Advent, growth and deployment of (modern) science make a complex and multi-dimensional story. However, during the ‘golden age of colonialism’, once modern science came into a full- blown form, attempts were made to decouple it from its immediate antecedents and present it as a stand-alone, purely intellectual, exercise.

1. Lecture to be delivered at Southern Cross University, Lismore, NSW,
Australia, February 2015
Modern science in the Western
and
Non-Western contexts
Rajesh Kochhar
President IAU Commission 41: History of Astronomy
Hon. Prof., Panjab University, Mathematics Department, Chandigarh
Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali, Punjab
rkochhar2000@yahoo.com

2. Advent, development and deployment of (modern)
science is a complex and multi-dimensional
phenomenon. However, during the heyday of
colonialism, once modern science came into a full-
blown form, attempts were made to decouple it
from its immediate antecedents and present it as a
stand-alone, purely intellectual, exercise.
Now, of course, there is a tendency the world over
to attempt , in retrospect, a more even-handed
treatment.

3. H. G. Wells declared in his 1920 Outline of
History that
‘It is a misfortune for science that
the first Europeans to reach America
were those rather incurious Spanish,
without any scientific passion,
thirsty for gold, and full of blind
bigotry of a recent religious war’.1

4. Here Wells is acting more as a
pamphleteer than a historian.
The Portuguese and the Spanish may
have been thirsty for gold and blinded by
their religious zeal, but incurious they
were not.

5. It would be wrong to discuss Europe’s colonial
expansion in terms of the Catholic and the
Protestant phases because the phases were
sequential and not contemporaneous. The
material and the psychological foundations on
which the West European phase was built were
laid in the preceding Iberian phase. There is
continuity in the two phases, which is most
strikingly seen in natural history.

6. Medical botany was a necessity. Scientific
botany emerged out of it. Colonialism, in
course of time, would create a composite
world natural history.2

7. In addition to natural history, the Iberian
phase saw advances in the physical
sciences also in response to the practical
problems that the sailors faced. A swifter
and lighter ship, the caravel, was
introduced as early as 1441. In subsequent
years, rock magnetism was discovered;
valuable data on winds and currents was
collected which made voyages swifter and
safer; and maps and charts were drawn.3

8. Folklore was wrong in assuming that
monsters resided beyond Cape Bojador
(opposite Canary Islands). Ancient Greeks
were mistaken in assuming that water
would be boiling at the equator.

9. Oceanic voyages expanded Europe’s
economy, enlarged its world view, and
transformed its state of mind. Huge
profits were waiting to be made if ships
could sail to distant lands and return
home safely. For the first time in the
history, prosperity did not depend on the
blessings of the God or the good will of
the king, but on the initiative of the
merchants and the skills of artisans and
sailors.

10. Maritime imperatives diminished the
royal and the feudal holds; enhanced the
status of generators of new wealth;
promoted boldness of thought and action;
encouraged explorations; and weakened
Biblical and classical authorities. Had
Europe’s economy remained self-
contained, it would probably have
had no particular reason to
develop modern science.

11. In the early days of maritime activity when
scurvy and longitude took their toll, nature was
viewed as an enemy to be subdued. When
England’s Indian Ocean trade had barely started,
and it had already been participating in the
African slave trade, an English nobleman
Francis Bacon (1561–1626) appeared on the
scene whose long-lasting influence as a
philosopher of science overshadowed the
memories of his career as a disgraced politician
and judge. As a prophet of science, Bacon held
that nature should be made ‘to serve the
business and conveniences of man’.

12. In 1603 he declared: ‘I am come in very
truth leading to you Nature with all
her children to bind her to your
service and make her your slave’. 4
The imagery employed here is significant. May be,
by talking of nature and her children, Bacon was
trying to keep the European explorers
physically away from the native women they
would encounter when they ventured out. But,
clearly, when Bacon mentions the enslavement of
nature and of human beings in the same breadth, he
is using one to justify and support the other, in the
name of advancement of science.

13. When the English East India Company was
established in 1600, the telescope had not yet
been invented. It is no more than a
coincidence that the invention came about in
the Netherlands the same year5
(1608) the first
English ship reached India. But this does
bring home the important point that modern
science grew hand in hand with European
oceanic voyages, colonial expansion and
domination over nature and fellow human
beings.

14. Scientific developments in Europe proceeded in a
number of ways.
There were researches in mathematical sciences and
instrumentation to make navigation safe. This was
an all-Europe exercise in which distant lands on
their people played no role. In everything else
distant lands had a direct or indirect hand.
Europe was nature’s step-child, with limited natural
resources and restricted biodiversity. A vast latitude-
driven, ecology-related knowledge resided in distant
lands. Europe wished to benefit from this knowledge
base, and at the same time produce in its
laboratories what nature has given elsewhere.

