd 21 13/08/2020 3:19:40 PM





The sheet of paper in question does not tell us that it is the plan of a book. It may simply have been the outline for one of the many lectures that he gave in the course of his visits to academic institutions as part of his travels all over Free China from 1943 to 1946. But anyone who looks at this document with hindsight can see that the essentials of SCC are all present: the initial survey of Chinese traditions of

thought about nature from the early Daoists to Zhu Xi, the core of a detailed history of the technical fer-tility of Chinese civilisation, covering everything from ceramics and gunpowder to the pharmaco-poeia, all set in the context of an abiding interest in the relations between the ways people think and the social and political structures that shape and con-strain their actions.

Figure 1. Needham’s ‘ideas map’ for the SCC project.

04_CUL921615.indd 22 13/08/2020 3:19:41 PM

Cullen 23

After a relatively brief post-war period at UNESCO in Paris, Needham returned to Cambridge. He does not seem to have waited long before setting out his plans to write a history of science, technology and medicine in China, in the fullest social, intellectual, economic and political context, from original sources. We have the letter of 22 May 1948 in which the Syndics of Cambridge University Press expressed their willing-ness to consider such a book for publication (Figure 2). They acknowledged that the printing department would have to be warned that the book would contain ‘a certain number of Chinese characters’, which it cer-tainly did. We can perhaps detect a slight nervousness in the Secretary’s note that in the view of the Syndics, it was ‘most desirable that the material should be

included in one volume’, which, as we shall see, it cer-tainly was not.

2. The seven-volume scheme

The Syndics’ original agreement was to publish a single volume by Needham. Whether or not that was also Needham’s intention is unclear. But a little over 2 years later, in January 1951 (Figure 3), another Secretary to the Syndics wrote saying that it was pretty clear that ‘the right course [was] to issue the work in a number of smaller volumes purchasable separately’. It may be that the Syndics were already beginning to become apprehensive at the sheer bulk of material that Needham was preparing in draft

Figure 2. Letter from Cambridge University Press in 1948.

04_CUL921615.indd 23 13/08/2020 3:19:42 PM


– from the letter, it is clear that they had already seen material he was preparing on mathematics, a topic that was not planned to appear in print until volume 3. In any case, in accordance with the Syndics’

decision, the first three volumes of the series appeared in 1954, 1956 and 1959. The 1954 volume set out the first published plan of Needham’s work. This core plan, which remained constant during the

Figure 3. Letter from Cambridge University Press in 1951.

04_CUL921615.indd 24 13/08/2020 3:19:42 PM

Cullen 25

whole of the time Needham worked on SCC, was based on a division into 50 topical sections – from ‘1: Preface’ to ‘50: General conclusions’. These were to be distributed over seven physical volumes, arranged under broad topical titles, as follows3:

•• Volume 1: Introductory Orientations•• Volume 2: History of Scientific Thought•• Volume 3: Mathematics and the Sciences of

the Heavens and Earth•• Volume 4: Physics and Physical Technology•• Volume 5: Chemistry and Chemical

Technology•• Volume 6: Biology and Biological Technology•• Volume 7: The Social Background

Volumes 1, 2 and 3 appeared in fairly rapid suc-cession in 1954, 1956 and 1959, an excellent rate of publication for a scholarly series mostly written by one person. But then things changed quite markedly, as we shall now see.

3. The plan proliferates

Up to the end of the 1950s, there were no signs that Needham planned to depart from the seven-volume plan agreed with the press early in that decade. By 1962, however, it became clear that Needham had other ideas – and indeed must have had them for some time, given the time required to research and write books of the kind Needham was producing. Volume 4, Physics and Physical Technology, was originally planned as a single book containing four sections. But in that year, there appeared a book con-taining only one of the planned sections, with the rest of the volume scheduled to appear as two further physical books. As a result, volume 4 appeared in three parts as follows:

•• Volume 4: Physics and Physical Technology|| Part 1: Physics. Joseph Needham, with the

research assistance of Wang Ling, and the special co-operation of Kenneth Robinson (published in 1962 and contains section 26)

|| Part 2: Mechanical Engineering. Joseph Needham, with the collaboration of Wang

Ling (published in 1965 and contains sec-tion 27)

|| Part 3: Civil Engineering and Nautics. Joseph Needham, with the collaboration of Wang Ling and Lu Gwei-djen (pub-lished in 1971 and contains sections 28 and 29)

From this time on, someone speaking of a ‘vol-ume’ of SCC might mean either the large-scale divi-sion into volumes 1 to 7 or the actual physical books published by Cambridge University Press. Needham himself recognised the distinction by labelling the first kind ‘heavenly volumes’ and the second ‘earthly volumes’.

But the process of subdivision had much further to go. In the plan published in volume 1 (published in 1954), volume 5 was to contain the following five sections:

•• Volume 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology|| Section 33: Alchemy and Chemistry|| Section 34: Chemical Technology|| Section 35: Ceramic Technology|| Section 36: Mining and Metallurgy|| Section 37: The Salt Industry

If volume 5 had contained 680 pages, as had vol-ume 3, each section would have had about 136 pages. But just as the 1960s had seen volumes appear in a number of physical parts, the 1970s were to see an even more radical ‘multifurcation’, and one which would no doubt have horrified the Syndics had it been proposed a few decades earlier: the appearance of a single section in four separate physical parts.

Section 33 became

•• Volume 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology|| Section 33: Alchemy and Chemistry|| Part 2: Spagyrical discovery and inven-

tion: Magisteries of gold and immortality. Joseph Needham, with the collaboration of Lu Gwei-djen (1974): 510 pages

|| Part 3: Spagyrical discovery and inven-tion: Historical survey, from cinnabar elix-

04_CUL921615.indd 25 13/08/2020 3:19:42 PM


irs to synthetic insulin. Joseph Needham, with the collaboration of Ho Ping-Yu and Lu Gwei-djen (1976): 481 pages

|| Part 4: Spagyrical discovery and inven-tion: Apparatus, theories and gifts. Joseph Needham, with the collaboration of Lu Gwei-djen, and a contribution by Nathan Sivin (1980): 772 pages

|| Part 5: Spagyrical discovery and inven-tion: Physiological alchemy. Joseph Needham, with the collaboration of Lu Gwei-djen (1983): 574 pages

The reader who is wondering what happened to part 1 of volume 5 will perhaps be reassured to know that it appeared as volume 5, part 1: Paper and print-ing, authored by Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin (published in 1985). In total, the four parts of volume 5 embody-ing section 33 contained 2287 pages, about 17 times the number of pages that might have been predicted when volumes 1, 2 and 3 appeared in the 1950s. But far from being in any way disturbed, it appears that the Syndics happily agreed to publish. And they cer-tainly had some motivation for this, quite apart from the scholarly value of these books. The fact is that by 1970, SCC had established itself as a series that many scholarly libraries round the world had decided they should have on their shelves. As a result, each book in that series was automatically ordered in large numbers as it appeared. The resultant income for the press was more than satisfactory. Thus, whereas it is unlikely that the Syndics would have accepted a proposal from Needham for four substan-tial books on Chinese alchemy in 1960, by 1970, things looked very different.

Let us pause to ask how Needham was able to sustain and develop this immense productivity. In the first place, it is indisputable that he had a capac-ity for work that most scholars would envy, and that he had an unusual ability to produce coherent text at the first draft as his fingers moved rapidly over the keys of his electric typewriter, after he had soaked himself in the source materials that he surveyed. He could also display a ruthless determination to keep distractions at a distance.

But added to all that were the fortunate circum-stances of his life in Cambridge. The only senior

academic post he held was that of the Sir William Dunn Reader in Biochemistry,4 which he held from 1924 to his retirement in 1966, with a period of absence during his wartime work in China, and immediately after in Paris at UNESCO. The University statutes at that time meant that his only strict obligation was to give a certain number of lec-tures on biochemistry each year, which he did until his retirement. As a result, his abandonment of bio-chemical research for the SCC project did not threaten his security of tenure or his salary; in addi-tion, he had inherited some capital from his parents that also produced a helpful income. He had been a fellow of Gonville and Caius College since 1924, and was thus guaranteed a room in college and free meals for life; he was elected Master in 1966. And for most of his life, he had the loyal support of two energetic and learned women, his wife Dorothy Needham (like her husband a Fellow of the Royal Society) and Lu Gwei-djen.

I mention these advantages, which most modern researchers can only wonder at, to stress how well and fruitfully he exploited them. He wasted none of his chances, and we should be grateful for that.

4. The later collaborators

During the time I was General Editor, I saw a num-ber of volumes of SCC through the press. Two of these were largely by Needham himself, though they appeared posthumously:

•• Volume 6, part 6: Biology and biological technology: Medicine. Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen, edited by Nathan Sivin (pub-lished in 2000)

•• Volume 7, part 2: The social background: General conclusions and reflections. Joseph Needham, edited by Kenneth Girdwood Robinson, with contributions by Ray Huang, and an introduction by Mark Elvin (published in 2004)

Most of my work was, however, concerned with volumes by collaborators in which Needham had never played any role, apart from noting their topics in his outline of the series. I shall now turn to some

04_CUL921615.indd 26 13/08/2020 3:19:42 PM

Cullen 27

examples of these, which appeared, respectively, in 2004, 2008 and 2015 (a date which rendered it, in a sense, posthumous for me as General Editor, given my retirement the previous year). But how did it happen that Needham felt he had to allow others to publish whole books in the series that he had, in many ways, made a unique expression of his world view as a scien-tist, a historian and a student of Chinese culture?

When speaking or writing about his project, Needham typically used the pronoun ‘we’ rather than ‘I’. This was a just recognition of the fact that the SCC series in anything like the form it began to take in the 1950s would have been impossible with-out the work of a number of scholars in addition to Joseph Needham.

For the first three volumes of the series, that col-laborator was Wang Ling, who is credited on the title pages as having provided ‘research assistance’. To a large extent, this consisted of locating material in pre-modern Chinese sources that Needham could use in his writing of what was, let us remember, conceived as a pioneering survey rather than a definitive treat-ment. Needham was certainly well able to read and translate both modern and classical Chinese, but Wang had a speed of comprehension that enabled him to glance through many pages of complex premodern texts and locate promising materials much more eas-ily than Needham ever could. In the three parts of vol-ume 4, other names appear: Part 1 had the ‘special co-operation of Kenneth Robinson’, who wrote on acoustics, and part 3 also bore the name of Lu Gwei-djen. But in every case, all or the great majority of the words published in the series came from Needham’s rapid dactylography on his electric typewriter.

From the 1980s onwards, we begin to see signs of a different kind of collaboration, in which entire books in the series appear as the work of a single collaborator, although Needham’s name continues to appear as the overall series author. If we consider Needham’s situation in the 1970s, it is clear why he would have felt this necessary.

The plan agreed with the press in 1951 provided for seven volumes, each being a single book. In accordance with this plan, Needham had produced the first three volumes by the end of the decade. That left four more volumes to write, and even if we allow for a rather slower rate of production for these books,

they could certainly have been in print by around 1975 or 1980. Since Needham was born in 1900, that might have been thought an appropriate time for him to retire from active research and writing, and enjoy the gratitude of the scholarly world for a magnificent life’s work that would have done much to change the way the world saw China, as well as the way that historians of science saw the premodern and early modern world. But it was not to be. The 1960s were mainly devoted to bringing out the three parts of the expanded volume 4, and the 1970s were spent in producing no less than four books on the topic of a single section, that on alchemy.5 Needham could see clearly that it was unlikely that he would be able to complete his work even if he had suddenly reverted to the original plan of the 1950s, and that it was flatly impossible that the series would ever be completed in the expanded, we may even say the inflated, form that he had allowed it to assume.

It was at this point, already late in life by any nor-mal scholarly standard, that he began to hand over responsibility to others for the writing of major parts of SCC.

This first such book to appear was volume 6, part 2: Biology and biological technology: Agriculture, by Francesca Bray (published in 1984). This was fol-lowed by the book on paper and printing (volume 5, part 1) by Tsien Tsuen-Hsuin (published in 1985). Bray was the first author to whom Needham handed over responsibility in this way, and it appears that once he had chosen someone in whom he had confi-dence, Needham’s habit was to let that person get on with the job in his or her own way – at times even when the ‘collaborator’ would have been glad to have been able to work more closely with him. There was of course one obvious reason for this: Needham was impelled to turn to collaborators in the hope that he would at least be able to finish work on the remaining parts of the series. Such time and energy as remained to him had to be used for that purpose and that purpose alone.

5. A collaborator’s volume from (re)start to finish: ceramics

I turn now to the first example of a volume entirely written by a collaborator that was published during

04_CUL921615.indd 27 13/08/2020 3:19:42 PM


my editorship. In the original 1954 plan, the follow-ing section appears:

•• Volume 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology|| Section 35: Ceramic Technology|| ‘History of pottery, porcelain, feldspathic

glazes, etc.’

By 1979, when the Needham Research Institute (NRI) prepared a pamphlet on ‘The State of the Project’ for private circulation, the words ‘Digression on cloissoné’ had been added. But that was all. When I took over responsibility for the series, I found that this section had been allocated to a collaborator, of whom we need say no more than that there were no apparent signs of activity on that person’s part, nor did there seem any great likelihood of the situation changing.

Although, on the basis outlined earlier, this sec-tion might have occupied something like 136 pages as part of a single physical volume 5, I also found that in the context of the almost uncontrolled expan-sion of the series in previous decades, the expecta-tion had arisen that this section would appear as a separate book. In scholarly terms, the idea of a com-prehensive survey of the development of ceramic technology in China, set in its fullest historical, social and intellectual context with all the accompa-nying apparatus of a volume of SCC, was a very attractive one. Given the privileged publishing win-dow offered by SCC at this stage of its development, this was clearly an opportunity not to be missed. After I had outlined the situation to him, Needham accepted my suggestion that we needed to seek a new collaborator who might actually be able to do the necessary work to make this very desirable pos-sibility into a reality.

If one has a demanding task that one wants to see completed within a reasonable timescale and to a high standard, it is commonplace wisdom that one should ask a busy person to take it on. The busy person in question was Rose Kerr, Keeper of the East Asian section, Victoria and Albert Museum, London. To my great delight, she agreed to take the job on, and she in turn was able to persuade Nigel Wood to join her, with particular responsibility for

the technical aspects of the topic. Of course, a pro-ject like this needs funding, and my next task was to draft the appropriate grant applications. Happily, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation agreed to support a ‘buy-out’ of Rose Kerr from the Victoria and Albert Museum for a year, plus all other research costs. A Leverhulme Trust Senior Fellowship was also obtained for Nigel Wood.

In 2004, 10 years after recommissioning, and half a century after the publication of the original seven-word plan for this section, the book appeared as volume 5, part 12: Ceramic Technology, by Rose Kerr and Nigel Wood, with additional contributions by Ts’ai Mei-fen and Zhang Fukang. As its topic demanded, it was illustrated in colour throughout, the first volume of the series to be given this privilege by Cambridge University Press. It contains 918 pages in all, making it seven times longer than the estimate for a single section under the seven-volume plan. This was a very modest expansion compared with the fac-tor of 17 that Needham had allowed himself for sec-tion 33 on alchemy, and was certainly well justified by the importance of the subject and the rich histori-cal scholarship and technical understanding that this book offered its readers. It is unlikely to have any serious competitors for several decades.

6. A closer look at one long but successful story: ferrous metallurgy

In the case of ceramics, the challenge I faced as edi-tor was that of effectively restarting part of the SCC project from scratch, given the complete failure of the original collaborator to make any perceptible progress with the task allocated to (or perhaps imposed on) them by the creator of the series. In other cases, my responsibility was essentially to ensure that a collaborator who was already fully engaged with the task was enabled to bring it to suc-cessful completion and publication. I shall briefly discuss two such cases in the order in which the planned volumes eventually appeared.

The story of the first of these begins with the orig-inal plan for section 36, Mining and Metallurgy, which appeared in 1954 as follows:

04_CUL921615.indd 28 13/08/2020 3:19:42 PM

Cullen 29

•• Volume 5: Chemistry and Chemical Technology|| Section 36: Mining and Metallurgy|| Ancient Chinese bronze and bronze-

casting. Metallurgical formularies in Han books

|| Ancient iron technology: the mastery of cast iron in the Han; iron ploughs and sword forging

|| Metallurgy of the precious metals|| Knowledge of coal in China and tentatives

at coke for smelting. Types of smelting furnaces. The great Ming metallurgical compendium

|| Mining of tin and zinc. Brass and other alloys, some unknown to the West till the +18th century

All this was to be one section within volume 5, planned as a single book. On the usual estimate of 136 pages for a section, the topic of ferrous metal-lurgy might have been expected to take up no more than 50 pages. It is interesting therefore to note that the draft of the ferrous metallurgy section, published as The Development of Iron and Steel Technology in China (Needham, 1958), contains 48 pages. Had Needham continued to work at the same pace on the rest of the section, the result would have been a very valuable short monograph survey of an important topic not so far treated by historians of technology. But this was not to be. Needham himself moved on to other matters, particularly those that eventually appeared in volume 4 of SCC. The parts of the sec-tion relating to mining were taken on by Peter Golas, and it was a pleasure to see his valuable contribution appear as volume 5, part 13, in 1999. The parts of the section dealing with nonferrous metallurgy were allocated to collaborators who proved unproductive, and I was happy to be able to transfer responsibility for this topic to Mei Jianjun, now my successor as Director of the NRI. But what had happened to fer-rous metallurgy?

After the publication of Needham’s short mono-graph in 1958, there are no further signs of work on this topic over 20 years, until 1981, when Needham left the following note in his ferrous metallurgy file:

Donald Wagner @ Ostasiatika Institutet Copenhagen / v. keen on hist. [history] of i. [iron] & s. [steel] in [China] might collaborate

Needham’s first idea was essentially to ask Wagner to revise the short draft on ferrous metallurgy that he had already completed and published, since he was fully aware that the archaeology and scholar-ship of the preceding two decades had rendered his previous work outdated. But the conception of the task appears to have expanded rapidly in harmony with other aspects of Needham’s original plan, and by 1992, it had been agreed that Wagner was to pro-duce a complete book on this topic. Once more thanks to a grant obtained by the NRI from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, Wagner was able to spend several years in Cambridge working on his book without distraction, and it was published as volume 5, part 11, in 2008 – 54 years after the publication of the original plan. Once more SCC offered the window for publication of a lengthy and comprehensive work of scholarship that will provide an entry point into its subject for decades to come.

7. (Ethno)botany: SCC reflects on itself

If we look at the outline given for volume 6 in the 1954 plan of SCC, we see:

•• Volume 6: Biology, Agriculture and Medicine|| Section 38: Botany|| Botany and plant sciences in the great

series of pharmaceutical compendia|| Development of the classification system|| Special monographs in the Sung [the

Song dynasty]|| Discovery of sex in plants; plant abnor-

malities and so on.

The whole of volume 6 as then planned was to be contained in a single book, covering sections 38 to 45 – Botany, Zoology, Biochemical Technology, Agriculture, Agricultural Arts, the ‘Institutes of Medicine’ (specified as Anatomy, Physiology and Embryology), Medicine and Pharmaceutics. In terms of space in the plan, Botany represented about

04_CUL921615.indd 29 13/08/2020 3:19:43 PM


one-twelfth of the whole. On the basis of the 680 pages of main text in volume 3, that would have given Botany a little under 60 pages – slightly longer than what we saw earlier might have been occupied by ferrous metallurgy.

If we look at the plans for botany published in the 1979 pamphlet, it is clear that there had been great developments during the preceding quarter of a cen-tury. Volume 6, of which section 38 ‘Botany’ had origi-nally been described in four lines, was now planned to appear in four parts, with sections 38 to 42 composing parts 1 and 2, while sections 43 to 45, dealing with medical matters, were to be dealt with in parts 3 and 4. The plan for section 38 occupied more than 60 lines in the pamphlet plan, and much of it had in fact already been drafted. It is at this point that the name of Georges Métailié first appeared in print in association with SCC: under the heading for parts 1 and 2 in the pam-phlet, we read ‘With the collaboration of Lu Gwei-djen, Georges Métailié, and Francesca Bray’.

To trace the background of this story, we may turn to the correspondence files of the SCC project, care-fully filed away at the NRI. Inside a green folder, labelled ‘SCC VI Bot’, we find another folder bear-ing the name ‘Georges Métailié’. The earliest slip of paper in that folder is dated ‘16 Dec. 78’, with a box round the words ‘BOTANY Section, finishing of’. Clipped to that slip is the curriculum vitae of a young French researcher in his 30s, who describes himself as being in the process of completing a ‘doctorat d’état’ on the history of botanical vocabulary in China and Japan in the 19th century, after having completed a PhD in 1974. Plans for an initial visit to Cambridge in the first 6 or 7 months of 1979 are outlined, con-cluding with the note by Needham that once the work was underway, the new colleague ‘could work in Paris, + xeroxed files of notes, coming once or twice for coupla [sic, = ‘a couple of’, i.e. two] weeks’.

But as time went by, it became clear that, like all tasks to do with SCC, this one was less simple to complete than it might have appeared at first sight. Métailié’s job involved his participation in an offi-cial French mission to China in the immediate short term and gave him few opportunities to work on SCC-related topics. There was also a major project for a dictionary of agriculture that was eventually to be published in 1995 (Métailié and Cai, 1995). This

project involved Métailié working with and manag-ing a number of collaborators of his own.

