On Their Own Terms: Science in China

Benjamin Elman has been one of the most prolific and expansive historians of late imperial/early modern China. His early works on intellectual culture in the late Ming and early Qing, From Philosophy to Philology (Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard, 1984) and Classicism, Politics, and Kinship (University of California Press, 1990) were geographically focused on the Jiangnan region, and engaged deeply with the kaozheng evidential scholarship movement and with local scholarly traditions as vehicles for literati/gentry self-assertion. He followed these monographic productions with, the conceptually ambitious and chronologically sweeping A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (University of California Press, 2000), in which he presented a magisterial overview of the imperial examination system throughout the Ming and Qing periods. Elman's latest book is perhaps even more ambitious, in that he sets out to recast one of the most persistent Western perceptions of Chinese culture, the lack of a scientific revolution, or indeed of much of what is thought of as "science" in the West. The problematic of the history of science in China has not been widely addressed in Western scholarship. There is, of course, Joseph Needham's encyclopaedic Science and Civilisation in China, which has brought a vast wealth of facts about Chinese science and technology to the libraries of Western academic institutions. Needham's magnum opus, however, generally does not bring the story beyond the sixteenth century, and largely accepts a view of the Chinese intellectual world as one which stagnated and declined after the glorious era of the Song. Where later scientific developments took place in China they have been seen as largely a response to the ar-