Lecture to be delivered at Southern Cross University, Lismore, NSW, Australia, 18 February 2015

Modern science in the Western and

Non-Western contexts

Rajesh KochharPresident IAU Commission 41: History of Astronomy

Hon. Prof., Panjab University, Mathematics Department, ChandigarhIndian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, Punjab

rkochhar2000@yahoo.com

Advent, development and deployment of (modern) science is a complex and multi-dimensional phenomenon. However, during the heyday of colonialism, once modern science came into a full- blown form, attempts were made to decouple it from its immediate antecedents and present it as a stand-alone, purely intellectual, exercise.Now, of course, there is a tendency the world over to attempt , in retrospect, a more even-handed treatment.

H. G. Wells declared in his 1920 Outline of History that‘It is a misfortune for science that the first Europeans to reach America were those rather incurious Spanish, without any scientific passion, thirsty for gold, and full of blind bigotry of a recent religious war’.1

Here Wells is acting more as a pamphleteer than a historian.

The Portuguese and the Spanish may have been thirsty for gold and blinded by their religious zeal, but incurious they were not.

It would be wrong to discuss Europe’s colonial expansion in terms of the Catholic and the Protestant phases because the phases were sequential and not contemporaneous. The material and the psychological foundations on which the West European phase was built were laid in the preceding Iberian phase. There is continuity in the two phases, which is most strikingly seen in natural history.

Medical botany was a necessity. Scientific botany emerged out of it. Colonialism, in course of time, would create a composite world natural history.2

In addition to natural history, the Iberian phase saw advances in the physical sciences also in response to the practical problems that the sailors faced. A swifter and lighter ship, the caravel, was introduced as early as 1441. In subsequent years, rock magnetism was discovered; valuable data on winds and currents was collected which made voyages swifter and safer; and maps and charts were drawn.3

Folklore was wrong in assuming that monsters resided beyond Cape Bojador (opposite Canary Islands). Ancient Greeks were mistaken in assuming that water would be boiling at the equator.

Oceanic voyages expanded Europe’s economy, enlarged its world view, and transformed its state of mind. Huge profits were waiting to be made if ships could sail to distant lands and return home safely. For the first time in the history, prosperity did not depend on the blessings of the God or the good will of the king, but on the initiative of the merchants and the skills of artisans and sailors.

Maritime imperatives diminished the royal and the feudal holds; enhanced the status of generators of new wealth; promoted boldness of thought and action; encouraged explorations; and weakened Biblical and classical authorities. Had Europe’s economy remained self-contained, it would probably have had no particular reason to develop modern science.

In the early days of maritime activity when scurvy and longitude took their toll, nature was viewed as an enemy to be subdued. When England’s Indian Ocean trade had barely started, and it had already been participating in the African slave trade, an English nobleman Francis Bacon (1561–1626) appeared on the scene whose long-lasting influence as a philosopher of science overshadowed the memories of his career as a disgraced politician and judge. As a prophet of science, Bacon held that nature should be made ‘to serve the business and conveniences of man’.

In 1603 he declared: ‘I am come in very truth leading to you Nature with all her children to bind her to your service and make her your slave’. 4

The imagery employed here is significant. May be, by talking of nature and her children, Bacon was trying to keep the European explorers physically away from the native women they would encounter when they ventured out. But, clearly, when Bacon mentions the enslavement of nature and of human beings in the same breadth, he is using one to justify and support the other, in the name of advancement of science.

When the English East India Company was established in 1600, the telescope had not yet been invented. It is no more than a coincidence that the invention came about in the Netherlands the same year5 (1608) the first English ship reached India. But this does bring home the important point that modern science grew hand in hand with European oceanic voyages, colonial expansion and domination over nature and fellow human beings.

Scientific developments in Europe proceeded in a number of ways. There were researches in mathematical sciences and

instrumentation to make navigation safe. This was an all-Europe exercise in which distant lands on their people played no role. In everything else distant lands had a direct or indirect hand.