Nevertheless, in March 1981, only 3 years after asking his new collaborator to begin work, Needham began to apply pressure. When writing in reference to an impending visit to Cambridge by Métailié, Needham added a significant sentence:

We are longing for [the volume on Botany] to be able to go to press, and I must say that the CUP [Cambridge University Press] themselves are trying to hasten more the publication of the volumes, so that they are very eager to receive typescript.

Reference is also made in this letter to the contri-bution to be made to the book by Huang Hsing-Tsung (Huang Xingzong, once Needham’s secretary in war-time China, but by 1981 working with the National Science Foundation in Washington, DC), who had been given responsibility for the parts of section 38 dealing with biological plant protection. Further cor-respondence renewed the topic, until in February 1983, Needham announced that those portions of the Botany volume then available in finished form, including most of the contribution by Huang Hsing-Tsung, had gone to press, and galley proofs were imminently expected. In April of that year, Needham wrote that ‘I think it is now agreed that we should print the breakdown of all the sub-sections of the chapter in Vol. VI, part 1, leaving your remaining portion to come in a later volume’.6

SCC volumes passed rather more slowly through the press in those days, and in the event volume 6, part 1, containing 553 pages of main text, did not actually appear until 1986, 32 years after the original plan of 1954. When readers turned to the contents pages, they found that section 38 had been divided into alphabetically divided subsections labelled (a) to (k). Subsections (a) to (d) were by Needham and Lu Gwei-djen, and comprised7

(a) Introduction

(b) The setting: China’s plant geography

(c) Botanical linguistics

(d) The literature and its context.

04_CUL921615.indd 30 13/08/2020 3:19:43 PM

Cullen 31

Huang Hsing-Tsung was responsible for

(e) Plants and animals in man’s service.

After the usual details of bibliographies, the index and auxiliary tables, there is a white space, followed by these words enclosed by rules:

The following subsections, by Georges Métailié, are not yet ready for publication

After which the subsections still to come are listed as

(f) Treatises on traditional botany, and the devel-opment of classification

(g) The development of plant description and illustration

(h) Chinese knowledge of the life of plants

(i) Horticulture and its techniques

(j) The influence of Chinese flora and botany on modern plant science

(k) Conclusions

In his preface, Needham wrote,

The present volume contains most of section 28 [sic – an uncorrected typographical error for 38], on the plant sciences. We cannot say all, because there will still be more to come in a following volume, the work of our collaborator Dr Georges Métailié . . . It would no doubt have been preferable to bring it all out together in one volume, but the necessities of collaboration and the interlocking of commitments have made it impossible.

In July 1986, Colin Ronan (at the time Secretary of the East Asian History of Science Trust) replied to an enquirer by referring to Métailié’s work as being planned to appear in ‘the second botany volume’ of SCC. It is clear that those working with Needham had tacitly moved from the original notion of the remaining botanical material finding a place in some later volume of the series, to the assumption that there would be a completely independent further

volume on botany, written by Métailié. By April 1988, it was clear that the issue had been settled in favour of a separate ‘earthly volume’, and Métailié gave as his estimate that the typescript for this new volume would consist of around 400 pages.

Time (once more) passed. When in 1992 I became General Editor of the SCC series, the state of affairs with Métailié’s book was one of the matters I reviewed. I was a little concerned to learn that there was an understanding between Needham and the author that the text of this volume would be drafted in French, but I dealt with this problem as far as I could by earmarking funds for the eventual employ-ment of an expert translator, whose skills would obviously be required in order for the book to be published in English with the rest of the series.

Work on the series continued over the next two decades. Nine further (earthly) volumes were pub-lished under my General Editorship. Finally, in February 2011, I was able to report to the NRI Board of Trustees:

We [have] received the final instalment of MS [manuscript] from [Georges Métailié], and have now been sent very favourable reports from the two specialist readers. We therefore begin the complex process of preparing this long-awaited volume for publication, a task which we view with all the more satisfaction considering how long the author has been working on this major project.

But as already mentioned, Métailié’s complex and scholarly text was all in French. However, I was in the extremely fortunate position of having by then agreed with Lady Lloyd (Janet ‘Ji’ Lloyd) that she would take on the very demanding task of transla-tion. As anyone familiar with the range of scholarly work that had already been handled by this expert and sensitive translator will understand, I felt com-plete assurance that the resulting version would be the best that could possibly be produced. Anybody who reads the book as it now stands will agree that my assurance was justified in the event. In late 2013, we had before us a fully translated text, agreed with the author, and could begin to carry out the final tasks required before sending the book to press.8 So, 36 years after Georges Métailié agreed to Needham’s

04_CUL921615.indd 31 13/08/2020 3:19:43 PM


request to help finish his book on Botany, his book appeared.

Some words of Métailié in his preface show us that the time taken for this project had given this author the opportunity for deep reflection on the nature of the task he had undertaken. As a result, he set down on paper what I think is the first significant example of an SCC collaborator’s critical reflection on the nature of the task he had been set:

In accepting the proposal made by Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-djen, I had in effect accepted the idea that a form of clearly defined botany did exist in ancient China, given the voluminous corpus of texts to be analysed. However, as my reading proceeded, I was forced to admit, in the first place, that I had come across no Chinese term that might have even one of the modern meanings of ‘botany’. Furthermore, nor had I found any term that referred to any traditional knowledge specifically about plants before the creation, in 1858, of the term zhiwuxue植物學, meaning botany in the modern sense of the term. Finally, among the abundant literature that I was working through, there was no text that could be regarded as a kind of botanical manual, nor was there any reference to what we call a flora. So was there no botany in China at that time?

To ask such a question is, in effect, to turn the spot-light on what has, over the past 60 years, come to be seen as a controversial assumption behind the whole structure of the SCC project, first stated by Needham in 1977 in the following words, which Métailié quotes:

I suppose we all generally agree that there is only one unitary science of nature, approached more or less closely and built up more or less successfully and continuously, even if very slowly, by the several groups of mankind from age to age. This means that we could expect to trace an absolute continuity between the first beginnings of astronomy and medicine in ancient Babylonia or ancient Egypt, through the advancing natural knowledge of mediaeval China, India, Islam and the classical Western world, to the break-through of late Renaissance Europe when, as has been said, the most effective method of discovery was itself discovered. (Needham, 1977)

Reading these words written over 40 years ago, most historians of science would be able to do no more than say ‘Well, up to a point . . .’ The nature of

Métailié’s sensitive and deeply informed response is set out in his book and cannot be discussed in detail here. The important thing is, however, that with Métailié’s book, we can say that SCC has become reflexive and has begun to discuss the assumptions that underpinned its creation. That is not a bad moment for me to bid farewell to the series now that it has passed into other hands.


The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1. In 1992, I became Deputy Director of the Needham Research Institute (NRI) in parallel with my full-time job in the department of history at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London. I worked under the new Director of the NRI, Ho Peng Yoke, who had taken over in 1990 when Needham decided to retire. I also became chairman of the NRI Publications Board and General Editor of the SCC series. In theory, all this took up no more than the one working day a week away from London allowed by the terms of my contract with SOAS. I was able to work full-time for the NRI after being appointed Director in 2002 in succession to Ho Peng Yoke.

2. The original sentence is ‘Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made’. It is commonly attributed to Prince Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898), but is said by Fred R. Shapiro to have first appeared in the Cleveland Herald in 1869, attributed to the poet John Godfrey Saxe (1816–1887), more than half a century before it began to be attributed to Bismarck. See: Shapiro (2008; online edition: said to have appeared in print on page MM16 of the Sunday Magazine).

3. At the time Needham planned his work, it was fairly normal practice among historians of science to use the contemporary view of the structure of science to give shape to their study of the past. In addition, since Needham was planning to survey a largely unex-plored field, it would have been unwise for him to begin by attempting to decide at the outset how human

04_CUL921615.indd 32 13/08/2020 3:19:43 PM

Cullen 33

understanding of nature was actually constructed in premodern China. (For such an attempt, made to some extent in the light of Needham’s work, see Sivin, 1977: Introduction.) Most of the time, Needham’s chosen structure did not pose significant problems in his writ-ing and that of his collaborators. In two cases, it proved difficult to make the evidence of premodern Chinese thought and practice fit into modern structures. Thus, there is no SCC treatment of zoology, not because Chinese people did not have systematic knowledge of animals from many aspects (agriculture, veterinary medicine, cosmological correlation), but because there was no overall concept of ‘the study of animals’ in its own right. The problems that arose with botany will be discussed near the end of this essay.

4. A Reader in British usage at that time was above a Lecturer in status and salary, but below a Professor.

5. We may also mention substantial works outside Science and Civilisation in China (SCC), one of which (see Needham et al., 1960) contained origi-nal research, while the others (see Needham, 1969; Needham et al., 1970) were essentially edited talks and articles appearing in book form. Needham is also named as the second author of a research monograph (see Lu and Needham, 1980).

6. Needham seemed quite happy with the idea that col-laborators’ contributions that were not ready to be published with his own work, such as Métailié’s, could be fitted in somewhere at a later stage, perhaps by ‘mak[ing] up a volume consisting of various con-tributions’ (letter from Needham to Métailié dated 14 June 1982). Consistency of topic was not necessarily a primary consideration in such plans. Needham had for instance hoped that material drafted by Lo Jung-pang on deep drilling and the salt industry might find a place in Francesca Bray’s book on Agriculture, to which it would not have been very relevant (see volume 6, part 1, Preface, xxiv–xxv, and the letter referred to above). Of course, the topic of the salt industry (section 37) properly belonged in some part of volume 5 (Chemistry and Chemical Technology) rather than anywhere in volume 6 (Biology and Biological Technology).

7. I omit here and below the more detailed analyses of the content of each subsection given in the original.

8. These included, among other things, securing the complex copyright permissions required for the book’s many illustrations. Much gratitude is due to the institute’s librarian, John Moffett, for his

persistence and skill in helping to ensure that all that was needed was eventually put in place.

References

Lu G and Needham J (1980) Celestial Lancets: A History and Rationale of Acupuncture and Moxa. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Métailié G and Cai SL (1995) Dictionnaire d’agriculture chinois–français–anglais. London; New York; Paris: Lavoisier.

Needham J (1958) The Development of Iron and Steel Technology in China. London: Newcomen Society for the Study of the History of Engineering and Technology.

Needham J (1969) The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West. London: Allen and Unwin.

Needham J (1977) Address to the opening session of the 15th International Congress of the History of Science, Edinburgh, 11 August 1977. The British Journal for the History of Science 2(38): 103–113.

Needham J, Wang L and De Solla Price DJ (1960) Heavenly Clockwork: The Great Astronomical Clocks of Medieval China. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Needham J, Wang L, Lu G, et al. (1970) Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West: Lectures and Addresses on the History of Science and Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shapiro FR (2008) Quote . . . Misquote. New York Times, 21 July. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/magazine/27wwwl-guestsafire-t.html

Sivin N (ed.) (1977) Science and Technology in East Asia. New York: Science History Publications.

Author biography

Christopher Cullen studied engineering science at the University of Oxford, and later did a PhD in classical Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He became Deputy Director of the NRI in 1992, then held the post of director from 2002 to 2014. His recent publications include Heavenly Numbers: Astronomy and Authority in Early Imperial China (Oxford University Press, 2017) – a narrative history of the founda-tional period of Chinese astronomy, 3rd century BCE to the 3rd century CE – and The Foundations of Celestial Reckoning: Three Ancient Chinese Astronomical Systems (Routledge, 2017) – translations of source materials, with detailed explanations.

04_CUL921615.indd 33 13/08/2020 3:19:43 PM

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/magazine/27wwwl-guestsafire-t.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/21/magazine/27wwwl-guestsafire-t.html

https://doi.org/10.1177/2096608320915074




This article is a very personal account of my adven-tures in preparing the volume on ferrous metallurgy of Science and Civilisation in China (SCC) (Wagner, 2008). My first encounter with Joseph Needham’s monumental work was in 1968. I was 25 and a first-year student of Chinese. A visiting professor, hearing that I had a background in science, led me to its place on the library shelf and insisted that I read it. (I send Schuyler Cammann many belated thanks.) At that time, the first two of the three parts of volume 4 had been published.

I was captured immediately by Joseph Needham’s erudition, his clear and precise language, and per-haps most of all his use of his scientific background in a constant concern for what he called ‘brass tacks’. Americans call it ‘the nitty gritty’, and a Swedish writer, Arne Dahl, recently coined the term ‘non-virtual reality’.

Joseph asked me to write his volume on ferrous metallurgy in about 1980. I submitted the finished manuscript 25 years later, and it was finally pub-lished in 2008. In those years of work, I confronted

numerous questions large and small. In this article I review some of them, starting with the big picture and then going on to a few brass tacks.

1. Theoretical framework

A writer of history needs a theoretical framework – or rather, a historian has a theoretical framework whether she or he knows it or not. In studies of the history of technology, four approaches stand out.

1.1. Whig history

History is about progress, towards a goal that some-how is a given from the beginning. The term can be applied to Joseph Needham’s (1962) work, as the following passage testifies:

Brass tacks on iron: Ferrous metallurgy in Science and Civilisation in China

Donald B WagnerUniversity of Copenhagen, Denmark; Sichuan University, China

AbstractThis article is a memoire of the author’s work in producing the volume of Science and Civilisation in China focusing on ferrous metallurgy.

KeywordsJoseph Needham, ferrous metallurgy, Science and Civilisation in China

Corresponding author:Donald B Wagner, Jernbanegade 9B, Frederikssund DK-3600, Denmark. Email: [email protected]

915074 CUL0010.1177/2096608320915074Cultures of ScienceWagnerresearch-article2020

Article

05_CUL915074.indd 34 13/08/2020 3:20:02 PM




Wagner 35

Some time ago a not wholly unfriendly critic of our previous volumes wrote, in effect: this book is fundamentally unsound for the following reasons. The authors believe (1) that human social evolution has brought about a gradual increase in man’s knowledge of Nature and control of the external world, (2) that this science is an ultimate value and with its applications forms today a unity . . ., (3) that along with this progressive process human society is moving towards forms of ever greater unity, complexity and organisation. We recognised these invalidating theses as indeed our own, and if we had a door like that of Wittenberg long ago we would not hesitate to nail them to it. (p. xxxi)1

My own subjective experience leads me to agree that ‘science is an ultimate value’, but for all my respect for Joseph Needham, I can find no subjective or objective basis for the idea that the evolution of society has any definite direction at all, positive or negative, or that progress is a useful concept in the study of history.

1.2. The social construction of technology

Technology is influenced in important ways by social forces, which are to be studied using the meth-ods of the social sciences. This approach no doubt owes much of its popularity to a reaction against the Marxist emphasis on the ways in which technology influences society. For example, in a famous dictum in Marx’s (1936) The Poverty of Philosophy, ‘the handmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist’ (p. 92). In my own work, I find it useful to see technolo-gies in both ways. I have earlier used the term ‘tech-nological choices’ and believed I had coined it myself. It turned out that this was a term already in wide use, with quite a different meaning from that I had intended. Basically, I see technologies – the ways people choose to satisfy their material needs and wants – as factors among myriad historical fac-tors that interact with each other simultaneously as causes and effects. The historian’s challenge is to understand and articulate them in a meaningful way.

1.3. The evolution of technology

Technologies change and develop in ways that are closely analogous to the evolution of biological

species. George Basalla (1988) in his book The Evolution of Technology made an old idea explicit, adduced a large number of historical examples and made a convincing argument for it as a valid approach in the history of technology. Consulting a citation index, it seems that his work has had a cer-tain impact. H. T. Huang used it in SCC, volume 6, part 5, Fermentations and Food Science (Needham and Huang, 2000: 597–605).

I have been very much attracted to this approach. In particular, the great geographical variation in iron-production technologies throughout China, apparent in recent centuries, is reminiscent of the ways in which new species develop in ecological isolation. Local ironmasters working in a traditional master–apprentice line can be expected to make small innovations in each generation, not necessarily aware of any change. The result has been that each isolated region had its own iron-production technol-ogy, precisely adapted to its geographical situation.

Sadly, I have had to abandon the effort to follow up on Basalla’s insight. I lack the kind of sources – documentary or archaeological – that would be needed to develop a fine-grained understanding of the evolution of any of the regional iron-production technologies.

1.4. Technology in economic history

One specific concern of mine has been to bring the insights of economic theory into the history of the iron industry in China. Especially important here is the Law of Comparative Advantage of David Ricardo (1772–1823). Boiled down to its essential minimum, it states that the economically rational course is not to do what one does best, but to do what gives the highest profit in the given market. This insight helps to explain why the iron industry in the region around Nanjing, until the Yuan period a major iron-produc-ing region, died out by the early Ming: commercial development there gave the comparative advantage to other activities.

Another example of the effects of comparative advantage is given by the structure of the iron industry in the province of Guangdong from the Ming period onward. Here numerous large-scale ironworks had until about 1700 produced massive quantities of iron for a market that extended northward along the

05_CUL915074.indd 35 13/08/2020 3:20:02 PM


Chinese coast and southward throughout South-east Asia. This may well have been the largest and most technically sophisticated iron industry in the world at that time. The large-scale ironworks operated in paral-lel with myriad small-scale village ironworks through-out Guangdong that produced for local consumption. These were much less efficient than the large-scale works, but their comparative advantage lay in iron production because of low labour costs and the high cost of land transportation. It was economically rational to produce iron inefficiently rather than to produce something else for sale and buy iron pro-duced by the efficient large-scale ironworks (Wagner, 2008: 47 ff, 2011).

Comparative advantage helps also to explain the effect of foreign trade on the iron industry of Guangdong. The large-scale sector went into a steep decline beginning in the early 18th century, and by the mid-19th century it was dead. The small-scale village ironworks continued production uninterrupted. An important part of the explanation for the decline of the large-scale iron industry was competition with imported foreign iron. Improvements in iron-produc-tion technology in the Industrial Revolution, as well as falling shipping costs, meant that British and American iron was competitive in China from the early 19th century. This is only part of the explana-tion, however, because the decline began long before foreign competition became a major factor. The explanation of the 18th-century decline is more likely to be that foreign trade brought new opportunities for Chinese investors, especially in tea and ceramics pro-duction but also in many other fields. Investors’ com-parative advantage changed: the large-scale iron industry gave a smaller return on investment and could not compete for the capital necessary for contin-ued operation.

2. Style and structure

In a book that emphasizes the historical implications of technological brass tacks, one must deal at length with technical details and make them comprehensi-ble to non-specialist readers. This is a difficult task, and I doubt that it is even possible to explain these matters in a manner accessible to all of the intended readers of SCC. I have, in SCC and elsewhere,

attempted to write for ‘readers who know some chemistry and are accustomed to technical thinking’. Not all readers have been satisfied with this limita-tion, but further popularization of technical matters would, I believe, dull the sharp contours of the tech-nical discussion and leave no one satisfied. I have at least attempted to make the broader implications clear to all readers, including those who skip over the technical explanations.

The natural organization for the book clearly had to be chronological, delineating for each period the historical events and developments that have influ-enced and been influenced by technological devel-opments. However, technical matters are easiest to explain when dealing with a period that is well-known through rich historical sources. I therefore moved the last period, the 18th–20th centuries, to the beginning of the book. This allowed me to describe the basic iron-production technologies in a concrete context, with clear contemporary written descrip-tions and illustrations. I could at the same time dis-cuss the ways in which specific aspects of the technology could interact with the economics of the time and place. An example is the two-tiered iron industry in Guangdong and elsewhere, mentioned above – a phenomenon conditioned by, first, the extreme economies of scale that are possible in blast-furnace iron production, and second, the law of com-parative advantage. This two-tiered industrial structure appears in the sources in the 3rd century BCE (Wagner, 2008: 187–188), but it would have been awkward and unconvincing to explain it in that context, with only a few uncertain sources.

Some readers were not happy with this arrange-ment, and I must admit that Chapter 2 of the book can be off-putting for some, a tough chunk to digest right at the start. Perhaps I should have found a com-promise, with fewer details in this opening chapter, but by the time that the Publications Board of the Needham Research Institute began criticizing it, the book was nearly complete and there was no reason-able possibility of changing the arrangement.

3. Brass tacks

Of all the matters that it was necessary to take up in the preparation of my SCC volume, I shall restrict

05_CUL915074.indd 36 13/08/2020 3:20:02 PM

Wagner 37

myself here to some widely held wrong ideas about iron in China that I have had to correct.

3.1. Cast-iron versus steel ploughshares

Joseph Needham wrote in 1956,

It has often been said that the Chinese farmer was ploughing with a cast-iron ploughshare long before the farmers of the West knew anything else but wood; but that they continued to plough with a cast-iron ploughshare long after the farmers of the Far West had ploughshares of steel.

This was in a short epitome of his famous lecture to the Newcomen Society for the History of Engineering and Technology, ‘Iron and steel produc-tion in ancient and medieval China’, on 9 May 1956. He did not include that sentence when the full lecture was published in 1964 (Needham, 1964), perhaps because he had learned the brass tacks of cast-iron ploughshares. White cast iron (the principal kind in premodern China) is highly abrasion-resistant and therefore an excellent material for ploughshares (see, for example, Massari, 1938). Cast-iron ploughshares were in use in the West from the 18th century well into the 20th, and are presumably still used today: in 1976, ‘[m]ost shares used in Britain are made of chilled cast iron, but cast alloy steel and forged steel are also used’ (Culpin, 1976: 51).

