What are the most productive ways to study science, society, and history in non-Western societies? Whether in casual conversation or in university seminars, as Yung Sik Kim remarks, historians of East Asia must routinely parry the “Needham Question”: “Why was there no Scientific and/or Industrial Revolution in China?” Those working in the domain of political economy or global history clearly enjoy confronting the question, whether it be to identify negative factors responsible for what they see as imperial China's failure to progress, or to argue positively for China as a key contributor to the emergence of the modern world. Intellectual historians typically prefer to brush the Needham Question aside: serious historians, they hold, should not ask why things did not happen, but inquire into what did. Asking why China did not invent modern science is thus a false question that forces both the East Asian and the Western past into a distorting straightjacket of teleologies, alien conceptions, and misleading comparisons that obscure more than they reveal.
In this learned and provocative collection of essays and case studies, Kim argues persuasively for taking the Needham Question seriously. Needham himself held that neo-Confucian orthodoxy, which he saw as obsessed with metaphysics at the expense of natural philosophy, and an elaborate state bureaucracy combined to stifle scientific curiosity and technical creativity in China after the Song dynasty. Starting with his earlier monograph on the natural philosophy of Zhu Xi, Kim helped lay the groundwork for an effective challenge to this interpretation of East Asian institutions as inherently anti-scientific. Yet he notes that while Needham may have overplayed the negative impact of bureaucracy in East Asian societies, he was correct in emphasizing its significance: however unorthodox an East Asian intellectual might have been, his very contestation of orthodoxy was inevitably shaped by the centrality of the state and its bureaucratic governance.
There is now a substantial body of scholarship exploring neo-Confucian forms of natural philosophy, and the range of what we today would recognize as scientific and technical expertise that East Asian bureaucrats needed to master as part of their qualifications to govern. Yet despite our best intentions, we still tend to take the European experience as normal, focusing on activities that resemble Western sciences, or looking for signs of historical “progress” or “failure.” Rather than simply dismissing Western categories or norms as irrelevant, Kim proposes that we confront such deep-rooted assumptions by contriving more rigorous comparative frameworks to analyze what science was, how it was done, and where it can be found in specific social, historical, and political contexts.
Kim invites us here to ponder the implications of a cross-cutting set of decenterings. Each depends upon Kim's fine-grained knowledge of the biographies, thoughts, fields of action, resources, and legacies of an extraordinary range of prominent or maverick Confucian intellectuals in China and Korea, ranging from the twelfth-century founding father Zhu Xi to the nineteenth-century Korean polymath Chŏng Yak-yong. Kim's first and least surprising project is to broaden and specify how we might usefully identify science in East Asian contexts, in the process further revising modernist suppositions about the legitimate objects, boundaries, methods, and applications of “proper” science.
Kim's second decentering tactic challenges assumptions of societal and chronological unity, and of linearity. The nineteenth-century Korean scholar Chŏng Yak-yong is usually celebrated for his positive interest in European instruments and sciences, but this, Kim reminds us, neglects his equal interest in theories just then coming into Korea from China, ideas that appeared equally novel and stimulating in Korea after a period of relative isolation from China. Kim shows how uneven the topography and chronology of a scientific landscape could be, highlighting differences not only between schools but between knowledge and concerns in the courts at Beijing and in Seoul, between capitals and provinces, or between the same individual in and out of office.
This leads Kim to a third decentering, a further deconstruction of the East Asia–West dichotomy. In a section entitled “Comparative Problems in the History of Science,” Kim invites us to ponder how different the history of science in East Asia looks, and how the big questions change, depending upon whether China, Korea, or Japan is taken as the representative East Asia case.
Kim can be said to follow the mainstream in focusing primarily on astronomy and calendrical science as his principle cases of East Asian science in context. They undoubtedly loomed large for Confucian intellectuals, not least because the Jesuits confronted them with alternative versions of the same sciences. Perhaps a further decentering is called for, highlighting different yet equally characteristic and significant East Asian fields of action or sciences of government: agriculture, hydraulics, and sometimes (but not always) medicine. But for now let us savor and test Kim's provocative ideas, and the rich new opportunities they suggest for comparative history.
