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  • Science and Civilisation in China. Volume 7, The Social Background. Part 2, General Conclusions and Reflections
  • Nathan Sivin (bio)
Joseph Needham . Science and Civilisation in China. Volume 7, The Social Background. Part 2, General Conclusions and Reflections. Edited by Kenneth Girdwood Robinson, with contributions by Ray Huang. Introduction by Mark Elvin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. li, 283 pp. Hardcover $100.00, ISBN 0-521-08732-5.

One memorable summer evening in 1981, while fending off gypsy violinists at a very grand restaurant in Bucharest, Lu Gweidjen, Nakayama Shigeru, and I were nagging Joseph Needham to begin writing the final volume of Science and Civilisation in China.

Since the first volume of Needham's enormous reconnaissance of Chinese science appeared in 1954, he had promised to explain in detail why, despite the early preeminence of science and technology in China, a scientific revolution like the one that swept seventeenth-century Europe did not take place in China first. Readers were eager to find out what decades of research had taught him about the reasons—or the question.

But, as he turned eighty, Needham was devoting most of his time to coordinating and editing the contributions of others to the series, and to transforming his working library into an international research institute with state-of-the-art facilities. We were all aware that the volume on non-Western chemical knowledge in J. R. Partington's magisterial History of Chemistry, a tome that would have furthered Needham's educational aims, was far from finished when Partington died in 1965.1

Needham agreed that evening to set aside time for the grand synthesis. But when he died in 1995 at the age of 94, it was still unwritten.

This volume results from the assiduous effort of Kenneth Girdwood Robinson (himself eighty-seven in the year of publication) to approximate what Needham's last word might have been. Robinson is a self-effacing man possessed of exceptional intellect, a disinclination to think in clichés, and a quietly poetic attitude toward writing and life. In 1949, Joseph Needham encouraged him to take himself seriously as a researcher. In those days few scholars anywhere, even those with doctorates, wanted to or got an opportunity to become academics. Robinson pursued a varied career as a civil servant. He wrote a remarkable study of the invention of equal temperament in sixteenth-century Chinese music that, in 1962, became the first substantial contribution to Science and Civilisation in China written [End Page 297] by anyone other than Needham. After retirement, Robinson returned to Cambridge in 1980, helping in a great many unobtrusive ways to keep the Science and Civilisation in China project going.

Volume 7, part 2 reprints four pertinent articles from the 1960s and 1970s (one mainly by the economic historian Ray Huang). It adds a substantial new essay by Robinson and a brief new concluding section. Let me give a general idea of what the book has to say, and assess its success.

I need not make a case for the value of the project as a whole. Its twenty-three volumes (so far) have made Europeans and Americans aware of traditions comparable in every respect to those elsewhere before the Scientific Revolution—sometimes more sophisticated, sometimes less so, sometimes utterly different, always worth knowing about. Needham's survey of the primary sources and scholarship from China and elsewhere has inspired the growth of what is now a large and flourishing field. The constant use of comparison in the series and its argument that intelligence and technical talent are equally distributed throughout Homo sapiens have encouraged scholars to unify the histories of civilizations rather to treat them as quasi-sealed compartments.2 Mark Elvin, in his cordial introduction to this volume, adds that "the capacity to translate ourselves at will to a different conceptual perspective on our own local history by means of an imaginative absorption into that of China is one of Needham's most fruitful, and underappreciated, gifts to the field" (p. xxix).

As Robinson points out in the preface to volume 7, part 2, Needham made it clear that Science and Civilisation in China is a preliminary exploration of very elaborate...

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