It is true that this supposed example of Chinese technological stagnation has often been expressed; I have not found its source, but here is a version of the story, as stated by a Danish author in 1975:

One of the oldest and most important uses of iron is for ploughshares. In China it was possible to use brittle cast iron for this purpose. This was because China’s agricultural land has been cultivated for centuries, and therefore does not contain stones. In Europe a ploughshare of cast iron would be shattered by the stones. (Thomsen, 1975: 12)2

Of course, China’s agricultural land contains stones, and various means have been used to deal with them. Figure 1 shows a Han-period cast-iron ploughshare.3 The edge, the part most subject to damage, is protected by a small V-shaped cap, also

of cast iron. This can be replaced quickly and cheaply when damaged and thereafter recycled. From the Yuan period we have a text describing the use of a wrought-iron cap in the same way on a cast-iron ploughshare (Wang, 1956: 11; Wagner, 2008: 286).

The history of the cast-iron ploughshare in the West seems not to have been dealt with by serious historians of technology. The sources I have found in a cursory search are mostly laudatory stories of heroic inventors, often with details that look suspi-ciously like tall tales. Here are some bare brass tacks, gleaned from those suspect sources: A cast-iron ploughshare was on the market in New York in 1794, and was declared to be much superior to wrought iron (Smith, 1974). A cast-iron plough was patented in Britain by Robert Ransome in 1795 (Ransome, 1843: 17–19; Mirzoeff, 1980), and in the USA by Jethro Wood in 1814 (Allen, 1848; Gilbert, 1882). John Deere produced some of the first steel plough-shares in about 1837, and within a few decades his company (which still exists today) became a major supplier of agricultural equipment of all kinds (Clark, 1937: 32–38). His fawning biographer explains that the heavy clay soils of the American Midwest stuck to the cast iron and hindered the plough’s progress through the earth, but did not stick to the smooth steel. The question of damage to cast iron by stones is not even mentioned.

3.2. Robert Hartwell’s iron-production figures for the Song period

Working chronologically through Chinese history, writing the history of Chinese iron and steel one period at a time, I several times, starting on a new chapter, felt like a beginning graduate student again, having to familiarize myself with the sources for the period, the outstanding events and trends, and the important issues confronting its historians.

When I began working on the Song period, my most important guide was the works of the late Professor Robert Hartwell: his 1963 Chicago disser-tation and several articles on the iron industry in the ‘commercial revolution’ of the Northern Song period (Hartwell, 1962, 1963, 1966, 1967). He not only con-fronted the broad issues in Song economic history, with lasting influence on the field,4 but also did some

05_CUL915074.indd 37 13/08/2020 3:20:02 PM


hard work on the detailed brass tacks of the primary sources. In the course of his dissertation work he went through the most important primary sources for Song history page by page – thousands of pages – seeking out references to iron, steel, coal, and other key subjects. I needed only to go through the foot-notes in his dissertation to find a wealth of sources for my own work.

Having now acknowledged my immense debt to Hartwell in matters both broad and detailed, I must now go on to criticize him severely. A famous part of his work is the estimate that iron production in 11th-century China was 125,000 English tons (115,000 metric tonnes) per year. In a couple of my early pub-lications I quoted this estimate as a fact, established

as it was by a respected scholar. However, when, in research for SCC, I looked more closely at the back-ground for this figure, I became angry; I felt that I had been duped by a conman. There is, put bluntly, no basis at all for Hartwell’s estimate.

I gave a detailed argument for this conclusion in a separate article, which I referred to only briefly in the SCC volume (Wagner, 2001, 2008: 279–280). In that article I was concerned to avoid explicitly calling a recently deceased and highly respected scholar a liar. I concealed my anger so well, unfortunately, that some readers have taken the article to be praising rather than criticizing Robert Hartwell. Part of my effort to soften the criticism was writing that the esti-mate of 115,000 tonnes was ‘plausible’, and this has

Figure 1. Mouldboard, ploughshare and V-shaped cap found at Wangxiangcun in Liquan County,a Shaanxi: (a) The three artefacts. The cap is rusted fast to the ploughshare. Ploughshare 23.3 × 28 × 8.6 cm, mouldboard 22 × 23 cm. On the underside of the mouldboard are two lugs for tying with cord and a peg that fits precisely into the hole in the ploughshare. (b–d). Three views of the artefacts when fitted together.a礼泉县王相村.

05_CUL915074.indd 38 13/08/2020 3:20:03 PM

Wagner 39

led several historians to accept the figure as the best estimate possible. In fact, I believe that a figure three times higher or three times lower would be equally ‘plausible’. We simply have no basis for any quanti-tative estimate of iron production for the period.

In Hartwell’s publications he refers to his unpub-lished dissertation for details of the calculation, but this has not been easily accessible, and very few have read it.

Two official surveys of metal mining and smelt-ing, dated 1064–7 and 1078, give the ‘receipts’ or ‘quotas’ of iron from localities throughout the Empire. The total receipts are about 3,400 tonnes in 1064–7 and 3,300 tonnes in 1078. Hartwell makes two assumptions about these surveys. First, that they refer to different sectors of the iron industry, so that they should be summed to obtain the annual total receipts of iron by the government in the 11th cen-tury. Second, that these ‘receipts’ represent a ten-per-cent in-kind tax on iron production. This gives 67,000 tonnes of taxed iron production, to which he adds estimates for untaxed government ironworks, receipts accidentally omitted from the surveys, and illegal production. The result is a total annual production of 115,000 tonnes (Hartwell, 1962: 154–155, 1963: 178–195, 1966, 1967: 104–105).

Hartwell’s only argument for the first assumption is that the two surveys show very different figures for most localities and greater changes than would normally be expected in the course of only 14 years. This ignores the fact that the period between the two surveys was the period of the reforms of Wang Anshi (Wang Anshi bianfa),5 which influenced most aspects of the economic life of the time. He cites no sources indicating a recognized distinction between two well-defined sectors of the iron industry in the Song period.

The second assumption is based ultimately on one 10th-century source, which states that in one place (modern Shangrao,6 Jiangxi) there is an ‘iron mountain’ where, at some unspecified time in the past, common people were allowed to mine, with the government receiving one-tenth. This is the only Song source that mentions a 10% tax on iron produc-tion. It concerns a single place, in the past, and says nothing about the general situation in the Empire in the 11th century.

There is thus no evidence at all for Hartwell’s production estimate. None.

3.3. Economies of scale in iron blast furnaces

In many places in SCC, I invoke as an explanatory factor the economies of scale that the blast furnace makes possible. A general rule in modern iron pro-duction is that, for maximum efficiency, a blast fur-nace should be as large as the supply of its raw materials and labour, and the market for its product, will reliably allow (Jones, 1933; Pratten and Dean, 1965; Sidney, 1920). No larger than that, for effi-ciency also requires that the furnace should operate continuously for years at a time.

Figure 2 shows technical details of the operation of a modern blast furnace. It can be seen that there is a ‘zone of relatively constant temperature’ near the top of the shaft; this zone acts as a buffer, shielding regions further down in the shaft from outside per-turbation. This means that the furnace is extremely stable in normal operation, and remains so even when it is scaled up to an enormous size. The princi-pal reasons why efficiency increases with size are, first, that a larger volume means less heat lost to the surroundings, and second, that a reduction zone with higher temperature and larger volume means faster reduction. Both factors lead to more efficient use of fuel.

With the technical explanation clear enough, and the empirical observation that modern industry pre-fers large blast furnaces to small ones, it is surprising to find two well-known archaeometallurgists, William Rostoker and Bennet Bronson (1990), claiming that the economies of scale in blast-furnace iron production are illusory (pp. 186–189). They cite some data for Indian and South-east Asian bloomery iron smelting, which are irrelevant. They make much of the fact that in Shanxi, in the 1920s, cast iron from the crucible smelting process sold for about the same price as imported blast-furnace cast iron. This is again not a comparison of blast furnaces, but more striking still is the economic naiveté of the argument. In Shanxi, ironmasters and workers lived in utter poverty and produced iron because they had no other means of living, and obviously they could not sell

05_CUL915074.indd 39 13/08/2020 3:20:03 PM


that iron at a higher price than that of imported iron produced by well-fed investors and workers in Britain and the United States. The same argument applies to blast-furnace iron production in many other parts of China.

Rostoker and Bronson state that ‘[m]anagers of American steel corporations in the twentieth century have consistently preferred larger furnaces, but there is little good evidence that these produce significant savings in costs’, citing as their only authority a sur-vey of 20th-century American blast furnaces by

Myles G Boylan. But what Boylan (1975) actually said is this: ‘In summary, the data indicate that while large blast furnaces were more efficient than smaller furnaces, their edge in efficiency was reduced when agglomerates of high quality were used (for exam-ple, pellets) in place of standard domestic ore’ (p. 176). Ore agglomeration is an innovation of the 20th century and has no relevance for Rostoker and Bronson’s argument.

Thus, Rostoker and Bronson, in an otherwise very useful textbook of archaeometallurgy, have on this

Figure 2. Diagram of a modern large-scale coal-fuelled iron blast furnace.The height is typically 20–30 m. Temperatures in °C are indicated for isotherms inside the furnace. The reactions that take place are indicated at the right; underlined elements are in solution in iron.

05_CUL915074.indd 40 13/08/2020 3:20:03 PM

Wagner 41

issue merely introduced confusion into an issue that has been clear for centuries: larger blast furnaces are overall much more cost-efficient than smaller ones.

4. Joseph Needham’s intellectual heritage

The work I have described here was possible because Joseph Needham showed the way. In his publica-tions, he made clear the importance of Chinese sci-ence and technology to me and many of my generation, and also to universities hiring staff and foundations supporting research.

A large part of his impact lay in his insistence on taking on the whole of a subject: SCC was and is intended to consider all fields of natural science through all of Chinese history, and each of the vol-umes attempts to treat the whole of one of those fields. This was his implicit challenge to me and his other collaborators and an important part of his intellectual heritage: do the whole job; do not accept limitations.

An important fixed point for me in the work was the Needham Research Institute. Its unconventional library, together with the truly great Cambridge University Library nearby, was of course essential, but of equal importance was the scholarly milieu of the place, with Joseph himself as long as he was in good health, his enthusiastic staff and a constant stream of visitors from all parts of the world. I vis-ited once or twice a year from 1979 on and worked there for 4 years (1990–1991 and 1993–1996). The institute has always provided the physical frame-work for discussions and debates that have shaped many scholars’ work, including my own. This is the bricks-and-mortar aspect of Joseph Needham’s intel-lectual heritage.



Funding


Notes

1. Here Needham was reacting to a review of volume 2 by Arthur F Wright (1957). He is not entirely fair in his summary of Wright’s critique.

2. A similar statement is made by Mathieu Arnoux (2014).

3. Figure 1 is reproduced from Cultural Relics (1966: 19–26 + plates 3–4, plate 3); also reproduced in Science and Civilisation, vol. 5, part 11, p. 160. Further examples can be seen in Wagner (1993: 232–235); Chinese translation by Li Yuniu (李玉牛) (2018: 113–117).

4. For more on Hartwell’s work and its influences see especially Tim Wright (2007).

5. 王安石变法6. 上饶

References

Allen AR (1848) The cast iron plow. Scientific American 3(22): 171.

Arnoux M (2014) European steel vs. Chinese cast-iron: from technological change to social and political choices (fourth century BC to eighteenth century AD). History of Technology 32: 297–312.

Basalla G (1988) The Evolution of Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Boylan MG (1975) Economic Effects of Scale Increases in the Steel Industry: The Case of US Blast Furnaces. New York; London: Praeger.

Clark NM (1937) John Deere: He Gave to the World the Steel Plow. Moline, Illinois: Desaulniers & Company.

Culpin C (1976) Farm Machinery. 9th edition. London: Lockwood.

Gilbert F (1882) Jethro Wood, Inventor of the Modern Plow. Chicago, IL: Rhodes & McClure.

Hartwell RM (1962) A revolution in the Chinese iron and coal industries during the Northern Sung, 960–1126 A.D. Journal of Asian Studies 21(2): 153–162.

Hartwell RM (1963) Iron and early industrialism in eleventh-century China. PhD Thesis, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

Hartwell RM (1966) Markets, technology, and the struc-ture of enterprise in the development of the eleventh-century Chinese iron and steel industry. Journal of Economic History 26(1): 29–58.

Hartwell RM (1967) A cycle of economic change in imperial China: Coal and iron in northeast China, 750–1350. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 10(1): 102–159.

05_CUL915074.indd 41 13/08/2020 3:20:03 PM


Jones GT (1933) Increasing Return: A Study of the Relation between the Size and Efficiency of Industries with Special Reference to the History of Selected British and American Industries, 1850–1910. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Li CQ and He HN (1966) Tiehua and bitu of the Han Dynasty discovered in Shaanxi Province [陕西省发现的汉代铁铧和鐴土]. Cultural Relics [文物] 1: 19–26.

Li Y (李玉牛) (2018) Iron and Steel in Ancient China [中国古代钢铁技术史]. Chengdu: Sichuan People’s Publishing House.

Marx K (1936) The Poverty of Philosophy (Orig. Misère de la philosophie: Réponse à la philosophie de la misère de M. Proudhon, 1847). London: Martin Lawrence.

Massari SC (1938) The properties and uses of chilled iron. Proceedings of the American Society for Testing Metals 38: 217–234.

Mirzoeff J (1980) Heritage: Self-sharpening shares. New Scientist 85: 947.

Needham J (1956) Iron and steel production in ancient and medieval China. Transactions of the Newcomen Society 30: 141–144 (reprinted in Needham J, et al. (1970) Clerks and Craftsmen in China in the West: Lectures and Addresses on the History of Science and Technology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 112).

Needham J (1962) Science and Civilisation in China (Physics), vol. 4, part 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Needham J (1964) The Development of Iron and Steel Technology in China. Cambridge: The Newcomen Society.

Needham J and Huang HT (2000) Science and Civilisation in China (Fermentations and Food Science), vol. 6, part 5. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pratten CF and Dean RM (1965) The Economies of Large-Scale Production in British Industry: An Introductory Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ransome JA (1843) The Implements of Agriculture. London: Ridgway.

Rostoker W and Bronson B (1990) Pre-Industrial Iron: Its Technology and Ethnology. Philadelphia, PA: Univ Museum Pubns.

Sidney LP (1920) Blast furnace practice. The Times Engineering Supplement 546: 129, 548: 189.

Smith J (1974) On cast-iron plough-shares. Transactions of the Society for the Promotion of Agriculture, Arts, and Manufactures 1(2): 168.

Thomsen R (1975) Et meget mærkeligt metal: En beret-ning fra jernets barndom. Varde: Varde Staalværk.

Wagner DB (1993) Iron and Steel in Ancient China. Leiden: Brill.

Wagner DB (2001) The administration of the iron industry in eleventh-century China. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 44(2): 175–197.

Wagner DB (2008) Science and Civilisation in China (Ferrous Metallurgy). vol. 5, part 11. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wagner DB (2011) The traditional iron industry in Guangdong. Available at: http://donwagner.dk/MS-English/GuangdongEng.html (accessed 22 January 2020).

Wang Z (1956) Wang Zhen Nongshu. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company (in Chinese).

Wright AF (1957) Science and Civilisation in China. Volume II, History of scientific thought. By Joseph Needham, with the research assistance of Wang Ling. (New York: Cambridge University Press. 1956. pp. xxii, 696. $14.50.). The American Historical Review 62: 918–920.

Wright T (2007) An economic cycle in imperial China? Revisiting Robert Hartwell on iron and coal. Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50(4): 398–423.

Author biography

Donald B Wagner, formerly a lecturer in Chinese at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, has written widely on the history of science and technology in China, espe-cially mathematics and metallurgy. After his retirement, he is associated with the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, University of Copenhagen, and the Department of Archaeology, Sichuan University. He is currently engaged in developing a multimedia textbook on the archaeometal-lurgy of iron in China and the West.

05_CUL915074.indd 42 13/08/2020 3:20:03 PM

http://donwagner.dk/MS-English/GuangdongEng.html

http://donwagner.dk/MS-English/GuangdongEng.html

https://doi.org/10.1177/2096608320922324




In its early years, the atmosphere at the East Asian History of Science Library (EAHSL) resonated with the wide-ranging interests and the extensive social networks of Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-Djen, respectively, the institution’s founding director and deputy director. Those who knew them well might recall Needham sometimes plaintively declaring that he was ‘just’ a historian of science, technology and medicine: There is little question that his steadfast-ness in pursuing those particular subjects gave a nec-essary grounding to his remarkable discipline and prolific output as an author.1 Without that focus and discipline, the successive tomes of his Science and Civilisation in China (SCC)2 project probably

never would have appeared and would certainly not have been produced so consistently and at such a high standard of scholarship. Nonetheless, Needham was always a man of multiple dimensions – a public proponent of scientific rationalism, an Anglican lay reader and process theologian, a lifelong Labour Party socialist with a strong anti-imperialist bent, and yet a devotee of traditional college protocols and

The East Asian History of Science Library/Needham Research Institute as an intellectual hub in the late 1970s and 1980s

Gregory BlueUniversity of Victoria, Canada

AbstractDuring its first decade and a half, the East Asian History of Science Library/Needham Research Institute served both as the centre of the Science and Civilisation in China project and as a meeting point for discussions involving a wide range of researchers. Some of these were working on the history of science, technology and medicine; some were members of Joseph Needham’s and Lu Gwei-Djen’s broader networks; and some came seeking the views, guidance or assistance of the institute’s founders on diverse topics. In the institute’s first 6 years in particular, a series of delegations from China visited as that country embarked on re-expanding academic relations abroad in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. This article recalls the institute’s ambiance during those years, key individuals who were involved and some of the kinds of interactions that took place there.

KeywordsHistory, China, United Kingdom, East Asia, international relations, history of science, technology and medicine, social history of science, Joseph Needham, Cambridge University, Needham Research Institute

Corresponding author:Gregory Blue, Department of History, University of Victoria, 3800 Finnerty Rd., Clearihue Building, Room B245, Victoria, BC V8W 3P4, Canada. Email: [email protected]

922324 CUL0010.1177/2096608320922324Cultures of ScienceBlueresearch-article2020

Article

06_CUL922324.indd 43 13/08/2020 3:20:25 PM




prerogatives.3 Moreover, SCC itself embraced an ample array of subjects and was based on volumi-nous ranges of evidence. Accordingly, researchers from many different disciplines were steadily drawn to him and to the institution that he and Lu had founded. Some came to partake in the breadth of vision the SCC project embodied; others came to access the rich documentary materials that the library possessed. In either case, Needham’s generosity in sharing his insights and materials, including texts he was still working on, went hand in hand with his devotion to promoting understanding of the com-parative history of science and, most particularly, of the relevant but hitherto long-neglected East Asian traditions.

Early in 1977, as a graduate student working in Belgium on political philosophy, I found myself try-ing to puzzle through how academic Marxist inter-pretations of ancient and imperial Chinese history might relate to the weaponized versions promulgated during the late Cultural Revolution. Hoping to get some enlightenment on the matter, I wrote to an ‘old China-hand’ in Britain whom I understood to be in touch with what was going in the People’s Republic. Unbeknownst to me, he was also a trustee of the East Asian History of Science Trust (EAHST) that Needham and Lu had established in the 1960s to support the SCC project.

My letter was passed along and, in due course, I was surprised one day to find a letter from Needham suggesting I visit him in Cambridge to consult on issues related to Marx’s notion of an ‘Asiatic mode of production’ and Needham’s concept of ‘bureaucratic feudalism’. To my good fortune, we hit it off, finding that we shared many common concerns. That fall, on his invitation, I joined the EAHSL team. Joseph Needham, his wife Dorothy and Lu Gwei-Djen kindly accepted my wife and myself immediately into their inner circle, which in turn welcomed us with warmth and generosity. Cambridge would become our home, and the Needham Research Institute (NRI) my danwei, for the next 13 years, until the end of Needham’s directorship. I remember those years, when China and the rest of the world were undergoing rapid transformations, as times of intel-lectual discovery, excitement and, especially in the NRI’s first decade, optimism: It is from that personal

vantage point that I here consider the functioning of the institute then. That there were other things in the air as well during the last decade and some of the Cold War and that various tensions and discontents emerged within the institute itself can go without say-ing: Those matters are not my concern here. As for the three decades at the NRI following the period I worked there, others are far better placed to discuss them.

By the time Needham and Lu, who had long been his chief collaborator, officially combined the Asia-related portions of their personal libraries to form the EAHSL in 1976, Needham’s generosity was already well established from the welcomes he had accorded over three decades to researchers who had visited his fellow’s rooms at Gonville & Caius College, where the SCC project had grown from its emergence as a prospective publishing venture in the late 1940s.