Europe was nature’s step-child, with limited natural resources and restricted biodiversity. A vast latitude-driven, ecology-related knowledge resided in distant lands. Europe wished to benefit from this knowledge base, and at the same time produce in its laboratories what nature has given elsewhere.

Of immediate concern to Europe was the medical botany and natural history which required extensive field work and interaction with keepers of traditional knowledge.

The introduction of gorgeously printed cotton cloth from the East into the 17th century Europe had very profound social and technological implications. There were two independent lines of action. (i) Machines were invented to replace the Indian weaver. (ii) Details of Indian printing processes were obtained and chemicals developed to replace natural colours.

The best scientific minds of the time worked to make voyages safe overseas trade.

In 1612, Galileo suggested the use of eclipses of Jupiter’s satellites for determining longitude

1615-1616: Henry Briggs at Gresham College London introduced logarithm to base 10, and prepared mathematical tables for use on the ship.

1624: Another Gresham professor, Edmund Gunter invents Gunter scale, precursor of slide rule.

In 1656, a significant breakthrough, Huygens

invented World’s first pendulum clock In 1731, Hadley invented the precursor of sextant,

making latitude determination accurate. Finally, in 1759 there came Harrison’s final sea

chronometer, making navigation entirely scientific.

The problem of scurvy still remained.

The scientific, commercial and nationalist causes all merged. Briggs offered private tuition to prospective mariners. Such was its value that two of his pupils, otherwise rival captains, honoured their instructor by naming features after him in Hudson Bay.6 Briggs was also a member of the Virginia Company. His reputation as a mathematician and his advocacy of a northwest passage helped colonize Virginia.

Scurvy

There was far greater loss of life due to scurvy (now known to be caused by Vitamin C deficiency) than due to enemy action or even ship-wreck. In a pioneering, now-famous, clinical trial conducted in 1747 on board the HMS Salisbury, the Scottish naval surgeon Robert Lind concluded that oranges and lemons were the best cure for scurvy. Even 150 years before Lind, surgeons and captains working for the East India Company had recorded the efficacy of lemon juice against scurvy. Ever practical, the Company made a regular issue of lemon-juice to its crews long before the Navy did so’.7

Regrettably, the received medical teaching in Lind’s time preached ‘appalling nonsense’. In the academic circles, whose thinking influenced the Navy, ‘lemon-juice was regarded as much too primitive and unscientific to be considered as a medicine’.8 Sailors would die for another four decades before empirical knowledge could prevail over mis-guided theorizing indulged in by the scientific research establishment. 9 Following Lind’s precepts, two ship surgeons, Gilbert Blane ( knighted 1812), and Thomas Trotter, successfully controlled scurvy. Finally in 1795, thanks to Blane, British Navy made lime a compulsory part of diet on sea (earning the epithet limey for British sailors and the British in general). It is not that the Admiralty weighed all available evidence and reached a considered decision.

As the Surgeon Vice-Admiral Sir Sheldon Dudley wrote in 1953, Blane loved ‘the society of lords and senior officers’, and could use ‘cajolery and flattery to get his own way with the powers that be’. ‘Without Blane’s popularity with Admiral Rodney and the rulers of the King’s Navy, the country [Britain] might have had to wait even more than forty years to see Lind’s recommendations for preserving the health of seamen put into force.’10 The social rank of a person making a scientific point was as important as, if not more than, the point that was being made.

