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Journal of World History 9.2 (1998) 288-290



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Scientific Aspects of European Expansion.Edited by William K. Storey. An Expanding World 6. Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum, 1996. Pp. xxi + 368. $109.95 (cloth).

Scientific Aspects of European Expansion is the sixth in a series treating European interactions overseas from 1450 to about 1800 from a variety of perspectives. If rightly executed, the series could provide useful teaching aids to historians working on imperial and global themes. Editor William K. Storey introduces the volume as "an effort to encourage further study of scientific interaction across cultures by presenting the most significant interpretive problems in this field" (p. xiv). The sixteen essays reprinted in this volume, one of which is in Spanish, were originally published between 1958 and 1992. They provide a selective but solid appreciation of very diverse aspects of European expansion as regards science and technology.

The goals of this work and series are laudable, but I wish those who produced the present volume had been more careful. It is hard to require students or even libraries to purchase a book that costs $110. It is harder still to find virtue in a volume consisting of reprints that [End Page 288] contains prominent errors and fails to provide significant advantages over a photocopied reader. The volume opens with a reprint of George Basalla's seminal article of 1967 on the diffusion of Western science. Unfortunately, carelessness has provided Basalla's article with both an incorrect date of publication and an incorrect title (the correct citation is "The Spread of Western Science," Science156 [1967]: 611-12). Basalla's piece remains important for its proposal of an easily grasped model that describes the diffusion of Western science beyond Europe. He saw the transfer of science to the colonial periphery as evolv-ingthrough three phases that culminate in the creation of an independent scientific tradition or culture. Basalla's article has since become the analytical baseline for all who ruminate on the role of science, technology, and medicine in matters colonial and imperial. Following Basalla's article is Roy MacLeod's 1982 (reprinted 1987) essay "On Visiting the 'Moving Metropolis.'" MacLeod revisited Basalla's ideas but proposed a more nuanced and dynamic alternative to describe core-periphery scientific relations. He argued that the needs and economics of empire and the forms of colonial governance changed substantially over time, and that scientific relations and the construction of imperial science were fundamentally mapped upon the politics of empire.

Several chapters focus on the Pacific region. For example, Alan Frost examines the Pacific explorations of Cook, Flanders, and others. Like MacLeod, he finds that imperial interests, particularly rivalry between France and England, took precedence over the scientific value of such ventures. Similar arguments run through Daniel A. Baugh's able and broad survey of European seapower and science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Baugh holds that by the 1760s a kind of defensive or protective maritime imperialism, rather than an unbridled lust to expand sovereignty, motivated British explorations in the Pacific.

Cartographic activities figure prominently in five chapters. The geographic coverage is extensive; the arenas visited include Europe, North America, Latin America, and the Far East. Two contributions on maps provide the basis for cultural readings of cartographic science. G. Malcolm Lewis takes as a case study a map produced in the early eighteenth century by the French Canadian Pierre Gaultier de Varennes et de la VĂ©rendrye. Examining in detail information collected from Amerindians by La VĂ©rendrye for his composite map of 1728-29, Lewis finds much winnowing of information and many unacknowledged assimilations. Reaching further in terms of theory and interpretation [End Page 289] is J. B. Harley's piece on the hidden agenda of cartography in early modern Europe. Playing with Foucauldian ideas of "silence" and of what was not spoken, or in this case not inscribed, Harley calls on readers to examine maps as a literary scholar examines a text. The map, he argues, ought to be considered as a rhetoric of action. Mapmakers had good strategic and commercial reasons...

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