The project’s roots famously ran deeper still. In 1938–1939, Needham and Lu first envisioned a modest volume on the history of Chinese science that would complement the studies Needham and Walter Pagel had been promoting within Cambridge University on the history of science in the West (Needham and Pagel, 1938). The scope of the China project grew dramatically thereafter, as Needham systematically set about working out a theoretical framework he considered suitable and gathering rel-evant materials. Those were tasks he pursued ‘on the side’, throughout his wartime mission to China (1943–1946) as director of the Sino-British Scientific Cooperation Office (SBSCO), when he had the opportunity to get to know many of the country’s prominent researchers. These were Lu’s colleagues in the Chinese scientific community before her 1937 departure for doctoral studies in Cambridge. Her guidance and advice to Needham in approaching them proved invaluable for the success of the SBSCO mission. The pair’s newly conceived his-torical project provided rich soil for personal and intellectual connections forged in many an informal conversation with Chinese interlocutors. In 1946–1948, when Lu was back in China, she too collected important materials and sent them to Cambridge for the project.

Needham continued deepening his thinking about SCC during his stint as founding director of the

06_CUL922324.indd 44 13/08/2020 3:20:25 PM

Blue 45

Science Division of UNESCO in Paris (1946–1948). As a lifelong Francophile, he happily made use of opportunities to cultivate relations not only with the French scientific elite, but also with leading scholars interested in comparative and world history, and with sinologists opening new vistas on the history of Daoism and on Sino–Western contacts.

Subsequently, soon after his return to Cambridge in late 1948, Needham and his then-most engaged collaborator Wang Ling, a young historian of science who had been one of his wartime assistants in China, sketched the contours of what they then planned as a seven-volume SCC series (Needham, 1954–present). The originally envisioned volumes 4 through 7 would famously become subdivided over time into a series of physical volumes, in many cases weighty tomes in their own right, so that the series now, although not quite finished, already comes to 25 dis-crete books. Nonetheless, the outline of the subjects Needham and Wang devised still largely applies, comprised of 50 thematic sections covering what they saw as the entire gamut of sciences and tech-nologies ranging from mathematics to medicine, with contextualizing forays into relevant philosophi-cal traditions and socio-economic conditions that varyingly affected scientific-technical development in different parts of the world in premodern times.

With the first volume of the series having appeared in 1954, by the time the EAHSL was for-mally constituted in 1976, eight physical volumes had already been published. By that time, the ency-clopaedic scope of the project had made it renowned, and the series was celebrated internationally as a monument of scholarship. Its academic value and pioneering significance underwrote Needham’s induction into the British Academy in 1971 and his election as president of the Division of History of Science and Technology of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science from 1972 to 1974. The fact that he had conceived the project as a study of the history of Chinese science, technology and medicine undertaken in the comparative cross-civilizational framework he and Lucien Febvre had conceived in the late 1940s in their first iteration of UNESCO’s Scientific and Cultural History of Mankind further enhanced his new institute’s intel-lectual appeal. With such a profile, it was hardly

surprising that the institute quickly became some-thing of a magnet for researchers.

Needham called the EAHSL a ‘working’ library, and it functioned operationally as a research insti-tute, one largely geared in its first two decades to producing the SCC series. Its trustees’ initiative in naming it the Needham Research Institute a few years later was thus an appropriate clarification, celebrating the director’s accomplishments (although Needham found the renaming rather ‘blush-making’) while playing on his fame as a fund-raising move.

Of the factors that worked to make the institute an international hub of scholarship and reflection, several stand out in addition to the breadth of the founders’ vision and personal connections. One was the striking expansion in research in the late 1970s and the 1980s on the history of science, technology and medicine in East Asia. That growth in the field is evidenced by the fact that the first international conference on the history of science, technology and medicine in China, held in Leuven, Belgium in 1982, involved fewer than two dozen participants, whereas the sixth, organized by Christopher Cullen at and for the NRI in 1990, brought together over 200. Over the course of that upsurge of interest, the NRI functioned as something of a disciplinary pil-grimage site, drawing researchers wishing to pay their respects as well as use the library.

A related factor in the institute’s attractiveness in those years was the nature and organization of the book collection as a ‘working library’: not that it had so many holdings that could not have been found elsewhere, even in the West, but rather that the rich holdings it did have were (and are) rather uniquely accessible. To a considerable degree, that accessibil-ity was due to the first librarian, Philippa Hawking, who managed to turn Needham’s and Lu’s personal collections into a usable collective tool, not least by painstakingly cataloguing all published holdings. In the course of her labours, Hawking incorporated two key features of the ‘working library’ approach Needham took pride in: namely, that the library stacks were open (to bona fide researchers), and that items on a given subject were shelved together irre-spective of language, that is, without East Asian lan-guage materials being segregated on their own, as is

06_CUL922324.indd 45 13/08/2020 3:20:25 PM


most often the case elsewhere in the West. Given the institute’s active specialist acquisition policy, and the fact that authors and publishers from around the world frequently provided copies of new publica-tions relevant to the institute’s mandate, the EAHSL’s stacks were a treasure trove for SCC collaborators and other researchers alike.

At the same time, one must recognize the impor-tance of the vigorous correspondence, with a diverse array of people, that Needham carried on from the late 1940s and into his final decade as director, as another factor in building the institute’s aura as an engaged centre of scholarship in the field to which he devoted what he referred to as his ‘second half-life’.

A further obvious attraction of the NRI was its location – for Cambridge itself, with its density of specialist scholars with so many kinds of expertise and with its wealth of academic resources, was a huge draw. To cite a single instance among many, Needham’s friend, Abdur Rahman, whom Needham had known since Rahman was a young anti-colonial scientist in mid-1940s India, and who eventually served as Indira Gandhi’s science advisor under her premiership, would regularly visit Cambridge both for historical and science-policy consultations with Needham and for cosmological discussions with Sir Hermann Bondi, master of Churchill College through most of the 1980s.

At a more mundane level, many researchers visit-ing the institute for more than a short stay found it invaluable that Needham was regularly open to pro-viding a letter of introduction that would open the door to accessing the vast holdings of the main uni-versity library. Aesthetically, of course, Cambridge also features both beauty and the strong romantic allure, for which it is renowned throughout East Asia as well as elsewhere. On top of that, politically, espe-cially in the institute’s first years, a visit to the NRI was a way for delegations from China to express respect for Needham as a very ‘old friend’ of their country, one who was incidentally the founding president of the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (established in 1965).

One can glean a sense of the character of the early EAHSL – inter-disciplinary, international and multi-generational – from the stream of visitors during its

first months, even before its formal inauguration, which would bring EAHST trustees and the univer-sity’s top brass together at the beginning of 1977.

Characteristically for Needham, the first signa-ture in the official guestbook is that of his wife Dorothy, the celebrated biochemist and historian of muscle biochemistry, whom he sometimes referred to as the only other person he was certain had read all the SCC volumes to date, since she proofread them. Along with her name in the guestbook, one can find those of Carol and Nathan Sivin, the latter then in mid-career at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and completing his contribution to SCC on alchemical theory. As close friends and associates of the Needhams and Lu, the Sivins vis-ited more or less annually over the following dec-ades. On this occasion, they were joined by Douglas King of Singapore. Frederick F Kao, editor of the American Journal of Chinese Medicine, also made an appearance early on. Not long after, Lu Gwei-Djen’s close old friend Muriel Platt dropped by, the widow of Benjamin Platt, Lu’s director of nutritional research at the Lester Institute of Medical Research in mid-1930s Shanghai.

By the end of the year, a string of senior figures had visited: Derk Bodde, the eminent University of Pennsylvania intellectual historian of China, the Japanese historian of science and technology Yoshida Tadashi of Tohoku University, the political historian Charles Curwen from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, Witold Rodzinski, historian of China and former Polish ambassador to Beijing, the Stanford historian of Chinese art Michael Sullivan, and the theologian James Burtchaell, then provost at the University of Notre Dame.

At the same time, notably interspersed in with the names of such established figures are those of then-young scholars with prominent careers ahead of them. Among the first to visit were the archaeo-astronomers Richard Stevenson, a long-time friend of the SCC project, and David Clark, then of the Mullard Laboratory, the United Kingdom’s largest space science research facility, as well as Nicholas Isbister, the Freud biographer, who shared Needham’s interest in psychoanalysis and the history of psychol-ogy. Also present were the now-distinguished

06_CUL922324.indd 46 13/08/2020 3:20:25 PM

Blue 47

historian of Chinese art, Craig Clunas, then a doctoral candidate at Edinburgh, the young Peter Lee (Li Lisheng), an industrial chemist with Coca Cola, who would go on to play important roles in both the United States and Hong Kong trusts, and the budding East Asia-inspired garden architect Ulrich Hausmann, who a dozen years later would bring us chunks of the Berlin Wall as mementoes of its fall.

In the EAHSL’s first days, Francesca Bray like-wise signed in, one of the first two young members of the core team then forming up at the institute. Her volume on agriculture (Bray, 1984) became SCC’s first to be fully authored by someone other than Needham. Not long after, Dieter Kuhn, a young German sinologist specializing in textile history vis-ited. A year later, he too joined the core team; in time he would go on to contribute the SCC volume on spinning and reeling (Kuhn, 1988). Before the year’s end, Nick Menzies, later the author of SCC’s treatment of the history of Chinese forestry prac-tices (Daniels and Menzies, 1996), had put in an appearance.

The strategy of recruiting a new contingent of collaborators followed from Needham’s realization that the SCC project, as it was unfolding in practice, was more than he and his original team from the 1950s – most prominently, Wang Ling, Lu Gwei-Djen, Kenneth Robinson and Ho Peng Yoke (Ho Ping-yū in Needham’s transcription) – could com-plete on their own. From the outset, he had in princi-ple constructed the team as cross-cultural on the ground that the kind of wide-ranging and in-depth comparative study he envisioned would be impossi-ble to execute without the knowledge and expertise of people from different backgrounds. By the mid-1970s, the experience of the series’ first volumes had shown the fecundity of this approach while also amply demonstrating the extent and richness of the material to be analysed.

Moreover, since the 1960s, Chinese studies as a field of research had been booming, and a new gen-eration armed with new levels of specialized training was emerging. Needham was effectively riding this wave when he set about enlisting his contingent of young collaborators who would contribute to the new institute’s character, whether as members of EASHL’s core group of research associates or as

contributors based elsewhere who would periodi-cally visit. Both types contributed significantly to the institute’s ambience as it developed over the fol-lowing years.

So too did the institute’s quarters, which shifted to accommodate a larger number of researchers (in increasingly comfortable surroundings) while evolv-ing towards a distinctively cross-cultural personality in architectural terms. For its first 2 years, the EAHSL was housed in a nondescript one-story pre-fab structure, with an open-plan layout, located at the main site of the Cambridge University Press on Shaftesbury Road. There, the sole signs of any East Asian presence were the exterior signage with the library’s name and Chinese seal, plus a plaster stupa. When the press began preparing for its massive new administrative edifice, the Edinburgh Building, on that same site 2 years later, the institute moved around the corner to a roomier three-story Victorian building at 16 Brooklands Avenue that before the 1960s had housed the Faculty of Oriental Studies. Finally, in 1986, the permanent Needham Research Institute moved to Sylvester Road, at the southwest-ern corner of the Robinson College grounds in west Cambridge, where its richly appointed premises, red brick with Chinese features, have been descri-bed as an ‘East Anglian/East Asian’ composite stylistically.

The decade of fundraising required for that evolu-tion was itself an international affair involving the efforts of three distinct supporting trusts. The origi-nal EAHST in the United Kingdom was aided finan-cially from 1979 by a counterpart in Hong Kong4 that devoted itself with great success to raising the bulk of the construction funds. From 1978 on, the British trust was supported as well by a correspond-ing American body5 that channelled generous opera-tional funds from the National Science Foundation, monies that were intended to move the SCC project towards completion. Those funds were supple-mented in the 1980s by further substantial opera-tional support provided to the British trust directly by the Japanese National Institute for Research Advancement.

The consistently international character of the SCC project was brought home to me during my second visit to the EAHSL in the late summer of

06_CUL922324.indd 47 13/08/2020 3:20:26 PM


1977, when Needham literally walked me through the list of collaborators he had signed up to work on the series’ remaining volumes (‘literally’ in the sense that he explained the tasks to be done over the course of a long, fascinating stroll through ‘the backs’ of the colleges along the Cam). He expressed his hope that I could help keep him in touch, through correspondence and otherwise, with the growing cohort of collaborators. Having encountered SCC’s weighty tomes as a graduate student and recognized it as a monument of scholarship, I had for some time implicitly assumed it to be a nearly finished prod-uct, but Needham had disabused me of that notion and alerted me to its status as a work in progress when, during my first visit, he had presented me with hefty binders containing drafts by Ray Huang and Derk Bodde for volume 7, sections 48 and 49, respectively.6 He was interested in theoretical feed-back and in deepening the conversations the three of them had held the previous summer. As we ambled around the Trinity and Johns lawns on my second visit, he detailed the institute’s function as the hub in the complex international research network that was ‘SCC in process’.

At the centre of that network was the EAHSL itself, with the core team as it shaped up in 1976–1977. Administratively, the institute was headed by a three-person management committee consisting of Needham and Lu, plus Peter Burbidge, Cambridge University Press’s production manager and the first chairman of the EAHST. He was the person who had steered the SCC series through the press’s editorial and printing processes ever since volume 1. That three-person committee oversaw the institute’s day-to-day affairs, handled employment matters and liaised with the respective trusts. In addition, through the late 1970s, after the Cultural Revolution in China, and once Needham was no longer persona non grata in the United States after the Vietnam War, he and Lu travelled extensively through East Asia and North America to share and promote the work of the institute, and raise funds for its permanent build-ing. Frankly, much as Needham loved to travel, such trips wore on them, especially as Dorothy Needham was increasingly affected by Alzheimer’s disease from around 1983 onward.

In terms of research, however, Needham enjoyed and was stimulated by the younger members he brought into the institute. From the EAHSL’s 1976 opening, Philippa Hawking and Francesca Bray were both, each in their own ways, dynamic and positive presences. Hawking was prominent not only as librarian and gatekeeper, but also for her Japanological expertise and translations on the his-tory of silk textiles. As the institute’s first full-time younger researcher, Bray played a pioneering role in opening avenues for the new cohort as she embarked on her decade of contributions to the institute while establishing herself as a leading specialist in the his-tory of agriculture, agricultural technologies and related policy matters and as a gender historian. For the EAHSL’s first year, the young linguist Robin Brilliant was also present, constructing SCC’s stand-ard conversion table between pinyin and Needham’s idiosyncratic version of Wade–Giles romanization. I joined the team in the fall of 1977, coming from my philosophy studies at Leuven to focus on Western theories concerned with patterns of socio-economic change in diverse societies. Dieter Kuhn joined in December that year, shortly after earning his doctor-ate at Cologne, to contribute to the SCC section on textiles.

Over the following years, the core team under-went various changes while remaining central to the SCC project. Dieter Kuhn remained absorbed in working on his volume on spinning after taking an academic position in Heidelberg late in 1980. Philippa Hawking left at about the same time and, over the following decade, was succeeded in turn as librarian by Michael Salt, Carmen Lee and Liang Lien-chu, the last of whom also pursued her research on the history of Chinese hospitals in collaboration with Lu Gwei-Djen.

In 1980, after a career in the colonial civil service and at the Education Division of UNESCO, Kenneth Robinson was re-enlisted onto the team to serve as editor coordinating the burgeoning contributions to volume 7. Shortly afterward, Toshio Kusamitsu came to the team as a fresh post-doc with the pri-mary task of engaging with Japanese materials on textile history; he remained for several years work-ing on issues related to volumes 5 and 7.

06_CUL922324.indd 48 13/08/2020 3:20:26 PM

Blue 49

Around 1983, Peter Burbidge brought Trevor Gardner, Cambridge University’s recently retired treasurer, onto the EAHSL management committee to help put the institute’s finances on a sounder financial footing and better regularize employment conditions for library and research staff. This was a prudent move, but, unfortunately, after Burbidge’s sudden death, it led to administrative rifts over the NRI’s future, with negative effects on morale.7

In the mid-1980s, the historian of medicine Ma Boying from Shanghai’s First Medical University joined the team to collaborate with Lu and, to a lesser extent, Needham. The end of the 1980s saw a new vibrancy in the spirit of research emerging, as Geoffrey Lloyd of the Cambridge Classics Faculty began his long comparative engagement with Chinese science, encouraging such studies among his associates internationally, and as monies from American and European foundations began bringing in fresh young researchers on fellowships, a wave that fortunately continued through the 1990s and early 2000s, and indeed beyond.8

Needham knew from long experience that aca-demic collaborations are often unpredictable, and that each is likely to have its own unique trajectory9: Some prove incredibly enriching and productive for the partners; others can be delicate, tenuous, difficult affairs.

Certain senior individuals associated with the project, including some (certainly not all) on the British trust, were sceptical of the abilities of young scholars in particular to contribute as collaborators. That objection never seemed to phase Needham much. After all, he knew well that Wang Ling had written the bulk of the mathematics section for SCC’s volume 3 as his doctoral dissertation, that Kenneth Robinson had composed his section on physical acoustics as a mature student at Oxford, and that Ho Peng Yoke had been recruited as a fresh post-doctoral scholar.

In any case, the strategy of enlisting new collabo-rators quickly showed itself to be a success. Bray’s volume on agriculture (volume 6, part 2) appeared in 1984, Tsien Tsuen-hsuin’s on paper and printing (vol-ume 5, part 1) in 1985 and Kuhn’s on spinning and reeling technologies in 1988 (volume 5, part 9). That success also proved to be strategically enduring.

Christian Daniels’ and Nicholas Menzies’ shared vol-ume, in which they, respectively, treat agricultural industries and forestry, would be published in 1996. Peter Golas’ volume on mining appeared in 2000, Donald Wagner’s on ferrous metallurgy in 2008 and Georges Métailié’s, SCC’s second volume devoted to botany, in 2015.

All these authors were recruited by Needham dur-ing his 1976–1991 term as NRI director. All but Bray completed their contributions while working remotely, with editorial processes carried out in Cambridge at the NRI, which functioned as the SCC project’s hub, and then at the press.

The progress on those volumes allowed Needham and Lu to focus their own energies on subjects dear to their hearts. This they occasionally did on their own, as was the case both with their major study of acupuncture and moxibustion (Lu and Needham, 1980)10 – one they intended to eventually revise into a volume of SCC – and with their critical review of scholarship on the history of material and cultural transmissions across the Pacific Ocean (Needham and Lu, 1985). More often, they worked in collabo-ration with established associates, as was the case with two further SCC volumes, namely, that devoted to botany (Needham et al., 1986a), on which they worked with their old friend and associate Huang Hsing-tsung, one of Needham’s wartime assistants in China, and the volume devoted to gunpowder technologies (Needham et al., 1987), on which they collaborated again with Ho Peng Yoke and Wang Ling. Needham co-authored a further volume devoted to military technologies (Needham et al., 1994) with Robin DS Yates of Dartmouth College and, later, McGill University.

Many of the collaborators Needham told me about during our summer walk along the backs went on to produce outstanding studies in the SCC series. Others whom he was enthusiastic about fell by the wayside: some because other obligations or health problems did not allow them to complete the work the series required (e.g. Ursula Franklin (Toronto) on non-ferrous metallurgy, James CY Watt (Boston) on ceramics, Hans Ågren (Gothenburg) on mental dis-ease, Janusz Chmieliewski (Warsaw) on language and logic), others because their analysis did not square sufficiently with the understanding Needham,

06_CUL922324.indd 49 13/08/2020 3:20:26 PM


often influenced by other members of the network, had of a subject (e.g. WB Fisher (Durham) on China’s physical environment and its social signifi-cance, Derk Bodde (Philadelphia) on the signifi-cance of the outlook of the literati elite), others still because of differences over conditions of publication and/or NRI policies and practices. Nonetheless, peo-ple Needham had roped into the project, even tempo-rarily, in various cases made contributions that reverberated in the institute and, through it, had an impact on thinking within the SCC network, and sometimes beyond it.11

The reader might wonder what kinds of opera-tive relationships and types of communication were in effect among members of the NRI/SCC network. Honestly, the relationships varied widely. A point worth noting, though, is that some impor-tant members of the network never did visit the institute or visited only perfunctorily. One notable case was that of Hu Daojing in Shanghai, with whom Lu and Needham remained in touch via correspondence and, after the Cultural Revolution, via visits in Shanghai. Another was that of Tsien Tsuin-hsuen who, as chief librarian at the University of Chicago, had ready access there to all the sources he needed.

Few NRI research associates and SCC collabora-tors were ever in a position to observe much of the relationships among the shifting memberships of the three trusts, although such relationships clearly did substantially affect life at the institute and work on the SCC project. That is, a rather large gap did gen-erally exist, for whatever reason, between members of the three trusts and the research staff, although it was by no means wholly unbridgeable. Each of the three trusts featured striking personalities – to men-tion just a few, F Peter Lisowski, professor of medi-cine at the University of Hong Kong, who had strong anthropological interests, the financier Stephen Keynes, great grandson of Charles Darwin and nephew to the famous economist, the Quaker geolo-gist Brian Harland, who had spent World War II in Chengdu, and the pacifist Chicago banker Erwin ‘Bud’ Salk, who once had served as a bodyguard for Paul Robeson. Fascinating as such personalities were, opportunities for researchers and staff to engage with them remained distinctly limited.

The same cannot be said of researchers’ interac-tions with other members of the institute and with visitors. Needham regularly encouraged and pro-moted consultation among his collaborators, and within the institute, he and Lu adopted from the beginning the practice, which they had previously known at the Dunn Institute of Biochemistry,12 of having everyone participate together in morning cof-fee and afternoon tea breaks. That included the directors, all staff and any visitors, whether long or short term, who were present at the appointed time. These informal occasions, characteristically relaxed and lively, featured open conversation on all manner of subjects and for a good decade constituted excel-lent occasions for members of the institute’s broad networks to get to know one another.