15.  Of immediate concern to Europe was the medical
botany and natural history which required
extensive field work and interaction with keepers
of traditional knowledge.
 The introduction of gorgeously printed cotton
cloth from the East into the 17th century Europe
had very profound social and technological
implications. There were two independent lines of
action. (i) Machines were invented to replace the
Indian weaver. (ii) Details of Indian printing
processes were obtained and chemicals developed
to replace natural colours.

16. The best scientific minds of the time worked to
make voyages safe overseas trade.
 In 1612, Galileo suggested the use of eclipses of
Jupiter’s satellites for determining longitude
 1615-1616: Henry Briggs at Gresham College
London introduced logarithm to base 10, and
prepared mathematical tables for use on the ship.
 1624: Another Gresham professor, Edmund
Gunter invents Gunter scale, precursor of slide
rule.


17.  In 1656, a significant breakthrough, Huygens
invented World’s first pendulum clock
 In 1731, Hadley invented the precursor of sextant,
making latitude determination accurate.
 Finally, in 1759 there came Harrison’s final sea
chronometer, making navigation entirely
scientific.
 The problem of scurvy still remained.

18. The scientific, commercial and nationalist causes
all merged. Briggs offered private tuition to
prospective mariners. Such was its value that two
of his pupils, otherwise rival captains, honoured
their instructor by naming features after him in
Hudson Bay.6
Briggs was also a member of the
Virginia Company. His reputation as a
mathematician and his advocacy of a northwest
passage helped colonize Virginia.

20. Scurvy
There was far greater loss of life due to scurvy (now
known to be caused by Vitamin C deficiency) than
due to enemy action or even ship-wreck. In a
pioneering, now-famous, clinical trial conducted in
1747 on board the HMS Salisbury, the Scottish naval
surgeon Robert Lind concluded that oranges and
lemons were the best cure for scurvy. Even 150 years
before Lind, surgeons and captains working for the
East India Company had recorded the efficacy of
lemon juice against scurvy. Ever practical, the
Company made a regular issue of lemon-juice to its
crews long before the Navy did so’.7

21. Regrettably, the received medical teaching in Lind’s time
preached ‘appalling nonsense’. In the academic circles,
whose thinking influenced the Navy, ‘lemon-juice was
regarded as much too primitive and unscientific
to be considered as a medicine’.8
Sailors would die for
another four decades before empirical knowledge could
prevail over mis-guided theorizing indulged in by the
scientific research establishment. 9
Following Lind’s
precepts, two ship surgeons, Gilbert Blane ( knighted
1812), and Thomas Trotter, successfully controlled
scurvy. Finally in 1795, thanks to Blane, British Navy
made lime a compulsory part of diet on sea (earning the
epithet limey for British sailors and the British in
general). It is not that the Admiralty weighed all available
evidence and reached a considered decision.

22. As the Surgeon Vice-Admiral Sir Sheldon Dudley
wrote in 1953, Blane loved ‘the society of lords
and senior officers’, and could use ‘cajolery and
flattery to get his own way with the powers that
be’. ‘Without Blane’s popularity with Admiral
Rodney and the rulers of the King’s Navy, the
country [Britain] might have had to wait even
more than forty years to see Lind’s
recommendations for preserving the health of
seamen put into force.’10
The social rank of a
person making a scientific point was as important
as, if not more than, the point that was being
made.

23. Role of distant lands
I shall now briefly discuss some illustrative cases of how distant
lands directly influenced science-related developments in the
West.
Table 2. Chronological table
1650+ Malaria/ Colonization of Africa/Panama Canal
1738 Zinc
1740+ Steel
1776 Smallpox as a weapon in America
1805 Mysore rockets and Congreve

24. Malaria (1650-1897)
Malaria posed a very great threat to colonial (and
missionary) expansion. The first Europeans to be
acquainted with the fever-controlling property of the
bark of what came to be called the cinchona tree were
the Jesuits who learnt about it in Peru in the 1620s or
1630s. The bark was regularly used in Jesuit colleges in
Europe from c. 1650 onwards with the Pope’s approval.
Such was the medicine’s association with the Jesuits
that it came to be known as the Jesuits’ bark.
Interestingly, Protestant nations were reluctant to adopt
innovations that carried a Catholic stamp. According to
legend, Oliver Cromwell (1599 –1658) preferred to die
of malaria than be treated with the Popish remedy.11

26. On the bases of this publication and specimens provided by
the author, Linnaeus described the tree in 1742, labelling
the genus cinchona after the Countess of Chinchon, the
wife of the Spanish Viceroy of Peru, the Countess of
Chinchon. It should have been called chinchona, but the
mis-spelt name has stuck.
• 1820: Isolation of quinine and other alkaloids by two
Frenchmen
• In 1834 a French army doctor, Francois Clement
Maillot (1804-1894), deviating from the current medical
practice, cured his patients of malaria by giving them
high dose of quinine. In 1881, glowing t ributes were
paid to him: ‘It is thanks to Maillot that Algeria has
become a French land; it is he who closed and sealed
forever this tomb of Christians’.12

