Benjamin Elman is like an 18th century Chinese encyclopedist: he has collected together a summary of almost everything that is known about the history of Chinese science since the arrival of the Jesuits in the late 15th century, organized it chronologically and thematically, and added judicious commentary. The result is a synthesis of western, Chinese, and Japanese scholarship that is truly impressive. For any student embarking on research in this field, Elman's publications are essential reading.
This book, aimed at the college textbook market, covers much of the same ground as his previous monograph On Their Own Terms, Science in China 1500–1900 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). Elman describes the state of Chinese knowledge about the natural world on the eve of interaction with western science, and documents the whole range of scientific interactions and accommodations undertaken by Chinese literati up until the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911—with one exception: Elman expressly excludes the ways in which scholars of the Chinese classic of the Changes (Yijing) used its patterns and calculations to help them understand the natural world (preface, xii). Why would he do that?
Yijing analysis does not map easily onto either science or the “natural knowledge” that is Elman's stated subject matter. And this is precisely the problem with the category of Chinese science. As Joseph Needham's collaborator Ho Peng-Yoke explained many years ago (Li, Qi and Shu: An Introduction to Science and Civilization in China, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1985), understanding the numbers of the cosmos and the natural world is vital to understanding the Chinese world-view, even when it resembles astrology, numerology, or fortune-telling. The science of numbers in China was a much broader field than mathematics, and included the Changes. Right at the beginning, then, there is a potential contradiction between the book's aim of “Placing the field of natural studies in China within its own internal and external contexts” (p. 14) and a methodology based largely on studying the interactions between westerners and their Chinese interlocutors. Luckily, Elman does not aim to defend a clearly demarcated scientific realm: on the contrary, he is arguing that Chinese culture and knowledge of the natural world are constitutive of each other.
Structurally, this book begins with the intellectual landscape of the late Ming court, and the mathematics, astronomy, and cartography brought by the Jesuits. The second chapter, “recovering the Chinese classics,” summarizes Elman's earlier work on the evidential research movement of the 18th century. In this, he emphasizes that Chinese interest in such western scientific skills as calendrical astronomy, surveying, and cartography was in response to existing problems to which Jesuit-brokered knowledge offered new solutions. In medicine and mathematics, Chinese scholars attempted to reconstitute lost classics while also consolidating new approaches.
Elman's chapter on manufacturing is a welcome excursion into fields usually treated as the history of technology rather than science, an arbitrary division that has contributed to the impression that China was scientifically backward at the same time that it was producing vast quantities of sophisticated printed books, paper, porcelain, and silk and cotton textiles. This chapter also includes interesting discussions of Qing emperors' employment of Jesuit missionaries to run glassmaking and clock making workshops, and the politics of technology transfer that led Lord Macartney to withhold gifts of a chronometer for longitude calculation, an air pump, and model steam engine after discovering the Qianlong emperor's keen interest in military technology.
The second half of the book concentrates on the interactions between nineteenth-century Protestant missionary-scientists and their Chinese interlocutors. British Protestants led the way in an effort to use science and religion to open China to free trade, yet Elman argues that the initiative was increasingly ceded to the Qing government which availed itself of science and technology in the service of Chinese national sovereignty in the decades after the Taiping Rebellion. This effort took place in the dozens of new government arsenals and associated mines, ironworks, and machine shops, which also produced scientific translations. In assessing the Chinese loss in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–5), Elman argues that China's loss was not a result of scientific backwardness but rather a function of administrative failures, and that Japanese borrowed extensively from Chinese scientific translations before the Sino-Japanese War. Thereafter, however, the flow of information came via Japan to China rather than directly from Europeans. Once the imperial civil service examination system was abolished in 1905, the classical curriculum which had done so much to frame Chinese understanding of the sciences gradually faded.
By moving beyond the narrow categories of individual sciences like mathematics or medicine and writing a much broader “cultural history” of science, Elman has demonstrated the arbitrary nature of boundaries between science and other forms of knowledge. This book successfully makes the argument that science and technology are essential constituents of Chinese culture.