While the EAHSL/NRI in its first years was an institution geared primarily to producing volumes of the SCC series, it was also always this and more. As such, it attracted a wide variety of users and visitors. A full, descriptive account of the individuals involved is impossible here, but a sketch of some major categories of people gravitating to the NRI can give an impression of their diversity.

One may start by noting that, while they hailed geographically from many different countries, most of the visitors came from Europe (including the United Kingdom), Asia, North America and the Middle East. Beyond this, they were of course dif-ferentiated in the first instance by whether or not they were collaborating on the SCC project. They also differed according to whether they were visiting for library research or for meeting with members of the team, or with other visiting scholars. Of course, such categories were hardly exclusive. In addition, as often happens with academics, an SCC collabora-tor visiting the NRI on their own funding (as was most often the case) might have devoted part of their time to work on SCC and part to other projects.

Similarly, many SCC collaborators made short trips simply to consult with Needham and Lu, or other project colleagues, but on other occasions they would visit to carry out library research. Some visi-tors thus returned numerous times. Some were long-time associates of the project or the directors, and others were new collaborators. Naturally, those who made research trips stayed for varying lengths of

06_CUL922324.indd 50 13/08/2020 3:20:26 PM

Blue 51

time. Some researchers settled in for relatively long stays of 6 months or a year or more – for example, on a sabbatical leave and/or research fellowship. Others came instead for medium-length stays of several weeks to a couple of months. The majority came for short stays of between a day and a week. The length of stay(s), number of visits and duration of associa-tion could all play roles in determining visitors’ impact on the institute and their closeness to the core team.

Even brief visits could have a fascination. As a seasoned international intellectual, Needham was in touch with many public figures who esteemed his work and insights and who would seek him out and/or gladly agree to participate in events he organized. I vividly recall glancing up from the computer in the NRI catalogue room in 1985 to find him giving a tour to Romila Thapar, the eminent historian of ancient and medieval India, and leading her over to introduce us. The institute in the late 1970s and through the 1980s was a place where one could find oneself having tea with Owen Lattimore, Franklin Roosevelt’s wartime representative to Chiang Kai-shek; Raysun Huang, vice-chancellor of the University of Hong Kong; the American IT and cybernetics pioneer John Diebold; Fang Lizhi while he was at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei; Joan Robinson, the left-Keynes-ian professor of economics at Cambridge; the Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi; the historian of pre-1919 Chinese anarchism and later of the ancient east Mediterranean, Martin Bernal; the historian of traditional medicine Ma Kanwen; the comparative literature specialist Elinor Shaffer; the astrophysicists/cosmologists Carl Sagan and Douglas NC Lin; or the Labour MEP and head of the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, Ken Coates. The presence, however occasional, of distinguished figures of diverse interests and expertise was a nota-ble facet of life at the NRI.

Recurrent visitors who stayed for a week or more naturally tended to have a greater impact. As young SCC collaborators, Donald Wagner and Georges Métailié were in the habit of coming at least once a year, and were closely integrated with the core team. Eventually, both also arranged to come for extended stays. Robin Yates, working on

the history of military technology, made periodic visits through the 1980s. In addition, Nathan Sivin, by then at the University of Pennsylvania, and Nakayama Shigeru, Thomas Kuhn’s one-time stu-dent who instituted the history of science pro-gramme at Tokyo University in the 1960s, regularly came to the NRI from the mid-1970s and through the 1980s, most often for several weeks during summers, conducting research on projects of their own. As established historians of Chinese science, both brought fresh research questions, deeply con-sidered views about issues dealt with in the SCC series, and engagement with the most recent trends in the scholarly literature. Both were also commit-ted to helping raise funds for the institute in their respective countries. As long-term intimates of the SCC project – Sivin was an SCC collaborator13; Nakayama, an associate of Needham’s since the mid-1950s14 – they could voice critical comments frankly in ways that benefitted the institute (e.g. on library acquisitions strategies) and were stimulat-ing for younger collaborators to consider (e.g. on issues ranging from the relation between Daoism and traditional science to the pressure from funders for stepping up the timetable for publication of the remaining volumes of SCC). Also appreciated was the Sivins’ generosity in annually hosting a summer tea on Grantchester Meadows for NRI members and their families.

The NRI’s long-term visitors, that is, those who came on sabbaticals or fellowships, for example, included a substantial number whose presence affected the atmosphere positively. My impression was that this was the case for both Derk Bodde and Ray Huang (Huang Renyu, or Huang Jen-Yü in Needham’s transcription). Before my time in the institute, as mentioned above, they held a series of lively three-way conversations with Needham dur-ing their stays in 1976. Those exchanges were important for solidifying their own thinking on aspects of the ‘Needham Problem’, and for spurring Needham himself to feel the need to engage other collaborators to help him refine his analysis of Chinese socio-economic history for volume 7.15 One of the consequences of that impulse was the recruit-ing of Timothy Brook, whose stay of 6 months in 1978 and another month in 1979 made him a

06_CUL922324.indd 51 13/08/2020 3:20:26 PM


familiar presence, and set the stage for Needham to appoint him in 1987 as coordinating editor of vol-ume 7, section 48, on imperial China’s socio-eco-nomic structure. (Unfortunately, the plan for that section, which was then expected to constitute a vol-ume in its own right, broke down in the early 1990s.)

Another consequential visit was Wang Ling’s nearly year-long stay starting in December 1977. Returning to Cambridge unannounced for the first time in 20 years, and armed with a sheaf of critical comments on the draft Ho Peng Yoke had written as SCC’s treatment of the history of gunpowder, Wang persuaded Needham that the subject needed considerably more work. Needham’s choice to invest time over the following years in that direc-tion meant, however, that, to Lu Gwei-Djen’s abiding disappointment, he was not able to work with her to the extent she had hoped on the history of medicine.

Other long-term stays in 1976–1979 helped strengthen the institute’s connections with East Asia. Hashimoto Keizo’s completion of his doctoral work on Chinese astronomy was important in this regard due to his closeness with Needham, even though he did not usually work at the institute. Another endur-ing connection for the Needham institute was forged with Japanese academia through the year-long sab-batical stay of Nakaoka Tetsuro of Osaka City University, who had earlier worked on the Japanese translation of SCC’s astronomy section and was now focusing on late Tokugawa and Meiji Japanese tech-nological development and social–political changes. He and his family quickly endeared themselves to the entire institute.

Similarly, in 1980, Li Wenlin of the Mathematics Department of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing was fondly received as a pioneering visitor from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as he proceeded good-naturedly on his fruitful 2-year stay at the institute. This enabled him to become a par-ticipant in the first international conference on the history of Chinese science. Not long after, the histo-rian of mathematics Lam Lay Yong of Singapore, an old friend of Needham’s, and her associate Ang Tien-se of Malaysia spent productive sabbatical years connected with the institute, where they were much appreciated.

New visitors from Western countries made an impact as well, as the institute approached and entered its second decade. In the mid-1980s, Peter Golas, for one, brought perceptive observations and lively conversation to the NRI during his sabbatical year, spent working up portions of his SCC volume on the history of mining. In 1986, Catherine Jami visited the institute briefly after its move to the per-manent building and, over the following years, made several extended visits there to work on the Jesuits of the Kangxi era. In this way, she inclined the NRI towards research on the Chinese reception of mod-ern science, a subject that had previously not been covered much in the SCC series.

Recurrent visitors who came for only short con-sultations were so many that I must confine myself to several especially concerned with the history of science in their own parts of the world. Deserving of particular mention are two key members of what Dhruv Raina has called ‘Needham’s Indian Network’, namely, Abdur Rahman and Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya. Both were from the National Institute for Science, Technology and Development in New Delhi, and both were of central importance for the introduction of the history of science as a dis-cipline into South Asia.16 The first, already men-tioned above, visited every couple of years or so, often more for discussions with Needham on science policy and the role of science in society than strictly on the history of science, despite his active research and publication record in the latter area. It was he who, while discussing the South Asian experience, impressed on Needham the new dangers posed by religious fundamentalism for both science and the maintenance of social peace. Chattopadhyaya, on the other hand, visited perhaps only twice during the 1980s, but when he did come, he was intent on get-ting into the ‘brass tacks’ of approaches to the com-parative history of science.

If South Asian scholars faced particular chal-lenges in striving to explore the history of science and technology in the Indian context, they were not alone in connecting with the NRI as they sought to explore the historical records of their own societies. Two other short-term visitors, Ahmad Yusuf al-Has-san and Donald Hill, visited in the early 1980s to discuss and get advice on their innovative projects

06_CUL922324.indd 52 13/08/2020 3:20:26 PM

Blue 53

on the history of Islamic technology (Al-Hassan and Hill, 1986). More significantly, in the 1970s and 1980s, the institute also cultivated contacts with scholars working on the history of science and tech-nology in Korea, long a subject of interest to Needham, particularly with regard to astronomical traditions (see Needham et al., 1986b) and the his-tory of printing. Visits of varying lengths by Song Sang-yong (Hallym University), Park Soong-rae (Han-kuk University), SongYoung-gon (Seoul National University) and Kim Ki-hyup all contrib-uted to firming up that connection in a fast-growing field.

In sketching the profile of the NRI as a hub, the preceding paragraphs have focused on the diversity of individual scholars who visited. To get a fuller picture, however, one must also recognize that the institute regularly received visits by delegations and working groups interested in subjects related to its areas of research.

Most prominent in this regard were delegations from the PRC: In weighing the NRI’s place in the international republic of letters, an important point to note is that 1976, the year in which the institute was founded, also happened to be the final year of the Cultural Revolution. China’s (re-)opening to the world beyond its borders, which had begun haltingly in 1973, now began to widen, again with initial hesi-tation but eventually quite dramatically. The fact that Needham and Lu had long and varied experience of China and Chinese ways, and that he, very publicly, and she, more quietly, were both well-known sup-porters of engagement and dialogue with China, seems to have made the NRI an appealing destina-tion for delegations venturing culturally and politi-cally into uncharted political waters.

In August 1978 – that is, in the run-up to Deng Xiaoping’s second official return to power17 – Hu Dingyi, the cultural counsellor at the Chinese embassy in London, who was well known to Lu and Needham, paid the institute an official visit. Between then and November 1982, when Lu Jiaxi, as presi-dent of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, visited for the first time (he would return 5 years later near the end of his term), at least 20 delegations of experts from the PRC visited the NRI. Ignoring the context of the previous 12 years, one might not have expected

the November 1977 visit by a study group on metal corrosion and protection to have been of great impor-tance. But Needham and Lu – recognizing it as the first official scientific delegation to the United Kingdom since 1966 – regarded it as highly signifi-cant. Dr Lu, who for reasons of health had long dis-ciplined herself to control her emotions, could not help being tense and excited. Happily, the visit came off as a relaxed and successful event.

In the 4 years after Hu Dingyi’s visit, the NRI welcomed all manner of official delegations: a pho-tochemical delegation, a crystallography delegation, a laser physics delegation, a joint Academia Sinica/Royal Society delegation, a delegation of book importers, another of publishers, another still of for-eign language specialists, a national medical sci-ences delegation and so on.

For me, two of those delegations are most memo-rable. The first was a Chinese Academy of Social Sciences delegation visit in May 1980, on which the renowned archaeologist Xia Nai served as deputy head. He complained sharply to Needham of having to cope with budget austerities under the Four Modernizations. The second visit I have in mind remains even more vividly in my memory, namely, that of the Chinese Academy of Sciences delegation headed by Zhou Peiyuan, then president of Peking University, a highly personable character who had worked with Einstein between the world wars. Poignancy was given to that September 1982 visit by the inclusion in the delegation of Cao Tianqin, another of Needham’s wartime assistants. After his distinguished doctoral work in biochemistry in Cambridge after the war, he and his wife, the renowned physicist Xie Xide, who had trained at MIT, returned to China to take part in the socialist construction. By early 1962, Cao was vice-president of the Shanghai Institute of Biochemistry, and Xie was professor of physics at Fudan University, but both were ousted from their positions during the Cultural Revolution. It was the refusal of the Chinese authorities to let the Needhams visit them in 1972 that focused Joseph’s mind on the harm the Cultural Revolution was doing to Chinese science and to the country.18 Cao’s 1982 return to the town where he had earned his doctorate was moving. That same year, he co-published a festschrift in Shanghai (Li

06_CUL922324.indd 53 13/08/2020 3:20:26 PM


et al., 1982) celebrating Needham’s 80th birthday – that is, honouring the man he had been persecuted for having associated with.

Over the following years, as travel between China and the West became normalized, the number of del-egation visits to the NRI dropped off rather steeply, but between 1977 and 1983, the role of the NRI as an iconic site for intellectual contacts between China and the West was palpable.

In addition to such official delegations, the sig-nificance of which may be said to have been gener-ally ceremonial, the NRI also had working meetings with groups of experts of various sorts from time to time. Several of these are memorable to me. The first was a team led by the French historian Charles Morazé, which came to consult over 3 days in 1981 on the preparation of a new UNESCO History of Mankind. Curiously, Morazé’s team included Colin Ronan and Christopher Cullen, both of whom would go on to have important roles at the NRI. Another meeting that sticks in my mind was the international workshop hosted in April 1982 by the NRI and organized by the United Nations University’s ‘Socio-Cultural Alternatives’ programme headed by Anouar Abdel-Malek (Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Paris), who was passionate about the need for inter-civilizational dialogue and had accordingly a decade earlier raised awareness of Needham’s approach to cross-cultural understanding in the francophone world with a sub-stantial profile in Le Monde diplomatique (Abdel-Malek, 1974). The 1982 workshop was an occasion that drew on Needham’s allure to bring together such reputed figures of diverse ideological orienta-tions as conservative University of Chicago histo-rian Donald Lach, Indian social scientist Barun De (Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta), ‘new cartographer’ Arno Peters (University of Bremen), Kenyan-American political scientist Ali Mazrui (University of Michigan) and Cambridge political theorist John Dunn.

A third notable meeting, held on a much smaller scale over 2 days in September 1983, was with a working-group from the Ruhr University in Bochum. The group was headed by the China scholar Bodo Wiethoff, who was in the process of developing a

major centre for the history of Chinese science and technology in Germany’s industrial heartland.

Still more memorable from my perspective is the March 1987 visit to the NRI by the former Algerian president Ahmed Ben Bella and his entourage. Ben Bella, with his desire to get a better understanding of the relations between science and religion in the Arab–Islamic context, and with a conviction about the value of inter-civilizational dialogue, had been alerted to Needham’s work by his friends, Anouar Abdel-Malek and Ken Coates, the MEP. Within two years, Ben Bella raised funds for an inaugural workshop in celebration of opening of the NRI’s permanent build-ing on Sylvester Road. That event, which was held in September 1989 at the NRI and Robinson College and was devoted to ‘The Dynamics of Oriental Societies’, was designed to promote fresh comparative discus-sion on issues to be treated in SCC, volume 7.

Finally, one last visit I cannot resist recalling is that of a film team from the Japanese national broad-caster NHK in July 1989. Led by the film-director Igarashi Kyotei and centred on the historian Tsuneishi Kei-ichi (Kanagawa University), the team was work-ing on a documentary on the Japanese Imperial Army’s Unit 731, which, during World War II, devel-oped biological warfare techniques that Needham had documented at the time. Unscripted at tea-time, Needham spontaneously entertained the assembled company with a rousing a capella rendition of the opening verse and the chorus of L’Internationale.

Let me cap this article with a simple conclusion: By the time Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-Djen stepped down in 1991 as the NRI’s directors, the institute had functioned for a decade and a half as a significant international centre promoting innova-tive scholarship, and as a site where researchers and analysts of varying orientations from many parts of the world came together for comparative historical reflection and dialogue. However much historical researchers were beginning to feel a creative need to enrich the field by moving ‘beyond Joseph Needham’,19 it seemed nonetheless entirely fitting that the NRI was chosen as the site for the September 1990 announcement of the formation of the International Society for the History of East Asian Science, Technology and Medicine.

06_CUL922324.indd 54 13/08/2020 3:20:26 PM

Blue 55



Funding


Notes

1. Blue (1997) lists Needham’s historical, philosophi-cal, religious and political publications. A list of his scientific books and papers is found in Li et al. (1982: 703–711).

2. Following Needham Research Institute (NRI) prac-tice, I italicize the title of the series, but not the name of the project.

3. See Blue (2002) for an overview of his life and career. 4. Formally incorporated in 1981 as the East Asian

History of Science Foundation (Hong Kong) and recently renamed as the Joseph Needham Foundation for Science & Civilisation Hong Kong.

5. The East Asian History of Science Foundation USA, established under the joint leadership of the seasoned US diplomat Phillips Talbot and Clifford Shillinglaw, senior vice-president of the Coca-Cola Company, who served as the foundation’s first chairman. After three decades of vigorous fundraising, this body was dissolved in 2008.

6. Respectively on socio-economic and intellectual fac-tors Needham considered as possibly inhibiting the emergence of specifically modern science. In his view, socio-economic structures were decisive in this regard.

7. Gardner’s (1998) account of the rift in his memoirs is insightful but not complete, overlooking, for exam-ple, how differences in political backgrounds and ori-entations exacerbated the situation.

8. On Mellon Foundation grants in the early 2000s in particular, see Needham Research Institute Fellowships (n.d.).

9. One finds a striking case, possibly known person-ally to Needham, in the partnership of the Cambridge mathematicians GH Hardy and JE Littlewood as pro-filed in Wilson (2002).

10. This work was unique among their joint publications in having Lu Gwei-Djen as lead author.

11. To take just a few examples: Ursula Franklin’s (1999) The Real World of Technology, Derk Bodde’s (1991) Chinese Thought, Society, and Science: The Intellectual and Social Background of Science and Technology in Pre-Modern China, Ray Huang’s

(1996) China: A Macro History, Timothy Brook’s (1999) ‘Capitalism and the writing of modern history in China’, and Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1999) ‘The West, capitalism and the modern world-system’. Some of these works may have had a greater impact outside of the SCC series than they would have had within it.

12. On the Dunn Institute, see Weatherall and Kamminga (1992: 34–62).

13. As noted above, he contributed to SCC, volume 5, part 4, on alchemy (Needham et al., 1980), and later as editor, to volume 6, part 6, on medicine (Needham and Lu, 2000).

14. Together, they organized and edited the festschrift honouring Needham on his 70th birthday, see Nakayama and Sivin (1973).

15. See Sivin (2013) for an insightful discussion of the significance of this question.

16. See e.g. Rahman (1987, 1999); Chattopadhyaya (1986–1991); also Raina (2015). Given that other writers share their names, readers may want to know that this Rahman was born in 1923 and Chattopadhyaya in 1933.

17. At the historic Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China, which aimed to draw a line beneath the Cultural Revolution.

18. For strategic reasons, he kept his powder dry. The public expression of his assessment came in an extended article in Nature 6 years later; see Needham (1978).

19. A sense captured later in the decade by a special issue of the History of Science Society’s journal Osiris; see Low (1998).

References

Abdel-Malek A (1974) Joseph Needham, encyclopédiste des civilisations. Ouverture sur l’Orient et condam-nation de l’occidento-centrisme. Le Monde diploma-tique 245: 19.

Al-Hassan AY and Hill DR (1986) Islamic Technology: An Illustrated History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Blue G (1997) Joseph Needham – A publication history. Chinese Science 14: 90–132. Available at: http://www.nri.cam.ac.uk/JN_wartime_photos/Blue_bibli-ography.pdf

Blue G (2002) Joseph Needham. In: Harman P and Mitton S (eds) Cambridge Scientific Minds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 299–312.

Bodde D (1991) Chinese Thought, Society, and Science: The Intellectual and Social Background of Science

06_CUL922324.indd 55 13/08/2020 3:20:26 PM

http://www.nri.cam.ac.uk/JN_wartime_photos/Blue_bibliography.pdf




and Technology in Pre-Modern China. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawaii Press.

Bray F (1984) Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 6, Biology and Biological Technology; Part 2, Agriculture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Brook T (1999) Capitalism and the writing of modern his-tory in China. In: Brook T and Blue G (eds) China and Historical Capitalism: Genealogies of Sinological Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, pp. 110–157.

Chattopadhyaya D (1986–1991) History of Science and Technology in Ancient India. Volume 1, the Beginnings; Volume 2, Formation of the Theoretical Fundamentals of Natural Science (Foreword by Joseph Needham). Kolkata: Firma KLM.

Daniels C and Menzies N (1996) Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 6, Biology and Biological Technology, Part 3, Agroindustries and Forestry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Franklin U (1999) The Real World of Technology (CBC Massey Lectures). Toronto, ON: House of Anansi Press.

Gardner T (1998) My First Eighty Years. Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing.

Golas PJ (2000) Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 13, Mining. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Huang R (1996) China: A Macro History. White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe.

Kuhn D (1988) Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 9, Textile Technology: Spinning and Reeling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Li GH, Zhang MW and Cao TQ (eds) (1982) Explorations in the History of Science and Technology in China. Shanghai: Shanghai Chinese Classics Publishing House.

