Knowledge and Power shows how science has developed in different historical settings by focusing on four episodes in the history of world science from the Middle Ages to the mid-twentieth century. The title of this book comes from a famous saying by the English Renaissance philosopher Francis Bacon: "Knowledge is Power." Through a combination of narrative and primary sources, author William Burns explores the following topics in order to provide students with an understanding of how different cultures throughout time and across the globe approached science: Science in the Medieval Mediterranean, The Jesuits and World Science ca. 1540-1773, Science in Russia and Japan ca. 1684-1860s, and Africa in the Age of Imperialism and Nationalism ca. 1860-1960.
Author(s): William E. Burns
Series: Connections: Key Themes In World History
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge | Taylor & Francis Group
Year: 2016
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 193
Tags: Science: History
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Table of Contents
Foreword
Series Editor's Preface
About the Author
Acknowledgments
Introduction
What Is Science?
Science and the Sciences
Why Do Science? Who Does Science?
Is Science Western?
How Do Scientific Ideas Move from Culture to Culture?
World Science and the Sciences of the World
Scientific Institutions
What Is the History of Science?
Why the Medieval Mediterranean?
Why the Jesuits?
Why Tokugawa Japan and Romanov Russia?
Why Africa in the Age of Imperialism and Nationalism?
1 Science in the Medieval Mediterranean
Classical Science in the Islamic World
The Translators
From Greek to Islamic Science
Greek and Arab Medicine
Greco-Arab Science in the Medieval Latin West
New Knowledge, New Institutions-The Rise of the University
Medicine in the Medieval University
Alchemy and Other "Disreputable" Sciences-Outside the University
The Missing Piece-Was There a Byzantine Science?
The Decline of Arab Science in Early Modern Europe
Why Did Scientific Leadership Move to Latin Christendom?
Medieval Latin Science and the Scientific Revolution
Sources
Arab Science Enters the Latin West: Adelard of Bath
Ibn Rushd on Islam and Philosophy
Roger Bacon on Experiment
A Jewish Physician and Christian Medicine: Prologue to Leon Joseph of Carcassonne's Hebrew Translation of Gerard de Solo's Practica super nono Almansoris
2 The Jesuits and World Science, 1540-1773
Jesuit Science and Religion
The Jesuits as Scientific Missionaries in China
The Jesuits as Imperial Astronomers and Cartographers
The Chinese and Jesuit Science
The Decline of Jesuit Science in China
Jesuit Science in Spanish America
Natural History and Materia Medica
"Creole" Jesuits and the Debate over the New World
Rome: Center of the Jesuit Scientific World
Athanasius Kircher and Global Science
The Decline of Jesuit Science
Sources
João Rodrigues on East Asian Cosmology and Physics
José de Acosta, of the Naturall and Moral History of the Indies
Matteo Ricci on Using Science in China
Athanasius Kircher on Earthquakes
3 Westernization, “Modernization,” and Science in Russia and Japan, 1684-1860s
Science and State-Driven Westernization in Russia
Science in Russia before Peter the Great
Science and Westernization in the Reign of Peter the Great
The Transformation of the Russian Language
The Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg
The French Revolution and Russian Science
Autocracy and Russian Science under Nicolas I
The Disciplinary Societies
Science and Russian Liberalism: Alexander Herzen
Western Learning in Japan
Chinese Science in Japan
The Early History of Western Science in Japan
The Dutch in Tokugawa Japan
Rangaku
Western Science, Chinese Learning, and Japanese Nativism
The Turn against Western Science
Siebold and the Crackdown on Independent Rangaku Scholars
The Japanese Crisis of the Mid-Nineteenth Century and Western Learning
Sources
Jakob Staehlin von Storcksberg, Founding the Imperial Academy of Sciences of St. Petersburg
Ekaterina Dashkova on the Reform of the Russian Academy
Honda Toshiaki on Western Science and Political Reform
Late Tokugawa Science in Western Eyes
4 Africa in the Age of Imperialism and Nationalism, 1860-1960
Exploration
Conquest
Exploitation
Western and African Knowledge in the Formation of African Natural History
Science and Imperial Ideology
"Racial Science" in Colonial Africa
Scientific Racism and Eugenics in Colonial South Africa
The Decline of Scientific Racism
"Ethnopsychiatry"
Teaching Science in Colonial Education Systems
Late Colonial Africa and "Experimental Developmentalism"
Science and African Nationalism in Early Postcolonial Africa
Sources
Sir Richard Burton, First Footsteps in East Africa, or a Journey to Harar (1856)
Karl Peters, The Eldorado of the Ancients (1902)
E. B. Worthington, Science in Africa: A Review of Scientific Research Relating to Tropical and Southern Africa (1938)
Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1961)
Epilogue: Making Connections: How Much Have Things Changed?
Science and the World's Future
Bibliography
Index