27. If Europe was to prevail on Africa, its dependence
on the Andes for cinchona should cease. A multi-
pronged approach was adopted to solve the
problem; chemical synthesis; cultivation in Europe;
and finally cultivation in the colonies.
Early attempts to synthesize quinine did not
succeed, but produced an unexpected bonus. In
1856, an 18-year old chemistry student William
Henry Perkin (1838-1907), while assisting his
professor in the synthesizing experiment, made
the private discovery of the first aniline dye,
mauveine, thus laying the foundation of synthetic
chemical dye industry.

28. Attempts to grow cinchona in Europe and
Algeria failed. Finally success came in Java in
1865 when Peruvian and Bolivian barks were
combined. (Some cinchona was grown in India
also.)
•The impetus for synthetic drug came from the
Second World War. Capture of Indonesia by the
Japanese disrupted the supplies of natural
quinine lending urgency to the exercise of
finding a substitute. Quinine was finally
synthesized in 1944 (by Robert Burns Woodward
(1917-1979) and William von Eggers Doering
(1917-2011) at Harvard).

29. In the meantime, India-based British doctor,
Ronald Ross discovered (in 1897) the role of
mosquitoes in transmitting malaria and won
the 1902 physiology Nobel Prize for his
researches. As an interesting tidbit, it may
be noted that the Indian volunteer who
permitted Ross’s 10 mosquitoes to have
a good feast on his blood was paid
1/16th of a rupee ( called anna) for
every mosquito bite.

30. Earlier, malaria and yellow fever had
prevented European soldiers from
penetrating Africa. Given abundant supply of
quinine, they could now colonize the
industrial raw material-rich continent.
Researches into malaria and its treatment
constitute a major achievement of modern
science. Given a choice between Europeans
and malaria, they would no doubt have
chosen malaria. As it turned out, they lost
their independence but still kept malaria.

31. Panama Canal (1878-1914)
While European conquest of inner Africa was made
possible by tackling the fever, the US digging of
Panama Canal involved tackling the mosquitoes. The
French took up the project first, in 1878 but gave it up
in 1902. The US stepped in 1904 and completed the
Canal in 1914. The American historian David Gaub
McCullough (b. 1933) declared in 2005: ‘I think often
about why the French failed at Panama and why we
succeeded. One of the reasons we succeeded is that we
were gifted, we were attuned to adaptation, to doing
what works, whereas they were trained to do
everything in a certain way. We have a gift for
improvisation.’13

32. McCullough’s prescription is simplistic. The Panama
Canal required medical skills in addition to the
engineering. The Isthmus of Panama was an ideal
environment for mosquitoes, and therefore control of
malaria was vital for the construction of the Panama
Canal. It is noteworthy that the one of the very first
tasks that the Americans took up in Panama was the
establishment of a sanitary department in 1904 which
undertook strict measures from larvaciding to killing
of adult mosquitoes to free dispensation of quinine.14
While there can be no doubt that the Panama Canal
was a great technological feat, it should be kept in
mind that it could not have been dug before a Ronald
Ross came on the scientific scene.

33. Apart from pure and applied natural history, Europe
had interest in learning about material culture of the
Old World. For the Europeans without colonial
connections, the generally well-educated missionaries
based in India emerged as valuable information
gatherers. A Berlin chemistry professor wrote to a
Protestant missionary based in Tranquebar in South
India asking about borax. The full report was
published in German in 1756 and French in 1759. He
would have liked to learn about two other important
industrial items: zinc and saltpeter, but the informant
could not help because their source was far away
from South India.

34. Remarkably, spirit of enquiry extended to theology
as well.
A theology professor in Gottingen was interested in
finding out if the large animal behemoth mentioned
in the Old Testament could be elephant as had
recently been suggested. He wanted to know about
the elephant’s habitat, food and reproductive habits.
He also wanted to know the maximum number of
people an elephant could carry. The considered
answer from India and Ceylon was 28, smaller
than the figure 32 mentioned in the Bible.15

35. (The behemoth is now identified with hippopotamus.)
The Bible so far had been treated as a revealed text. It
was now being subject to scientific scrutiny. In a way
this development was far more significant than
scientific curiosity in Europe about the East. Moving
away from Biblical authority was a slow and painful
task. Thus as late 18th and early 19th century, England
found it impossible to reconcile the discovery of the
antiquity of Sanskrit with the Mosaic ethnology.16