Low MF (ed.) (1998) Beyond Joseph Needham: Science, Technology, and Medicine in East and Southeast Asia (Special Issue, Osiris Second Series, 13). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University.

Lu GD and Needham J (1980) Celestial Lancets: A History and Rationale of Acupuncture and Moxa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Métailié G (2015) Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 6, Biology and Biological Technology, Part 4, Traditional Botany: An Ethnobotanical Approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nakayama S and Sivin N (eds) (1973) Chinese Science: Explorations of an Ancient Tradition (MIT East Asian Science Series). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Needham J (1954–present) Science and Civilisation in China (7 Volumes in 25 Parts). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Needham J (1978) Science reborn in China. Nature 274(5674): 832–839.

Needham J and Lu GD (1985) Trans-Pacific Echoes and Resonances; Listening Once Again. Singapore: World Scientific.

Needham J and Lu GD (2000) Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 6, Biology and Biological Technology, Part 6, Medicine (ed Sivin N). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Needham J and Pagel W (eds) (1938) Background to Modern Science; Ten Lectures at Cambridge Arranged by the History of Science Committee, 1936. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; New York: Macmillan.

Needham J, Ho PY, Lu GD, et al. (1987) Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 7, Military Technology: The Gunpowder Epic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Needham J, Lu GD and Huang HT (1986a) Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 6, Biology and Biological Technology; Part 1, Botany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Needham J, Lu GD and Sivin N (1980) Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology; Part 4, Spagyrical Discovery and Invention: Apparatus and Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Needham J, Lu GD, Combridge JH, et al. (1986b) The Hall of Heavenly Records: Korean Astronomical Instruments and Clocks, 1380-1780 (Antiquarian Horological Society Monograph). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Needham Research Institute Fellowships (n.d.). Available at: https://mellon.org/grants/grants-database/grants/needham-research-institute/40600681/

Needham J, Yates RDS, Gawlikowski K, et al. (1994) Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 6, Military Technology: Missiles and Sieges. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Rahman A (1987) Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II and Indian Renaissance. New Delhi: Navrang.

Rahman A (1999) History of Indian Science, Technology, and Culture AD 1000-1800. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

06_CUL922324.indd 56 13/08/2020 3:20:26 PM

https://mellon.org/grants/grants-database/grants/needham-research-institute/40600681/

https://mellon.org/grants/grants-database/grants/needham-research-institute/40600681/

Blue 57

Raina D (2015) Needham’s Indian Network: The Search for a Home for the History of Science in India. New Delhi: Yoda Press.

Sivin N (2013) The Needham Question. Available at: https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/docu-ment/obo-9780199920082/obo-9780199920082-0006.xml

Tsien TH (1985) Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 1, Paper and Printing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wagner DB (2008) Science and Civilisation in China: Volume 5, Chemistry and Chemical Technology, Part 11, Ferrous Metallurgy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wallerstein I (1999) The West, capitalism and the mod-ern world-system. In: Brook T and Blue G (eds) China and Historical Capitalism: Genealogies of Sinological Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, pp. 10–56.

Weatherall M and Kamminga H (1992) Dynamic Science: Biochemistry in Cambridge, 1898-1949.

Cambridge: Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine.

Wilson RI (2002) Hardy and Littlewood. In: Harman P and Mitton S (eds) Cambridge Scientific Minds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 202–219.

Author biography

Gregory Blue is an emeritus professor in the History Department at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, where he taught modern and contem-porary world history, comparative history and historiogra-phy from 1990 to 2014. His post-secondary studies in phi-losophy and the history of social/political thought were done in the United States, Belgium, and the United Kingdom. From 1977 until 1990, he was a research associ-ate on the Science and Civilisation in China project in Cambridge, England. His primary field of research is the history of Sino-Western relations and Western interpreta-tions of Chinese society and politics, but he has broad research interests in global and comparative history, intel-lectual history, and international politics.

06_CUL922324.indd 57 13/08/2020 3:20:26 PM

https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199920082/obo-9780199920082-0006.xml



https://doi.org/10.1177/2096608320919525




And for me, in the face of things difficult to understand

You, the Explainer, the Antithesis

(whether or not in the flesh)

Were always there,

You, the outward and the tangible sign

Of the strength of all workers’ muscles under the hot sun

Intelligence of scholars attending to brush-strokes

Beauty of all Chinese women under the moon.

You, the manifestation of what Lucretius invokes:

QUAE QUONIAM RERUM NATURAM SOLA GUBERNAS

The assurance of a link

No separation can break.

As it is written in the Book of Rites

THIEN HSIA TA THUNG

All under Heaven shall be One Community.

– From ‘A Poem for a Chinese Friend’

by Joseph Needham, September 19461

It is really sad for me that I did not meet Joseph Needham in his younger years; he was very frail and wheelchair-bound by the time I came across him at

How can we redefine Joseph Needham’s sense of a world community for the 21st century?

Vivienne LoUniversity College London, UK

AbstractIn the middle of World War II, my father, Kenneth Lo, accompanied Joseph Needham on a lecture tour to Colchester Co-operative Society dedicated to the support of China’s war effort and to boycotting Japanese goods. They were comrades-in-arms, soft-left socialists, inspired by the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell and WH Auden alike to take up the pen and the campaign circuit. This article is a reflection on the politics and aesthetics of research, on decentring the Eurocentric narrative of the history of science, but also on the role of poetry in the quest for a better world. Grounded in socialist, Christian and 20th-century scientific utopian belief, All under Heaven was to be One Community. Post Needham, but in the Needham spirit, I ask what shared vision drives our research?

KeywordsJoseph Needham, Kenneth Lo, research ethics, poetry, history of science, cosmic libido

Corresponding author:Vivienne Lo, University College London, Gower Street, London WC1E 6BT, UK. Email: [email protected]

919525 CUL0010.1177/2096608320919525Cultures of ScienceLoresearch-article2020

Article

07_CUL919525.indd 58 13/08/2020 3:20:39 PM




Lo 59

the Needham Research Institute (NRI). I have a bor-rowed memory of him though, through one of the interminable stories my father used to tell me about his own younger years – stories that I have grown to appreciate only in later years.

On 29 March 1942, my father addressed the Education Department of the Colchester Co-operative Society in Chinese. He spoke in Chinese despite being fluent in English, having just graduated from Fitzwilliam College. The other speaker happened to be Joseph Needham, whom he had known through the Cambridge Chinese Student Association during the 1930s. They were comrades-in-arms, soft-left socialists, inspired by the Spanish Civil War, George Orwell and WH Auden alike to take up the pen and the campaign circuit.

The Colchester event was a fund-raiser organised by the Save China Campaign Committee (1937–1949), which was dedicated to the support of China’s war effort and to boycotting Japanese goods. The documents of that meeting are kept in the public archives in Shanghai, where a colleague of mine, Zhou Xun, discovered them just before the Needham Workshop in July 2015. In 1942, Needham was just a few months away from departing for China, carry-ing his belief in the possibility of universal moral and intellectual solidarity, and the germ of what would grow into his magnum opus, Science and Civilisation in China, had already been planted.

My father had been born between revolutions. As a young teenager, he had seen the first Northern Expedition march past his front door in Fuzhou in 1926, before it arrived the following spring in Shanghai on that bitter day in April when all the left-wing elements of the Kuomintang were first violently purged. He was trained by Edgar and Helen Snow at Yanjing University, now Peking University, and as the North China tennis champion (1936) had been invited to join his friends in the Chinese Olympic team to go to Berlin. This was just before the Marco Polo Bridge Incident when the National Revolutionary Army and the Japanese Army clashed outside Beijing (7–9 July 1937) initiating the second Sino-Japanese War and, in the view of some scholars, World War II.

His experiences had prepared him to share Needham’s anxieties and his hope for China. Together, they also shared an appreciation of WH

Auden, another traveller in war-torn China, and his reflections on love, politics and citizenship; Auden’s epistolary poem, ‘New Year Letter’ (1940), written after his return from the Sino-Japanese War, had spo-ken of the ‘free rejoicing energy’ – a phrase that cap-tures the faith that revolution would transform society through love (Auden, 1965: 79; Auden and Isherwood, 1939). Also trained by Christians, in his case in the missionary school at Fuzhou, but not Christian himself, my father shared that optimistic spirit that the faith engendered and wrote for Kingsley Martin’s Eastern Eye.

For Needham, carrying with him an experience of the devastation of the civil war in China, All under Heaven was to be one Community (tianxia datong)2 in the service of a better world.3

Needham’s better world drew on the meaning of a passage in Liji and its imagining of a community that would be drawn together by social structures that were perceived as different from and more humane and benevolent than any others in the geographical region where the classical Chinese texts were pro-duced and disseminated.

But Lu Gwei-djen and Needham’s vision for world community in the mid-20th century was radically dif-ferent – as remains so vividly illustrated in ‘A Poem for a Chinese Friend’, quoted above. The poem itself speaks of their conjoined project as a powerful aes-thetic and cross-cultural practice, of a philosophy of world science and art (my father also left behind a lot of bad poetry), and is a very moving piece for what it reveals about his motivation and his success: a glori-ous concoction of republicanism, socialism and Christianity, and a passion for classical learning and music mobilised in the pursuit of the science that so characterised his and Lu Gwei-djen’s lives.

The full poem coasts from the pipa and the cello to Hu Sihui’s apparent differential diagnosis of beri-beri, to Peking opera and a Cantonese bishop. It embraces images of Lu Gwei-djen’s research:

Year after weary year by the student of plague

Dissecting endemic rats and fleas in a bamboo shed—

Iron and steel to the help of the million families . . . (Needham, 1969: 161)

07_CUL919525.indd 59 13/08/2020 3:20:39 PM


It also had a particularly potent reading of a love, which Needham found common to the Judaic, tantric and Chinese traditions, without possessiveness and jealousy.

Along with the reference to ideas grounded in the Liji, we are treated to an invocation to Venus, the goddess of love, that is the opening lines of Lucretius’ De rerum natura (On the Nature of Things): ‘QUAE QUONIAM RERUM NATURAM SOLA GUBERNAS’ (‘and since you alone govern the nature of things’).

Prescient of the 1960s celebration of liberated love, for Needham as for Lucretius, the goddess of love brought cohesion, solidarity, aggregation and reproduction and gave birth to the universe, joining, in Needham’s lyricism, the love and potency of a divine creator. The poem was written for Needham’s own love in 1946 and recycled as an address (for Whitsunday) in Caius Chapel in 1976, which also appears as a postscript to Jolan Chang’s (1977) The Tao of Love and Sex, and it ultimately framed his farewell to Lu Gwei-djen (1993) in 1991. His repeat-ing references to Lucretius’ poem and to the Liji con-firm the importance to him of a fusion of humanist philosophy and what he calls, on the final page of The Tao of Love and Sex, a ‘cosmic libido’, capable of powering and structuring creation.

And so this was his universal love that manifested simultaneously in a hope for mankind, in the poten-tial for the aggregation of wisdom and in a belief in the virtue of ‘the achievements of Chinese science and technology before the time when, like all other ethnic cultural rivers, they flowed into the sea of modern science’ (Needham, 1964).

Lu and Needham shared this compelling vision for their work. It was so perfectly fitted to their time that it drew to them a large network of people enthused not only by decentring the Eurocentric narrative of the history of science but also by a quest for a better world. Their historical project remains a model for other Asian histories of science. Grounded in social-ist, Christian and 20th-century scientific utopian belief, All under Heaven was to be One Community.

Though we now live in very different times, aca-demically and politically, is there a moral legacy here to preserve, or a new combination of ethics and aesthetics waiting in the wings? Can we, or should

we, encourage research that is grounded in political philosophy, in campaigning, in an aesthetics that is appropriate to our time?

Long ago, Donna Harraway (1988) argued that ‘politics and ethics ground [our struggles] over knowledge projects in the exact, natural, social, and human sciences’ alike. How we frame the object of our study inevitably reflects who we are as a com-munity. It is only rational then, like Lu and Needham, to make those politics and ethics explicit and to deliver them with passion and dedication. The NRI shapes the community responsibility for all who have the privilege to follow in their footsteps. The ethical dimensions of science research and its history are not limited to the ethics of what scientists pro-duce and how they review that process – the respon-sibilities, for example, of developing superior military technology or genetic modification – although that is one key aspect. There are others.

In the history of science, and medical history in my case, and increasingly as medical history becomes subsumed into Wellcome’s medical humanities fund-ing streams, historians have been forced to evaluate the impact of our work. On every application form we are confronted with the ‘Outreach’ and ‘Public engagement’ boxes, asking how we will interact with and learn from the public and disseminate our find-ings – a challenge that I have come to love, respect and value. It is no longer enough that we should plan to share our research findings in closed academic communities, but they should translate into some kind of meaningful practice. We have to consider the wider and ‘so what’ question in designing our histori-cal practice and to construct meaning beyond the confines of university departments.

Another aspect of Needham’s legacy is his suc-cess in projecting the values and work of the com-munity and creating institutional identity. Today this could become a corporate branding exercise, but from another perspective it would be a critical exercise in self-determination and effective com-munication – a rallying cry. For University College London (UCL), my employers, that has meant the Grand Challenges, which all staff are encouraged to respond to: improvements in global health, sus-tainable cities, intercultural interaction and human well-being.

07_CUL919525.indd 60 13/08/2020 3:20:39 PM

Lo 61

For the history of science, there has been a greater concentration on conceiving All under Heaven as One Community: the connections, the transcultural, transnational networks which have linked and are linking the world, but with more investment in the value of local translations and multivocal conversa-tions than ever there was before.

And what of the artistry, the poetry and the pas-sion? It remains as it was here at the NRI – in the atmosphere, in the library, in the garden, in the prac-tice of learning, in the cultivation of the modern scholar. More than ever, we should value and build on this aspect of the inheritance of Needham and his close associates: their marriage of ethics and aesthet-ics in research. Now that the harsh lines of discipli-narity no longer regulate and restrain the terms of our academic engagement, the creative potential is even greater.

I am ever impressed by this marriage of ethics and aesthetics and the power it has exerted to reori-ent the history of science. Perhaps in the following generation, we each can see only a small part of Needham’s sky, but we are moved and drawn together by what we have seen and remember. Mapping the future also requires a vision, but it is perhaps inevitable that that vision will be less grand and less universal in its ambition. I am reminded of Zhuangzi’s ‘frog in the well’ and the joy that can be found in knowing your well and the limited vision that it affords.4 Best not venture too far, lest we get hit by the ‘cosmic libido’! If the destinations of 21st-century science, politics and religion are less clear than they were in Needham’s time, what is needed is to determine a new and shared programme through just the kind of collective reflection and cultivation that we are engaged in today.



Funding


Notes

1. The full poem is reprinted in Within the Four Seas, London: Allen & Unwin, 1969, pp. 160–162.

2. 天下大同.3. This is a conflation of two terms found in the Liyun

chapter of the Confucian Classic Liji (Book of Rites). Needham had already embraced the concept by 1938, as evidenced by an inscription by him on a plank of wood to be found at the home of his friend John Cornford in Ringstead, Norfolk.

4. The story of the frog in the well is from Zhuangzi waipian ‘qiushui’.

References

Auden WH (1965) Collected Longer Poems of WH Auden. New York: Random House.

Auden WH and Isherwood C (1939) Journey to a War. New York: Random House.

Chang J (1977) The Tao of Love and Sex. New York: EP Dutton.

Harraway D (1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial per-spective. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599.

Lu G (1993) A Commemoration. Cambridge: The Pentland Press.

Needham J (1964) Science and society in east and west. Science and Society 28(4): 386.

Needham J (1969) Within the Four Seas. London: Allen & Unwin.

Author biography

Vivienne Lo is a senior lecturer and the convenor of the UCL China Centre for Health and Humanity. She has been teaching the History of Asian Medicine and Classical Chinese Medicine at BSc and MA level in UCL since 2002. Her core research concerns the social and cultural origins of Chinese acupuncture, therapeutic exercise, and food and medicine. She translates and analyses manuscript material from early and medieval China and publishes on the transmission of scientific knowledge along the so-called Silk Roads. She has a long-term interest in visual cultures of medicine and healthcare and has recently pub-lished with Chris Berry and Guo Liping Film and the Chinese Medical Humanities (London: Routledge, 2019). Her current projects include a Handbook of Chinese Medicine (Routledge, 2020) and a History of Nutrition in China (Reaktion).

07_CUL919525.indd 61 13/08/2020 3:20:39 PM

https://doi.org/10.1177/2096608320911316




1. Joseph Needham and Chinese organic materialism

In his preface to the second part of the last and sev-enth volume of the series Science and Civilisation in China, in which Joseph Needham was involved in laying out his general conclusions and reflections after five decades of monumental work, the eminent historian of Chinese science, Mark Elvin (2004), bemoans the neglect of Needham in the mainstream history of science:

What is hard to come to terms with, almost half a century after the appearance of the first volume in 1954, is the limited assimilation of Needham’s work into the bloodstream of the history of science in

general; that is, outside the half-occluded universe of East Asian specialists and a handful of experts sensitive to the decisive contributions of comparisons. For these to be useful, there has to be enough in common between two domains to make comparisons and contrasts relevant, and enough different to make such juxtapositions reveal critically distinctive aspects of one or the other. (p. xxv)

Over the more than two decades since Elvin wrote, the situation has changed considerably. The global

Chinese organic materialism and modern science studies: Rethinking Joseph Needham’s legacy

Arun BalaIndependent Scholar, Singapore

AbstractHistorian of science Joseph Needham argued in various papers and books that the philosophy of organic materialism that informed classical Chinese science not only nurtured Chinese discoveries in areas such as magnetic studies, but also obstructed the emergence of early modern mechanical science in China. Nevertheless, the emergence of field conceptions in late modern science led him to see that Chinese organic materialism could combine with mechanical conceptions to enrich late modern science. Although much attention has been paid to Needham’s historical and sociological views of Chinese science, there has been hardly any systematic focus on understanding his conception of the philosophy of Chinese science. This article explains why Chinese organic materialism not only nurtured Chinese science in the past, and hindered the emergence of modern science in China, but can also be part of a synthesis of late modern science transcending early Western science.

KeywordsJoseph Needham, organic materialism, contextual knowledge, complementarity, experimental method

Corresponding author:Arun Bala, Independent Scholar, 440 Tanjong Katong Road, Singapore 437149. Email: [email protected]

911316 CUL0010.1177/2096608320911316Cultures of ScienceBalaresearch-article2020

Article

08_CUL911316.indd 62 13/08/2020 3:20:54 PM




Bala 63

turn in history, and particularly the history of science and technology, has increased the relevance of Needham’s achievements for mainstream history. The study of the role of the Eurasian circulation of ideas, religions, goods and people in shaping the rise of modern science and modernity in Europe is now a vibrant cultural enterprise, and no one can deny that Needham played a crucial role in this turn, beginning more than six decades ago. Much of this new work is the outcome of attempts to construct a global histori-cal sociology of modern science and society by reori-enting from Eurocentric to Eurasian perspectives (Bala, 2006; Cohen, 2011; Hobson, 2004; Huff, 2010; Joseph, 2011; Mei and Rehren, 2009; O’Brien, 2013).

Nevertheless, even Elvin forgets to mention that Needham did not only have a great deal to say about historical and sociocultural factors that could illumi-nate his grand question about why modern science emerged in Europe rather than in China, but also wrote much about the intellectual and philosophical belief systems relevant to answering that question. In particular, Needham saw Chinese science as inspired by a vision of nature – what he termed ‘organic materialism’ – that was sharply different from the mechanical vision of early modern science. Although he saw many of the achievements of Chinese science as playing themselves out within the framework of organic materialism, Needham also claimed that Chinese natural philosophy constituted an insuperable obstacle to the rise of modern science in China.

Paradoxically, Needham also saw early modern science as subsequently broadening its perspective to include field ideas, and with late modern science to integrate such ideas with mechanical atomic notions. It led him to argue that the Chinese organic world conception was becoming a part of late mod-ern science, so that organic materialism and the mechanical philosophy could be seen as comple-menting and completing each other.

Needham’s views raise three profound concerns for contemporary history and philosophy of science that have yet to be adequately addressed:

•• First, how did the philosophical orientation of organic materialism influence the many discov-eries of Chinese science and technology that

had made seminal contributions to modern sci-ence and technology? Did it hinder, be indiffer-ent to or facilitate those discoveries in ancient China?

•• Second, why did organic materialist philoso-phy turn out to be an obstacle to the emer-gence of modern science in China? Was the obstacle merely linked with sociocultural fac-tors and beliefs that came to be integrally associated with organic materialism, or did this philosophy positively inhibit the turn to modern mechanical science?

•• Third, do developments in late modern sci-ence make the organic materialist world view relevant once again in a new synthesis of Chinese organic philosophy with the mechan-ical world view? How can such a synthesis even be possible if the organic world view had hindered the emergence of modern sci-ence in the first place?

This article attempts to address these questions and consider their implications for the relevance of classical Chinese natural philosophy to contempo-rary philosophy of science.