Role of distant lands I shall now briefly discuss some illustrative cases of how distant lands directly influenced science-related developments in the West. Table 2. Chronological table

1650+ Malaria/ Colonization of Africa/Panama Canal

1738 Zinc

1740+ Steel

1776 Smallpox as a weapon in America

1805 Mysore rockets and Congreve

Malaria (1650-1897)

Malaria posed a very great threat to colonial (and missionary) expansion. The first Europeans to be acquainted with the fever-controlling property of the bark of what came to be called the cinchona tree were the Jesuits who learnt about it in Peru in the 1620s or 1630s. The bark was regularly used in Jesuit colleges in Europe from c. 1650 onwards with the Pope’s approval. Such was the medicine’s association with the Jesuits that it came to be known as the Jesuits’ bark. Interestingly, Protestant nations were reluctant to adopt innovations that carried a Catholic stamp. According to legend, Oliver Cromwell (1599 –1658) preferred to die of malaria than be treated with the Popish remedy.11

On the bases of this publication and specimens provided by the author, Linnaeus described the tree in 1742, labelling the genus cinchona after the Countess of Chinchon, the wife of the Spanish Viceroy of Peru, the Countess of Chinchon. It should have been called chinchona, but the mis-spelt name has stuck. • 1820: Isolation of quinine and other alkaloids by two

Frenchmen• In 1834 a French army doctor, Francois Clement Maillot (1804-1894), deviating from the current medical

practice, cured his patients of malaria by giving them high dose of quinine. In 1881, glowing t ributes were paid to him: ‘It is thanks to Maillot that Algeria has become a French land; it is he who closed and sealed forever this tomb of Christians’.12

If Europe was to prevail on Africa, its dependence on the Andes for cinchona should cease. A multi-pronged approach was adopted to solve the problem; chemical synthesis; cultivation in Europe; and finally cultivation in the colonies.

Early attempts to synthesize quinine did not succeed, but produced an unexpected bonus. In 1856, an 18-year old chemistry student William Henry Perkin (1838-1907), while assisting his professor in the synthesizing experiment, made the private discovery of the first aniline dye, mauveine, thus laying the foundation of synthetic chemical dye industry.

Attempts to grow cinchona in Europe and Algeria failed. Finally success came in Java in 1865 when Peruvian and Bolivian barks were combined. (Some cinchona was grown in India also.)•The impetus for synthetic drug came from the Second World War. Capture of Indonesia by the Japanese disrupted the supplies of natural quinine lending urgency to the exercise of finding a substitute. Quinine was finally synthesized in 1944 (by Robert Burns Woodward (1917-1979) and William von Eggers Doering (1917-2011) at Harvard).

In the meantime, India-based British doctor, Ronald Ross discovered (in 1897) the role of mosquitoes in transmitting malaria and won the 1902 physiology Nobel Prize for his researches. As an interesting tidbit, it may be noted that the Indian volunteer who permitted Ross’s 10 mosquitoes to have a good feast on his blood was paid 1/16th of a rupee ( called anna) for every mosquito bite.

Earlier, malaria and yellow fever had prevented European soldiers from penetrating Africa. Given abundant supply of quinine, they could now colonize the industrial raw material-rich continent. Researches into malaria and its treatment constitute a major achievement of modern science. Given a choice between Europeans and malaria, they would no doubt have chosen malaria. As it turned out, they lost their independence but still kept malaria.

Panama Canal (1878-1914)

While European conquest of inner Africa was made possible by tackling the fever, the US digging of Panama Canal involved tackling the mosquitoes. The French took up the project first, in 1878 but gave it up in 1902. The US stepped in 1904 and completed the Canal in 1914. The American historian David Gaub McCullough (b. 1933) declared in 2005: ‘I think often about why the French failed at Panama and why we succeeded. One of the reasons we succeeded is that we were gifted, we were attuned to adaptation, to doing what works, whereas they were trained to do everything in a certain way. We have a gift for improvisation.’13

McCullough’s prescription is simplistic. The Panama Canal required medical skills in addition to the engineering. The Isthmus of Panama was an ideal environment for mosquitoes, and therefore control of malaria was vital for the construction of the Panama Canal. It is noteworthy that the one of the very first tasks that the Americans took up in Panama was the establishment of a sanitary department in 1904 which undertook strict measures from larvaciding to killing of adult mosquitoes to free dispensation of quinine.14 While there can be no doubt that the Panama Canal was a great technological feat, it should be kept in mind that it could not have been dug before a Ronald Ross came on the scientific scene.

