Journal of World History

Finlay, Robert, 1940-
China, the West, and World History in Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China
Journal of World History - Volume 11, Number 2, Fall 2000, pp. 265-303

University of Hawai'i Press

Robert Finlay - China, the West, and World History in Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China - Journal of World History 11:2 Journal of World History 11.2 (2000) 265-303 China, the West, and World History in Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China * Robert Finlay The University of Arkansas [Erratum] Long before the death of Joseph Needham in 1995 at the age of ninety-four, his Science and Civilisation in China was acclaimed as one of the monumental achievements of twentieth-century scholarship. One reviewer greeted the first volume in 1954 by declaring that Needham's project represents "perhaps the greatest single act of historical synthesis and intercultural communication ever attempted by one man." When the twenty-eighth and last text in the series comes out sometime in the next ten years, the volumes will provide an encyclopedic survey of Chinese achievements in almost all areas of science and technology -- physics, astronomy, metallurgy, chemistry, botany, agriculture, biology, language, geology, ceramics, and sericulture. Nothing like it exists for the history of Europe, and, given the special conditions that produced Needham's masterwork, it is unlikely that there ever will be. One of the greatest scholars in the comparative study of civilizations, Needham discovered an entire realm of knowledge--"a veritable gold mine, a cornucopia"--and made it available to the world. He possessed intellectual energy, passionate...