2. Organic materialism as facilitating classical Chinese science

Needham considered that the natural philosophy of organic materialism promoted the growth of Chinese discoveries during the period of its dominance, espe-cially in the development of the seismograph, knowl-edge of magnetism and the understanding of tidal phenomena. He wrote,

[I]t can be shown in great detail that the philosophia perennis of China was an organic materialism. This can be illustrated from the pronouncements of philosophers and scientific thinkers of every epoch. The mechanical view of the world simply did not develop in Chinese thought, and the organicist view in which every phenomenon was connected with every other according to hierarchical order was universal among Chinese thinkers. Nevertheless, this did not prevent the appearance of great scientific inventions such as the seismograph, to which we have already referred. In some respects this

08_CUL911316.indd 63 13/08/2020 3:20:54 PM


philosophy of Nature may even have helped. It was not so strange or surprising that the lodestone should point to the pole if one was already convinced that there was an organic pattern in the cosmos. If, as is truly the case, the Chinese were worrying about the magnetic declination before Europeans even knew of the polarity, that was perhaps because they were untroubled by the idea that for action to occur it was necessary for one discrete object to have an impact upon another; in other words, they were inclined a priori to field theories, and this predilection may well also account for the fact that they arrived so early at a correct conception of the cause of sea tides. (Needham, 1969: 20–21)

What is clear, however, is that even if Needham appealed to field conceptions of Chinese organic materialism to explain discoveries in seismograph-ics, magnetism and tidal phenomena, he did not show us that there is any connection between this organic philosophy and the many remarkable mechanical discoveries made in China that he so amply documented. Indeed, this dissociation is rein-forced by historian of science Shigeru Nakayama, who considers that organic materialism could not have served to promote modern science. He argues that, while Western thinkers see discrete phenomena as linked by cause and effect relations grasped in terms of impacts in a well-defined framework of abstract space and time, the Chinese comprehended them in terms of resonances involving action at a distance. He considers it doubtful that such a concept of ‘organism’ in Chinese thought could ever have led to modern science. Moreover, the organic concep-tions of nature that Needham saw as uniquely Chinese can, according to Nakayama, also be found in other premodern cultures (Nakayama and Sivin, 1973: 39).

To explain the anomaly of Chinese mechanical accomplishments and the apparently impoverished Chinese philosophy of nature, sinologist AC Graham maintains that theoretical and practical concerns were not brought to bear on each other in China as they were in Europe. That separation between the two precluded the integration of Chinese technologi-cal discoveries within a broader theoretical vision. Graham considers that our tendency to associate sci-ence and technology together hinders us in recogniz-ing this today. He attributes this to our propensity to

see an intimate connection between science and technology, so that the two are perceived as evolving and developing together, as the correlative mode of thinking of early magical modes of thinking and practice, as well as that of medieval protoscientific thought, became displaced by causal thinking. This leads us to suppose that the great advances made in technological discoveries in China imply that it was on the verge of modern science. It also prompts us to ask why China failed to achieve modern science, or otherwise raises suspicions about Chinese priority in technological achievements (Graham, 1989: 315).

Graham rejects both alternatives. He thinks we cannot repudiate Chinese priority in technological discoveries merely on the grounds that they did not produce modern science, but he also maintains that the Chinese cannot be taken to have been on the verge of modern science simply because of their technological achievements. He explains that it was possible for the Chinese to be scientifically regres-sive even though they were technologically progres-sive because they deployed causal thinking as rigorously as in the West when it came to practical, useful concerns that improved material welfare. But this does not imply that there would be a natural pro-gressive development of rationality that would lead to the notion of controlled experiments to make dis-coveries about mathematical laws of nature to explain phenomena. Causal thinking and the ration-ality it promoted could not lead the Chinese to the conceptions of experiment and mathematical laws so closely associated with Western science. This leads Graham to conclude that the Chinese engaged in two different kinds of thinking when it came to practical matters and theoretical or philosophical discourse. In the former case, where the pursuit of utility was the dominant interest, they adopted causal thinking, but in the latter case, where intellectual concerns were primary, they adopted a correlative cosmology and thinking (Graham, 1989: 317).

But such an account fails to provide an acceptable answer to the question he addresses. On the one hand, he asserts but does not explain why the Chinese adopted a causal approach in their practical pursuits. On the other hand, Graham does not explain why the Chinese causal approach to practical matters, which allowed them to design, construct and implement a

08_CUL911316.indd 64 13/08/2020 3:20:54 PM

Bala 65

surprisingly huge number of sophisticated technolo-gies over long historical periods, was not hampered by their correlative intellectual orientation.

However, in contrast to Graham, historian Floris Cohen gives a positive role to the philosophy of organic materialism in classical China in promoting Chinese discoveries. But, unlike ancient Greek phi-losophy, it could not pave the way to modern sci-ence. He explains this by noting that there were two different pathways of going beyond primitive thought – one taken by the ancient Greeks and the other by the Chinese. At the time those choices were made, neither path would have appeared clearly superior, and both were options well worth pursuing. The natural philosophy adopted by the Chinese was initially superior in making possible technological discoveries. The water clock developed by Su Sung in medieval China was superior to its mechanical counterpart in Europe at the time. Indeed, in many respects, one would have judged the natural philoso-phy of the Chinese superior to that of the Europeans before the scientific revolution. Nevertheless, there was a crucial difference: the Greek tradition had greater long-term possibilities than Chinese organic materialism. The latter ran into what Cohen terms ‘a magnificent dead end’, whereas the Greek legacy opened the way to modern science after it was restored and forged into a new synthesis. He con-cludes that ‘China had no Scientific Revolution because such an outcome was not contained in the developmental possibilities of an organic approach to nature in the “correlative” mode of the Chinese’ (Cohen, 1994: 475).

Cohen wrongly assumes that only the Greek and not the Chinese legacy possessed developmental possibilities that could lead to modern science. That would appear to be the case only if modern science were solely rooted in the Greek precedent. Following Needham, we now recognize that modern science also had crucial contributions from Chinese science. This suggests that elements of modern science came from both the Chinese and the Greek traditions even though neither had the resources to develop into modern science by itself. That required contributions from both traditions.

Despite their different conceptions of organic materialism in promoting Chinese technological

achievements – Graham thinks it was an obstacle circumvented by Chinese causal thinking in practi-cal matters, and Cohen considers it to have facili-tated Chinese achievements for some time until it reached its ‘magnificent dead end’ – neither explains how it nurtured Chinese technological and scientific achievements.

I suggest that correlative cosmology played a posi-tive role in Chinese technological discoveries. This becomes evident when we compare the notions of cause in Aristotelian philosophy, which inspired European science in the premodern era, and the Chinese correlative conception of causes. I propose that the Aristotelian tradition inhibits and organic materialism nurtures a technological experimental approach that promotes innovation in mechanical engineering.

This can be appreciated when we consider Aristotle’s causal analysis of phenomena. Aristotle sees all natural phenomena as shaped by four differ-ent types of causes, which he terms efficient, final, material and formal. He also takes those four causes to be ultimately grounded upon his fundamental con-cepts of matter and form used to analyse all pro-cesses of change. In his study, The Classical Mind: A History of Western Philosophy, WT Jones deploys the example of an acorn growing into an oak tree to elucidate how Aristotle would provide his causal analysis of the process. For an oak tree that grew from a planted acorn, Aristotle would see the effi-cient cause as the person who planted the acorn; the final cause would be the purpose for which the tree is being grown; the material cause would be the soil, water and sunlight needed to nurture its growth; and the formal cause is the form of the tree that exists potentially in the acorn.

Jones emphasizes that the Aristotelian view requires us to see the acorn as carrying the potential to be an oak tree and the tree as the actualization of that potential. The oak is the realization of the poten-tial in the acorn, and the environment in which it grows merely provides the medium that nurtures that process. For Aristotle, the grown oak tree is the out-come of something essential contained in the acorn, although in a way not yet actualized (Jones, 1969: 223–225).

This Aristotelian conception of causality contrasts sharply with the Chinese correlative conception. For

08_CUL911316.indd 65 13/08/2020 3:20:54 PM


the latter, the oak became what it is not only by virtue what is innate in the acorn, but also by virtue of the environment in which the tree grew. It is the relations with other things in its environment that makes the oak what it is. The acorn is only one factor among many others that have to be included. The Chinese view explains the oak tree correlatively in terms of the environmental context in which it matured, but Aristotelians account for it by appeal to essential properties within the acorn. Although they are both giving causal explanations of the oak tree, their accounts of its causes are quite different. Aristotle refers to necessary causes within the acorn but treats the environment as only a facilitating factor, whereas the Chinese emphasize correlated causes in the con-text outside and treat the acorn as a facilitating factor (Benesch, 1993; Lloyd, 2004; Lloyd and Sivin, 2003; Shankman and Durrant, 2002).

The correlative causal approach associated with organic materialism is much more likely to nurture mechanical innovation and creativity than the Aristotelian causal essentialist approach. It encour-aged the Chinese to take the path of understanding something by examining how it harmonizes and integrates with other parts of the system in which it is embedded. This is because its behaviour is explained in terms of how it fits into the larger sys-tem to produce harmony in the whole. This does not invoke some essence of a thing, or essential causes within it, but how it correlates with other things. Even if we acknowledge that there were many microcosm–macrocosm analogies in Greek thought, they were framed within the Aristotelian concept of causal essentialism rather than a relational view of causes, which dominated Chinese thought.

Needham saw this holistic orientation in the neo-Confucian philosophy of Zhu Xi (1130–1200), who viewed nature as regulated by li, which is translata-ble as ‘principles of organization’. Needham (1956) argued that li is close, but not identical, to natural law in the modern sense (p. 484) because it includes a notion in which parts of a system are treated as fit-ting into the whole, showing neo-Confucianism to be ‘a scheme of thought striving to be a philosophy of organism’ (pp. 558, 567). This conception of law as li accords with Chinese organic materialist phi-losophy of nature, in which the regularities of nature

are seen as arising from the relationships between things in nature (Needham, 1956: 518–583).

Such an understanding of a thing, not in terms of an essence within it but in terms of its relations to other things, would encourage a tinkering orienta-tion to a system as a whole, to see how changes occur in the behaviour of one part when we alter other parts within the system. This is the trial-and-error process that we find in the scientific experi-mental method, which involves altering the context of an object in order to discover how its behaviour is thereby affected. It would be far more difficult to adopt such a tinkering experimental approach if we assumed that the behaviour of a thing is influenced by virtue of an essence within it.

Chinese organic materialism did not only inspire technological discoveries. It came to shape Chinese astronomical ideas that Needham considered to have influenced modern astronomy in 17th-century Europe. Many ideas associated with the heliocentric revolution in astronomical theory had been antici-pated by the Chinese centuries earlier. In order to appreciate this, we have to recognize that an impor-tant astronomical model accepted by the Chinese at the time of the scientific revolution was the Xuan Ye, or infinite empty space, theory (Bala, 2006: 131–144). Although there was also concern about the movements of the Sun and the Moon and predictions of their eclipses, the theory centred on the study of the stars. According to the theory, all heavenly bod-ies were generated by the condensation of an ethe-real substance, qi, which floated in an infinite empty space. The heavenly bodies themselves rotated around their orbits in an anticlockwise direction around the Pole Star, driven by the floating, rushing qi. Needham maintained that this theory had cur-rency among Chinese astronomers at the time Jesuits arrived in China.

Jesuit astronomer and missionary Matteo Ricci referred to this theory in 1595 in a letter to his col-leagues in Europe, in which he contrasted the European and Chinese astronomical traditions. He particularly drew attention to some of the ‘absurdi-ties’, as he saw them, that Chinese astronomers believed. He noted that the Chinese believed in only one sky, unlike European astronomers, who knew that there were 10 skies because the planets were

08_CUL911316.indd 66 13/08/2020 3:20:54 PM

Bala 67

bound to separate crystalline spheres. Moreover, the Chinese thought that the stars moved in an empty void, unlike Europeans, who considered a void to be impossible, and stars to be attached to a crystalline firmament.1

What is remarkable is that the Chinese ideas seen as absurd by Ricci became part of the radical revisions of thought following the scientific revolution. Working with Chinese astronomers in their Astronomical Bureau, Ricci must have also learned how his Chinese counterparts made meticulous records of the passages of comets, the sudden mani-festations of supernovae or exploding stars, and the advent of sunspots. Even when European astronomers of the time noticed those anomalous events, the events were dismissed as illusions or earthly exhalations out of regard for the Aristotelian view of an unchanging and immutable heaven beyond the lunar sphere. It is surely striking that Ricci – who was well trained and educated in the European astronomical tradition at the time and inducted into the highest Chinese astronomi-cal circles for that reason – should list as absurdities Chinese beliefs that soon became part of modern astronomy (Ronan, 1981 (1978): 213). Indeed, this gives grounds for suspecting that Chinese ideas of a changing heaven of exploding stars, comets and sun-spots, and the infinity of space, influenced European astronomy at the time of the scientific revolution.2

Moreover, one can further suspect that Chinese organic materialism influenced the discoveries in Chinese astronomy that later became a part of mod-ern astronomy. If heavenly phenomena correlate with events on Earth in the Chinese organic view, then there is every reason to suspect that changes on Earth would correspond with those in the heavens, an example being the tides, and this would make Chinese astronomers receptive to recognizing com-ets, sunspots and meteors as well as supernovae in the heavens as portending changes on Earth.

Thus, we cannot explain the scientific revolution in Europe by ignoring the impact of Chinese tech-nologies and astronomy, both of which were shaped by Chinese organic materialist philosophy. We have to conclude that Chinese organic materialism con-tributed to the scientific revolution through the dis-coveries it facilitated even if it could not have led to modern science on its own.

3. Organic materialism as obstructing the emergence of modern science

Needham was also concerned with explaining how modern science differed from medieval science, including Chinese science, when he wrote,

[I]t is essential to define the differences between ancient and medieval science on the one hand, and modern science on the other. I make an important distinction between the two. When we say that modern science developed only in Western Europe at the time of Galileo in the late Renaissance, we mean surely that there and then alone there developed the fundamental bases of the structure of the natural sciences as we have them today, namely the application of mathematical hypothesis to Nature, the full understanding and use of the experimental method, the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, the geometrisation of space, and the acceptance of the mechanical model of reality . . . Until it had been universalised by its fusion with mathematics, natural science could not be the common property of all mankind. The sciences of the medieval world were tied closely to the ethnic environments in which they had arisen. (Needham, 1969: 14–15)

That passage is interesting from a philosophical point of view. It suggests that Needham believed that there is a crucial difference between the classical organic materialist natural philosophy of premodern China and the mechanical philosophy of modern sci-ence. It also invokes the question of why organic materialism, which nurtured science in its early stages within China, did not have the potential to make the passage to modern science directly. In par-ticular, it raises the issue of why the modern experi-mental method Needham refers to, which was systematically formulated by Francis Bacon, and the application of mathematical hypotheses did not arise in China. To address this, we have to look more closely at Bacon’s influence on modern science.

Many great scientists acknowledged Bacon as the founder of the scientific method, even though he was neither a great scientist nor a great mathematician. The Royal Society of London saw in him its founding inspiration, and Isaac Newton claimed inspiration from the Baconian method. Even in Enlightenment

08_CUL911316.indd 67 13/08/2020 3:20:54 PM


France, the philosophes treated him as the pioneer of the inductive–experimental method. The celebrated scientist John Herschel, in his study A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy in 1851, gave him the highest accolade. Herschel wrote that, although the fallacies of Aristotelian philosophy came to be overthrown by appeal to the facts of nature by Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, it was Bacon who showed the flaws in Aristotelian philo-sophical methodology by appealing to broad and general principles and rectifying its drawbacks by proposing a better approach to understanding nature. For that reason, Herschel (1851) considered that Bacon would be acknowledged in future ages as a great reformer of philosophy, despite making little contribution to the discovery of what he called ‘phys-ical truths’ (pp. 113–114).

To get a better appreciation of Bacon’s (1994) influence, let us begin with his famous dictum: ‘We can only command Nature by obeying her’ (p. 43). It seems paradoxical when we take it at face value. It appears to suggest the impossible: that we should command and obey nature at one and the same time. But what Bacon was doing was referring to two dif-ferent contexts in the way we relate to nature. His method of controlled experiment helps us to under-stand what they are. To practise his method requires us to adopt techniques to compel nature to reveal those laws that regulate natural phenomena. That cannot be achieved by merely observing phenomena as they occur in their natural contexts – it requires us to create new contexts, forged by our own artifice, that are not found in nature:

A natural history compiled for its own sake is quite unlike one collected in an organized way with the aim of informing the intellect and building a philosophy. And these two [kinds of] histories, different as they are in other matters, differ especially in this, that the former contains only the variety of natural species and no experiments of the mechanical arts. And just as in ordinary life the true personality of a person and his hidden thoughts and motives show themselves more clearly when he is under stress than at other times, so things in Nature that are hidden reveal themselves more readily under the vexations of art than when they follow their own course. There will therefore be grounds for optimism regarding natural philosophy

when, and only when, natural history (which is its basis and foundation) shall have been better organized; but until that is done, hardly any. (Bacon, 1994: 107–108)

Thus, Bacon’s experimental method recom-mends that we study how things behave not in their natural contexts, but in the context of controlled situations that we artificially engineer. He argued that the study of plants and animals – what he called natural history – must adopt the same experimental method that had shown itself to be remarkably suc-cessful in the mechanical arts. In effect, his method promotes an approach to studying nature in which contexts devised by the experimenter displace nat-ural contexts.

What was new and significant about Bacon’s experimental method was that it leads us to identify the universal laws that constrain nature in all the sundry and diverse conditions that scientists can imaginatively devise. It permits us to discover nature’s laws by adamantly violating the natural con-texts wherein those laws normally operate. Bacon maintained that we can discover those laws only by the vexations of art – that is, by creating new experi-mental contexts that do not exist in nature to wrest those secrets from nature.

Bacon’s apparently paradoxical dictum that nature must be obeyed to be commanded now becomes much clearer. He was proposing that we can only have greater control of nature by conform-ing to the laws of nature, which we cannot violate. Moreover, although we cannot alter those laws, we can use our knowledge of them to have greater com-mand over natural contexts. Those contexts can be freely altered by us, as we do in the experimental method, so as to bring nature into our service. In short, what can be made subject to our command are the contexts in which natural laws operate; what we must submit to are the natural laws in themselves.

But it is precisely the violation of natural contexts that Chinese organic materialism precludes. It pro-motes a science that seeks to operate within natural contexts even if they are tinkered with in order to make improvements in the functioning of nature. The debate between Taoist and Confucian thinkers in early China was not about whether one can violate natural contexts but the extent to which one should

08_CUL911316.indd 68 13/08/2020 3:20:54 PM

Bala 69

allow natural processes to develop spontaneously or cultivate them. Indeed, this original debate concern-ing our relations with nature became transformed, with the consolidation of the cultivation of nature under the agricultural order, into one centred not on whether nature should be cultivated, but on whether human nature should be cultivated or allowed to develop spontaneously. Both the Taoist and Confucian perspectives were inspired by an organic materialist vision of the universe that would have precluded the Baconian method of violating natural contexts to discover natural laws (Bala, 2017: 183–200). For this reason, Chinese organic materialism would have proved an obstacle to the emergence of modern science in China.

There has recently emerged a new approach to understanding the scientific revolution as more than a transformation in astronomical theory and technol-ogy. It is emphasized that the expansion of knowl-edge included many disciplines, from medicine and biology to geography and chemistry. Those changes involved not just technological or theoretical trans-formations but also a radical shift in the way we approach the production of natural knowledge. A strong case along such lines has been made recently by historian Floris Cohen (2011) in his study How Modern Science Came into the World: Four Civilizations, One 17th century Breakthrough. Cohen accounts for the rise of modern science through the emergence and fusion of three distinct approaches to natural phenomena that he labels ‘modes of nature-knowledge’: mathematical real-ism, kinetic corpuscularianism, and fact-finding experimentalism. Cohen claims that the first two of the three modes – mathematical realism and kinetic corpuscularianism – are transformations of two dif-ferent traditions that originated in ancient Greek sci-ence. Kinetic corpuscularianism emerged through a radical transformation of the ancient atomism of Epicurus that was popularized in Athens. Cohen sees mathematical realism as a transformation of the abstract mathematical orientation to disciplines such as optics, astronomy, statics and hydrostatics mainly associated with Greek science in Alexandria. He takes the third tradition of fact-finding experimental-ism to have grown out of another transformation of a distinctive orientation to nature emphasizing both

accurate description and practical orientation that emerged sui generis in late Renaissance Europe (Cohen, 2015: 102–144).3

Cohen traces this third mode of nature-knowl-edge to an origin in the practical crafts evident in artist–artisans such as Leonardo da Vinci. He main-tains that it was this mode of nature-knowledge that Francis Bacon transformed into fact-finding experi-mentalism. This is questionable. The mechanical discoveries that impressed Bacon did not draw their inspiration simply from Leonardo. They were Chinese discoveries, the origins of which were unknown to Bacon. In a famous and oft-quoted pas-sage, Bacon wrote,

It is well to observe the force and virtue and consequences of discoveries. These are to be seen nowhere more conspicuously than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure and inglorious; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the world, the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes; insomuch that no empire, no sect, no star, seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries. (As cited in Needham, 1954: 19)

Hence, in trying to explain the rise of fact-finding experimentalism in Europe with Bacon, we cannot simply take into account Leonardo da Vinci and ignore the crucial impact of Chinese technologies on medieval Europe.