Apart from pure and applied natural history, Europe had interest in learning about material culture of the Old World. For the Europeans without colonial connections, the generally well-educated missionaries based in India emerged as valuable information gatherers. A Berlin chemistry professor wrote to a Protestant missionary based in Tranquebar in South India asking about borax. The full report was published in German in 1756 and French in 1759. He would have liked to learn about two other important industrial items: zinc and saltpeter, but the informant could not help because their source was far away from South India.

Remarkably, spirit of enquiry extended to theology as well. A theology professor in Gottingen was interested in finding out if the large animal behemoth mentioned in the Old Testament could be elephant as had recently been suggested. He wanted to know about the elephant’s habitat, food and reproductive habits. He also wanted to know the maximum number of people an elephant could carry. The considered answer from India and Ceylon was 28, smaller than the figure 32 mentioned in the Bible.15

(The behemoth is now identified with hippopotamus.) The Bible so far had been treated as a revealed text. It was now being subject to scientific scrutiny. In a way this development was far more significant than scientific curiosity in Europe about the East. Moving away from Biblical authority was a slow and painful task. Thus as late 18th and early 19th century, England found it impossible to reconcile the discovery of the antiquity of Sanskrit with the Mosaic ethnology.16

Smallpox as a weapon in America (1776)

Many countries in Asia and Africa had been practising variolation, that is the deliberate inoculation of a healthy person with smallpox with a view to providing the survivors with life-long immunity. Variolation was introduced in London in 1721 from Turkey. It was enthusiastically accepted by the (European and English) royalty and aristocracy and soon became widespread.

Variolation made its appearance in North America, in Boston , in 1721 itself. But here the informant was an African slave who had been variolated back home. It was noted that the invention was made ‘not by the learned Sons of Erudition, but by a mean, coarse, rude sort of People’.17

Even the argument in favour of the slaves’ testimony used the same idiom: ‘The more plainly, brokenly, and blunderingly, and like Ideots, they tell their Story, it will be with reasonable Men, but the much more credible’.18

Sixty years previously, in England cinchona was being seen not as a cure for malaria but as a Popish remedy. Now, New England was judging immunity against smallpox not on merit but in terms of the race of the informant. One wonders where H. G. Wells would have fitted these facts in his theoretical framework of back-dated Protestant passion for science.

The American colonies remained unenthusiastic about variolation and paid a heavy price for their stance. In 1776, 10,000 American troops laid siege to Quebec City. Making use of their vulnerability to the infection, the besieged British infected civilians with smallpox and sent them among the Americans. More than half the American soldiers were killed by smallpox and the siege had to be lifted. If Canada today belongs to England and is not part of USA, it is because of the use of smallpox as weapon.19 The Americans were of course aware that the colonialists had earlier used smallpox against native Americans, but would they use it against their own people? Yes, they would. Minor considerations like racial loyalty were not going to divert England from its imperialist goals.

Zinc (1738)

Zinc metallurgy was invented in India c. 400 BCE from where it travelled to China. The technology was brought into England from India or China and patented, in 1738. More than a century previously, in 1608, Europe had refused to grant a patent on telescope to the Dutch optician, Hans Lipperhey, ‘on the ground that it is evident that several others have knowledge of the invention’. It however did not quite matter that zinc metallurgy was already known in the East. In a Euro-centric world, what was new for Europe did not exist before.

Steel (19th century)

Europe first became aware of the high quality of Indian carbon steel (retrospectively called wootz) when its Crusaders came into contact with Damascus swords made from it.2 0

Commercial production of carbon steel was begun in Sheffield (by Benjamin Huntsman) in c. 1740, based on the Indian process. Huntsman was interested in preserving his commercial secret rather than obtaining a patent.

Beginning with the closing years of the 18th century, samples of Indian steel and details of the process became available in England for scientific and industrial scrutiny.

The anglicized term wootz was introduced in a 1795 paper published in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Wootz was received with great excitement in Britain. Rather dramatically, Sir Thomas Frankland (1750-1831) sealed his letters to the Scottish metallurgist David Mushet (1772-1847) ‘with the Sanscrit characters denoting wootz, in full and prominent display’.21

James Stodart (1789-1873), maker of surgical instruments and cutler, and an FRS, carried a trade card (c. 1820) saying that he sold ‘Surgeon’s Instruments, Razors and other Cutlery made from Wootz, a steel from India, preferred by Mr Stodart to the best steel in Europe after years of comparative trial’22

Mushet obtained a steel patent in 1800 and Charles (‘India-rubber’) Mackintosh (1766-1843) in 1825. According to Josiah Marshall Heath (1791-1851), both these patents were derived from the Indian process.23 Heath himself obtained a patent ( for use of manganese) in 1839, which according to Henry Bessemer, was also derived from the Indian process.

Michael Faraday, who was commissioned by Stodart to study wootz, wrongly thought that the Indian steel derived its strength from aluminum. This was a ‘fruitful error’ (to borrow a phrase from Vilfredo Pareto) because it opened up the new field of alloy steels

Cyril Stanley Smith pointed out in 1982 that the western study of wootz throughout the 19th century ‘was central to the development of the relation between the structure, properties, and treatment of complex materials and thus is a very real part of the pre-history of modern solid state physics’. 24

Mysore rockets and Congreve (1805)

The Kingdom of Mysore made effective use of rockets in its wars against the British fought in the later decades of the 18th century. They caused temporary setback to the British expansion and permanent damage to the psyche of the future Duke of Wellington. But in the long run exposure to Mysore rocketry was beneficial for the British. After the conquest of Mysore in 1799, hundreds of these empirical iron-case rockets were sent to England for reverse engineering. The result in 1805 was the Congreve rocket. These rockets were very effective in the Napoleonic wars. They were used against the Americans also and find mention in the US National Anthem.

The rise of industrial, scientific and racially arrogant Europe

In the early decades of 19th century English cotton machinery achieved its cherished goal of making textiles equal to the best Indian weaver could provide. In the history of technology, grant of a patent constitutes a landmark; for growth of industry its expiry. Cartwright’s power-loom patent expired in 1801, opening the field of textile manufacture wide open. Britain’s industrial progress can be gauged from the figures of its consumption of cotton.

Table 3. Import of cotton into Britain25

Between 1815 and 1832, the value of Indian cotton goods exported out of India fell from £1.3 million to a mere £100,000. In the same period, the value of English cotton goods imported into India rose from a paltry £26,000 to £4,00,000. 26

Year Cotton imported into Britain/million lb

1764 3.8

1785 18

1830 265

Till now, Europe in its encounters with the East had been in a learning mode. Now began the era of cultural superiority and racial arrogance. Industrial revolution and modern science provided Europe with the physical means of subjugating and colonizing most of the world. In the case of the Old World it also gave the ideological justification for the exercise. (No such justification was needed in the case of The New World.) In 1837 a Bengal cavalry officer, Captain James Mackenzie, was asked to report on ‘the practicability and probable advantage of establishing permanent steam navigation communication between England and India’ through Egypt and Arabia.

The immediate fall out of the exercise would be the British annexation of Aden in 1839. In his report, Mackenzie declared:

‘It seems to be a law of nature that the civilized nations should conquer and possess the countries in a state of barbarianism and by such means, however unjustifiable it may appear at first, extend the blessings of knowledge, industry and commerce among people hitherto sunk in the most gloomy depths of superstitious ignorance’.27

In a significant slip, the Cambridge History of Africa28 dilutes the quote by saying ‘It seems to me’ instead of ‘It seems to be’, making the observation personal rather than universal.