But it is precisely the violation of natural contexts recommended by Bacon to discover the laws of nature that is precluded by Chinese organic material-ism. That philosophy recommends the method of observing nature in its natural contexts, even if it allows tinkering with those contexts to discover the changes and improvements that such tinkering makes possible. It was this approach that led to the gradual improvements in technology that Chinese science made possible, the impacts of which so impressed Bacon. It was also organic materialism that led the Chinese to envision a changing universe in an infinite empty space – an idea that influenced the rise of modern astronomy in Europe, although it also pre-cluded the mechanical conception of a clockwork

08_CUL911316.indd 69 13/08/2020 3:20:54 PM


universe so crucial to the Newtonian system. This explains why Needham rightly saw organic material-ism as both nurturing ideas and technologies that contributed to modern science and at the same time also precluding the mechanical worldview and exper-imental method.

Given the impact of Chinese technologies on Bacon, despite his ignorance of their origins, it is highly likely that his radical experimental method involves a systematization of the tinkering experi-mental method that nurtured those Chinese mechani-cal discoveries subsequently transmitted to Europe. The major innovation Bacon instituted was to take the tinkering orientation further by producing novel contexts not found in nature to enable the discern-ment of the laws of nature that controlled all experi-mental contexts. Thus, it was the stimulus of Chinese technology, and its tinkering experimentalism to make mechanical innovations, which guided Bacon to his ‘discovery of how to discover’.

By contrast, the tinkering experimental method of Chinese science went beyond the passive method of observation of the ancient Greeks, although it fell short of Bacon’s method of active experimentation. Greek science worked within the context of nature as it is; Chinese science was prepared to cultivate nature by tinkering with it while respecting its over-all context, but Baconian science demanded that we violate natural contexts to determine the laws that regulate nature in all contexts. And the main factor that inhibited Chinese science from moving beyond its tinkering experimental method to Baconian active experimentalism was the organic materialist philos-ophy that inspired it.

4. Organic materialism as completing modern science

In an early paper on mathematics and science that compared Chinese and Western approaches to knowl-edge, Needham noted that ‘Chinese mathematical and theoretical backwardness was clothed in an organic philosophy of nature closely resembling that which modern science has been forced to adopt after three centuries of mechanical materialism’ (as cited in Courtney and Lee, 1997: 108). This leads Nakayama to conclude that Needham was inclined to see late

modern science as a synthesis of the Chinese tradition of organism and early modern Western mechanism. This makes modern science, he thought, neither Eastern nor Western. Indeed, Needham held that early mechanistic science, which originated in Europe, could not be deemed modern science, but only matured into the latter after drawing on contributions from Chinese science (Nakayama and Sivin, 1973: 39–40).

Needham’s views on the relationship of Chinese philosophy to science exhibit a paradoxical stand that has not gone unnoticed. He seems to have assumed that Chinese philosophy was congenial to the growth of premodern Chinese science, hostile to the emergence of early modern science, but hospita-ble once again to late modern statistical science. Strangely, even Needham himself recognized the irony of his position when he wrote,

The problem is whether recognition of such statistical regularities and their mathematical expression could have been reached by any other road than that which science actually travelled in the West. Was the state of mind in which an egg-laying cock could be prosecuted at law necessary in a culture which should later have the property of producing a Kepler? (Needham, 1956: 582)

He went on to add, ‘Who shall say that the Newtonian phase was not an essential one?’(Needham, 1956: 582). He repeated this claim by stating,

An unexpected vista thus opens before our eyes – the possibility that while the philosophy of the fortuitous concourses of atoms, stemming from the society of European mercantile city-states, was essential for the construction of modern science in the 19th century form; the philosophy of organism, essential for the construction of modern science in its present and coming form, stemmed from the bureaucratic society of ancient and medieval China . . . All that our conclusion need be is that Chinese bureaucratism and the organicism which sprang from it may turn out to have been as necessary an element in the formation of the perfected worldview of science, as Greek mercantilism and the atomism to which it gave birth. (Needham, 1956: 339)

He reiterated this point in a number of places in the same text by not only stressing Chinese philosophical

08_CUL911316.indd 70 13/08/2020 3:20:54 PM

Bala 71

ideas as valuable for the future of science, but also that science could not ‘perfect itself’ without such ideas (Needham, 1956: 288, 340).

We have already seen Needham’s claims disputed by historian of science Shigeru Nakayama. His view is endorsed by Qian Wenyuan in a chapter titled ‘Scientific philosophies: China’s past – the world’s future?’ in his book The Great Inertia. Qian notes, tongue in cheek, that Needham treated ancient Chinese philosophy as increasing in value over time, like antiques. In the past, the Chinese did not know how to develop it, so it hindered the growth of sci-ence. But now, so Needham argued, it will be resur-rected to complete the science that emerged in Europe in the early modern era. To Qian, such a development would be a great irony of history (Qian, 1985: 133).

Indian sociologist of science Jatinder Bajaj would agree with him. He notes quizzically that Needham requires us to suppose that, although the Chinese had a natural philosophy and social views that were remarkably modern, they arrived at them too early to be able to make significant discoveries, as happened in the West. This was because those discoveries could only be made by following the historical sequence in which they emerged in the West. He finds such a view highly questionable (Bajaj, 1988: 59–60).

Paradoxically, Needham also thought that science today has reached a position in which we need to integrate the Chinese organic materialist vision (and its field orientation) with the mechanical and atomic views of early modern science. He argued that, since the time of Dalton, Huxley and the mechanical mate-rialists, science has increasingly been obliged to integrate field conceptions of nature that were more consonant with the Chinese organic materialist worldview. He envisaged a situation in which the two come to complement each other. He noted that

[Science] has been obliged to become still more ‘modern’, to assimilate field physics . . . Deepening knowledge of biological phenomena, too, has necessitated a reformulation of scientific concepts in which the philosophy of organism has had a vital part to play. (Needham, 1956: 339)

But Needham thought that Chinese science on its own could have developed into modern science with inputs from the Greek tradition. In his ‘Poverties and

triumphs’ chapter in The Grand Titration, Needham (1969) wrote,

I would be prepared to say that if parallel social and economic changes had been possible in Chinese society then some form of modern science would have arisen there. If so, it would have been, I think organic rather than mechanical from the first, and it might well have gone a long way before receiving the great stimulus which a knowledge of Greek science and mathematics would no doubt have provided, and turning into something like the science which we know today. (pp. 40–41)

Needham’s views on such philosophical matters may be dismissed as aggrandizing claims for Chinese natural philosophy if not for the fact that Niels Bohr (1958), a leading pioneer of quantum theory who developed the complementarity of the field and atomic viewpoints (wave–particle duality), also emphasized a similar connection to Chinese philosophy:

For a parallel to the lesson of atomic theory . . . [we must turn] to that kind of epistemological problems with which already thinkers like Buddha and Lao Tse have been confronted, when trying to harmonize our position as spectators and actors in the great drama of existence. (pp. 19–20)

Indeed, so impressed was Bohr by this Chinese connection that when he was awarded the Order of the Elephant, one of Denmark’s highest honours, he chose for his coat of arms the Chinese yin–yang symbol (Figure 1). The connections between field and atomic ideas noted by Needham and Bohr raise a new philosophical question. What makes the phi-losophy of Chinese organic materialism so congenial to the worldview of the quantum theory?

Needham answered that question, as we have seen, by arguing that the modern science of statisti-cal regularities, presumably linked to quantum the-ory, although he is not explicit about that, takes us beyond the mechanical vision of 17th century sci-ence and moves us closer to the correlative cosmol-ogy that characterized Chinese thought for millennia. Moreover, Needham also argued that, among Chinese philosophical traditions, it is the Taoists who most consistently emphasize the notion of nature as a correlatively conditioned self-regulating

08_CUL911316.indd 71 13/08/2020 3:20:54 PM


system of growing processes. He described the Taoist conception of nature as follows:

For the Taoists the Tao or Way was not the right way of life within human society, but the way in which the universe worked; in other words, the Order of Nature . . . which brought all things into existence and governs their every action, not so much by force as by a kind of natural curvature in space and time, that reminds us of the logos of Heracleitus of Ephesus, controlling the orderly process of change. (Needham, 1956: 36–37)

Thus, Needham saw the Taoists as concerned with the way of nature that lies outside the way of life in human society and views things in nature as growing and developing in correlative dependence upon other things without human intervention. This organic correlative vision of nature is central to the Taoist conception of how we should study and relate to nature. This is most clearly expounded by Laozi in

his seminal text Dao De Jing.4 It led him to recom-mend that we can only learn about nature by entering and communing with it, but without intervening in its processes. It is important to note that his desire for communion is not merely an expression of a sec-ular wish to leave civilization – it is also connected with an urge to identify with nature so closely and intimately that it is often seen as a sort of nature mysticism.

Taoist mysticism, however, contrasts sharply with Hindu, Buddhist, Christian and Islamic mysti-cal traditions because it stresses communion with nature rather than withdrawal from nature. Its natu-ralistic orientation led historian of Chinese philoso-phy Feng Youlan to describe it as ‘the only system of mysticism the world has ever seen which was not profoundly anti-scientific’ (as cited in Needham, 1956: 33). Such an approach would make observa-tion highly sensitive to the natural contexts in which phenomena arise and develop. It is quite contrary to the Baconian experimental method of studying nature by violating its contexts.

The importance of making scientific method sen-sitive to contextual knowledge was also stressed by philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin. He argued that Enlightenment science in general repressed con-textual knowledge and described the change he wished to promote to transcend the limits of the modernist vision initiated by Bacon and Descartes. He thought that those 17th century philosophers set out to frame their queries to arrive at answers that were universal and independent of context. By con-trast, he saw his task as the opposite one of reversing those decontextualizing approaches by recontextual-izing the questions that were their primary concerns (Toulmin, 1992: 21).

Toulmin contended that contextual knowledge was held in high regard in the premodern age by European and many other cultures inspired by their different organic worldviews, but enlightenment sci-ence marginalized such knowledge in favour of the acontextual knowledge of universal laws that early modern thinkers valued. He added that the new sci-ence of chaos and complexity has once again revealed the significance of contextual knowledge for the advancement of science. He concluded that quantum theory, gestalt psychology and ecology

Figure 1. Niels Bohr’s coat of arms.

08_CUL911316.indd 72 13/08/2020 3:20:55 PM

Bala 73

have begun to shift science away from the acontex-tual emphasis of early modern mechanical science. This makes the Chinese organic materialist emphasis on the importance of contextual knowledge obtained by working within the context of nature, rather than aggressively experimenting outside it, transcend the limitations of Bacon’s experimental method.

5. Rethinking Needham’s legacy

In the past, comparative studies of Chinese science have largely focused on why the organic materialist framework obstructed the emergence of modern sci-ence in China. Little attention has been paid to two positive contributions of organic materialism to modern science. First, it promoted the growth of sci-entific and technological developments in China that paved the way for early modern science to emerge in Europe. Second, its perspective can be incorporated to enrich the philosophical understanding of late modern science following the integration of field conceptions with atomic ideas in quantum theory. Needham himself emphasized these two positive contributions of organic materialism, although those who followed him have largely paid attention only to his concerns about how it obstructed the emergence of modern science.

There is a tendency to see Greek science as closer to modern science than its Chinese counterpart. This is a historical mistake, since both the Greek and the Chinese traditions made important contributions to modern science. Modern science broke away from Greek and Chinese science, although we can trace ontological and methodological continuities from both the earlier traditions into modern science. Such a view is more faithful to Needham’s legacy and, as Elvin notes, would rectify its neglect by mainstream historians and philosophers of science.

What comes out clearly is the coherence of Needham’s views on the role that Chinese organic materialism played in nurturing Chinese contextual science, in obstructing the Chinese from moving towards the acontextual tradition of early modern sci-ence, and once again meshing in well with late modern science. But Needham did not give a coherent philo-sophical explanation for his claims concerning the relations between Chinese organic materialist science

and modern science. The explanations offered in this paper for the ambivalent relationship between Chinese organic materialism and modern science make his views quite relevant to contemporary science studies.



Funding


Notes

1. It can be said that ancient Greeks, such as the atom-ists and Epicurus, postulated the void, but they were not part of the dominant Greek tradition. Similarly, Mohists had ideas reminiscent of modern views but were not part of the dominant Chinese organic orientation.

2. Although it may be rightly argued that those views identified by Ricci are neutral to the core 17th cen-tury astronomical debate in Europe concerning whether the Sun or the Earth is at the centre of the universe, they are relevant because they are also asso-ciated with the Chinese belief that the heavenly bod-ies rotate around the Pole Star. This is explained by heliocentric astronomy as an illusion produced by a rotating Earth.

3. Cohen links these new modes of nature-knowledge to pioneering figures of the scientific revolution: mathematical realism to Galileo Galilei and Johannes Kepler, kinetic corpuscularianism to René Descartes and Isaac Beekman, and fact-finding experimental-ism to Francis Bacon, William Gilbert and William Harvey.

4. Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching) has been translated over 250 times into various European languages, espe-cially English, German and French. See LaFargue M and Pas J (1998) “On Translating the Tao-te-ching,” in Kohn L and LaFargue M (eds) Lao-tzu and the Tao-te-ching, 277–301. Albany: State University of New York Press. Even in Chinese, there are a num-ber of transmitted editions in historical times, but the three primary ones are named after early commentar-ies of the text – the ‘Yan Zun version’ attributed to Han Dynasty scholar Yan Zun (80 BCE – 10 CE); the ‘Heshang Gong version’ named after Heshang Gong

08_CUL911316.indd 73 13/08/2020 3:20:55 PM


(202–157 BCE); and the ‘Wang Bi version’ named after Wang Bi (226–249 CE).

ReferencesBacon F (1994) Novum Organum (eds. P Urbach and J

Gibson). Chicago, IL: Open Court.Bajaj JK (1988) Francis Bacon, the first philosopher of

modern science: A non-Western view. In: Nandy A (ed.) Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, pp. 24–67.

Bala A (2006) The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bala A (2017) Complementarity beyond Physics: Niels Bohr’s Parallels. Stuttgart: Springer.

Benesch W (1993) The Euclidean egg, the three legged Chinese chicken: Contextual vs. formal approaches to reason and logics, an approach to comparative philoso-phy & logics. Journal of Chinese Philosophy 20(2): 109–131.

Bohr N (1958) Atomic Physics and Human Knowledge. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Cohen HF (1994) The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Cohen HF (2011) How Modern Science Came into the World: Four Civilizations, One 17th-Century Breakthrough. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Cohen HF (2015) The Rise of Modern Science Explained: A Comparative History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Courtney C and Lee JY (eds) (1997) East Wind: Taoist and Cosmological Implications of Christian Theology. Lanham, MD: University Press of America.

Elvin M (2004) Vale atque ave. In: Needham J (ed.) Science & Civilisation in China, vol. VII: 2. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. xxiv–xliii.

Graham AC (1989) Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China. La Salle, IL: Open Court.

Herschel J (1851) A Preliminary Discourse on the Study of Natural Philosophy. London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans.

Hobson JM (2004) The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Huff TE (2010) Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution: A Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jones WT (1969) The Classical Mind (A History of Western Philosophy). New York: Harcourt Brace & World.

Joseph GG (2011) The Crest of the Peacock: Non-European Roots of Mathematics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Lloyd G (2004) Ancient Worlds, Modern Reflections: Philosophical Perspectives on Greek and Chinese Science and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lloyd G and Sivin N (2003) The Way and the Word: Science and Medicine in Early China and Greece. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Mei JJ and Rehren T (eds) (2009) Metallurgy and Civilisation: Eurasia and beyond. London: Archetype Publications.

Nakayama S and Sivin N (eds) (1973) Chinese Science: Explorations of an Ancient Tradition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Needham J (1954) Science and Civilisation in China: Introductory Orientations, vol. I. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Needham J (1956) Science and Civilisation in China: History of Scientific Thought, vol. II. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Needham J (1969) Poverties and triumphs of the Chinese scientific tradition. In: Needham J (ed.) The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West. Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press, pp. 14–54.

O’Brien P (2013) Historical foundations for a global per-spective on the emergence of a western European regime for the discovery, development, and diffusion of useful and reliable knowledge. Journal of Global History 8(1): 1–24.

Qian WY (1985) The Great Inertia: Scientific Stagnation in Traditional China. Dover, NH: Croom Helm.

Ronan C (1981 [1978]) The Shorter Science and Civilization in China: An Abridgement of Joseph Needham’s Original Text, vols. 1 & 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shankman S and Durrant SW (eds) (2002) Early China/Ancient Greece: Thinking through Comparisons (SUNY Series in Chinese Philosophy and Culture). New York: State University of New York Press.

Toulmin S (1992) Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press.

Author biography

Arun Bala is the author of The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Complementarity Beyond Physics: Neils Bohr’s Parallels (Springer, 2016). He is currently exploring how the philosophical studies of historian Joseph Needham and atomic scientist Niels Bohr can be combined to enrich our conceptions of the philosophy of science.

08_CUL911316.indd 74 13/08/2020 3:20:55 PM

Honorary Director of Editorial Board Qide Han, Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Association for Science and Technology, China

Director of Editorial Board Yanhao Xu, China Association for Science and Technology, China

Editors-in-Chief Fujun Ren, National Academy of Innovation Strategy, China Bernard Schiele, Université du Québec, Canada

Associate Editors Zhiqiang Hu, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Zhengfeng Li, Tsinghua University, China Daya Zhou, National Academy of Innovation Strategy, China

Invited Editor of Current Issue Jianjun Mei, University of Cambridge, UK

Director of Editorial Office Xuan Liu, National Academy of Innovation Strategy, China

Managing Editor Ji Zhao, National Academy of Innovation Strategy, China

Coordinating Editor Yanling Xu, National Academy of Innovation Strategy, China

Data Editor Bankole Falade, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Copy Editor James Dixon, Institute of Professional Editors, Australia

Editorial Board Members Martin W Bauer, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK John Besley, Michigan State University, USA Massimiano Bucchi, University of Trento, Italy Rui Chen, China Association for Science and Technology, China Michel Claessens, European Commission, Belgium John Durant, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA Zhe Guo, China Association for Science and Technology, China Liuxiang Hao, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Robert Iliffe, University of Oxford, UK Lui Lam, San Jose State University, USA Les Levidow, The Open University, UK Hui Luo, China Centre for International Science and Technology Exchange, China Jianjun Mei, University of Cambridge, UK Gauhar Raza, National Institute of Science Communication and Information Resources, India Shukun Tang, University of Science and Technology of China, China Hongwei Wang, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, China Xiaoming Wang, Shanghai Science and Technology Museum, China Masataka Watanabe, Tohoku University, Japan Jiangyang Yuan, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, China Li Zhang, Peking University, China Yandong Zhao, Renmin University of China, China

Journal Description Cultures of Science is a peer-reviewed international Open Access journal. The journal aims at building a community of scholars who are expecting to carry out international, inter-disciplinary and cross-cultural communication. The topics include: cultural studies, science communication, the history and philosophy of science and all intersections between culture and science. The journal values the diversity of cultures and welcomes manuscripts from around the world and especially those involving interdisciplinary topics.

Aims and Scope Cultures of Science is an international journal that provides a platform for interdisciplinary research on all aspects of the intersections between culture and science. It is published under the auspices of the China Association for Science and Technology.

It welcomes research articles, commentaries or essays, and book reviews with innovative ideas and shedding a fresh light on significant issues. Research articles report cutting-edge research developments and innovative ideas in related fields; commentaries provide sci-entific perspectives on emerging topics or social issues; book reviews evaluate and analyze the contexts, styles and merits of published works related to cultures of science.

The topics explored include but are not limited to: science communication, history of science, philosophy of science, sociology, social psychology, public science education, public understanding of science, science fiction, political science, indicators of science literacy, values and beliefs of the scientific community, comparative study of cultures of science, public attitudes towards a new scientific and technological phenomena.

Cultures of Science is published 4 times a year in March, June, September and December.

Contact Information Address: 3 Fuxing Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100038, China. Email: [email protected]

Disclaimer Any opinions and views expressed in the articles in Cultures of Science are those of the respective authors and contributors and not of Cultures of Science. Cultures of Science makes no representations or warranties whatsoever in respect of the accuracy of the material in this journal and cannot accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions that may be made. The accuracy of content should be examined independently. © National Academy of Innovation Strategy 2020 All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, transmitted or disseminated in any form or by any means, without prior written permission of the publisher.

ISSN 2096-6083CN 10-1524/G


arch 2020


arch2020

Cultures of Science


ISSN 2096-6083CN 10-1524/G


arch 2020


arch2020

Cultures of Science


Editorial

3 Note from the co-editors in chiefFujun Ren and Bernard Schiele

Introduction

4 Introduction: Needham’s intellectual heritageJianjun Mei

Articles

11 After Joseph Needham: The legacy reviewed, the agenda revised – some personal reflectionsGeoffrey Lloyd

21 My farewell to Science and Civilisation in ChinaChristopher Cullen

34 Brass tacks on iron: Ferrous metallurgy in Science and Civilisation in ChinaDonald B Wagner

43 The East Asian History of Science Library/Needham Research Institute as an intellectual hub in the late 1970s and 1980sGregory Blue

58 How can we redefine Joseph Needham’s sense of a world community for the 21st century?Vivienne Lo

62 Chinese organic materialism and modern science studies: Rethinking Joseph Needham’s legacyArun Bala

CUL_3-1_Cover.indd 1 22/07/2020 7:40:23 PM

58 how can we redefine joseph needham’s 2020 · these two special issues on joseph needham’s...

Documents