The use of the phrase ‘law of nature’ in the context of human affairs is significant. It is as if the authorship of the powerful knowledge system of modern science bestowed such cultural and racial superiority on the Europeans as to give them a divine right to rule over others.

References:

1. Ford, Thayne R. ( 1998) Stranger in a Foreign Land: Jose de Acosta's Scientific Realizations in Sixteenth-Century Peru. Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 29, pp. 19-33; see p. 19.

2. Kochhar, Rajesh (2006) Early modern natural history: Contributions from the Americas and India. Journal of Biosciences, Vol. 37, pp. 937-947.

3. Goodman 1991, pp. 119-120 4. The statement occurs in Bacon’s The masculine birth of time. See

Farrington, Benjamin (1964) The Philosophy of Francis Bacon; an Essay on Its Development from 1603 to 1609 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press).

5. Van Helden, Albert (1977) The Invention of the Telescope ( Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society).

6. Markham , Clements R. (1903) Presidential address at the Commemoration of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Geographical Journal, Vol. 21 (June), pp. 589-602; see p. 599. The name of the islands does not exist anymore.

7. Naval Review, 1956, Vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 156-173; see p. 161.

References:

8. Ref. 7, p. 164.9. Glouberman, Sholom (2009) Knowledge transfer and the complex story

of scurvy. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, Vol. 15, pp. 553–557; Baron, Hugh Baron (2009) Sailors' scurvy before and after James Lind–A reassessment. Nutrition Reviews, Vol. 67, No. 6, pp. 315–332

10. Carpenter, Kenneth J. (1986) The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C ( Cambridge University Press); Bown, Stephen R. (2003) Scurvy: How a surgeon, a mariner, and a gentleman solved the greatest medical mystery of the age of sail (New York: Thomas Dunne Books)

11. Honigsbaum, Mark (2001) The Fever Trail: Malaria, the Mosquito and the Quest (London : Macmillan)

12. Headrick, Daniel R. (1981) The Tools of Empire Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century ( Oxford University Press), p 67

13. http://teacherweb.com/KS/StMarysColgan/KyleWolf/READ----Knowing-History-and-Knowing-Who-We-Are.pdf

References:

14. http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/panama_canal.html15. Jurgens, Hanco (2004) German Indology avant la letter: The

experiences of the Halle missionaries in Southern India, 1750-1810. In :Sanskrit and Orientalism (ed: Douglas T. McGetchin et al.) (Delhi: Manohar), pp. 63-64.

16. Trautman, Thomas R (1997) Aryans and British India (New Delhi: Vistaar Publications), pp. 28-61.

17. Mather 1722, p.5.18. Mather 1721, p.9.19. See Tucker, Jonathan B. (2001) Scourge: The Once and Future

Threat of Smallpox (New York: Grove Press).20. Bronson, Bennet (1986) The making and selling of wootz, a crucible

steel of India. Archaeomaterials, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 13-51.21. Mushet, David (1840) Papers on Iron and Steel ( London: John

Weale), see pp. 662-663.

References:

22. Hadfield, Robert (1933) A research on Faraday’s ‘Steel and Alloys’. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series A, Vol. 230, pp. 221-292; see p. 225.

23. Ref. 28 , p. 671.24. Science, 1982, Vol. 216, No. 4543, pp. 242-243.25. Ashworth 1858, p. 256. 26. Dutt 1949, Vol. 2, p. 101.27. Mackenzie, James (1837) Egypt and Arabia. The Literary Gazette;

and Journal of Belle Lettre, Arts, Sciences & co., No. 1072, 5 Aug., pp. 489-492; see p. 490.

28. Flint, John E. (1977) The Cambridge History of Africa, Vol. 5: From c. 1790 to c. 1870 ( Cambridge University Press), p. 495

Thank you