36. Smallpox as a weapon in America (1776)
Many countries in Asia and Africa had been practising
variolation, that is the deliberate inoculation of a healthy
person with smallpox with a view to providing the
survivors with life-long immunity. Variolation was
introduced in London in 1721 from Turkey. It was
enthusiastically accepted by the (European and English)
royalty and aristocracy and soon became widespread.
Variolation made its appearance in North America, in
Boston , in 1721 itself. But here the informant was an
African slave who had been variolated back home. It was
noted that the invention was made ‘not by the learned Sons
of Erudition, but by a mean, coarse, rude sort of People’.17

37. Even the argument in favour of the slaves’
testimony used the same idiom: ‘The more plainly,
brokenly, and blunderingly, and like Ideots, they
tell their Story, it will be with reasonable Men, but
the much more credible’.18
Sixty years previously, in England cinchona was
being seen not as a cure for malaria but as a Popish
remedy. Now, New England was judging immunity
against smallpox not on merit but in terms of the
race of the informant. One wonders where H. G.
Wells would have fitted these facts in his
theoretical framework of back-dated Protestant
passion for science.

38. The American colonies remained unenthusiastic about
variolation and paid a heavy price for their stance. In
1776, 10,000 American troops laid siege to Quebec City.
Making use of their vulnerability to the infection, the
besieged British infected civilians with smallpox and sent
them among the Americans. More than half the
American soldiers were killed by smallpox and the siege
had to be lifted. If Canada today belongs to England and
is not part of USA, it is because of the use of smallpox as
weapon.19
The Americans were of course aware that the
colonialists had earlier used smallpox against native
Americans, but would they use it against their own
people? Yes, they would. Minor considerations like
racial loyalty were not going to divert England from its
imperialist goals.

39. Zinc (1738)
Zinc metallurgy was invented in India c. 400 BCE
from where it travelled to China. The technology
was brought into England from India or China and
patented, in 1738. More than a century previously,
in 1608, Europe had refused to grant a patent on
telescope to the Dutch optician, Hans Lipperhey,
‘on the ground that it is evident that several others
have knowledge of the invention’. It however did
not quite matter that zinc metallurgy was already
known in the East. In a Euro-centric world, what
was new for Europe did not exist before.

40. Steel (19th century)
Europe first became aware of the high quality of Indian
carbon steel (retrospectively called wootz) when its
Crusaders came into contact with Damascus swords made
from it.2 0
Commercial production of carbon steel was begun in Sheffield
(by Benjamin Huntsman) in c. 1740, based on the Indian
process. Huntsman was interested in preserving his
commercial secret rather than obtaining a patent.
Beginning with the closing years of the 18th century, samples
of Indian steel and details of the process became available in
England for scientific and industrial scrutiny.
The anglicized term wootz was introduced in a 1795 paper
published in The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal
Society.

41. Wootz was received with great excitement in
Britain. Rather dramatically, Sir Thomas Frankland
(1750-1831) sealed his letters to the Scottish
metallurgist David Mushet (1772-1847) ‘with the
Sanscrit characters denoting wootz, in full and
prominent display’.21
James Stodart (1789-1873), maker of surgical
instruments and cutler, and an FRS, carried a trade
card (c. 1820) saying that he sold ‘Surgeon’s
Instruments, Razors and other Cutlery made from
Wootz, a steel from India, preferred by Mr Stodart
to the best steel in Europe after years of
comparative trial’22

42. Mushet obtained a steel patent in 1800 and Charles
(‘India-rubber’) Mackintosh (1766-1843) in 1825.
According to Josiah Marshall Heath (1791-1851),
both these patents were derived from the Indian
process.23
Heath himself obtained a patent ( for use
of manganese) in 1839, which according to Henry
Bessemer, was also derived from the Indian process.
Michael Faraday, who was commissioned by Stodart
to study wootz, wrongly thought that the Indian steel
derived its strength from aluminum. This was a
‘fruitful error’ (to borrow a phrase from Vilfredo
Pareto) because it opened up the new field of alloy
steels

43. Cyril Stanley Smith pointed out in 1982 that
the western study of wootz throughout the
19th century ‘was central to the
development of the relation
between the structure, properties,
and treatment of complex materials
and thus is a very real part of
the pre-history of modern solid
state physics’. 24

44. Mysore rockets and Congreve (1805)
The Kingdom of Mysore made effective use of rockets
in its wars against the British fought in the later decades
of the 18th century. They caused temporary setback to
the British expansion and permanent damage to the
psyche of the future Duke of Wellington. But in the long
run exposure to Mysore rocketry was beneficial for the
British. After the conquest of Mysore in 1799, hundreds
of these empirical iron-case rockets were sent to
England for reverse engineering. The result in 1805 was
the Congreve rocket. These rockets were very effective
in the Napoleonic wars. They were used against the
Americans also and find mention in the US National
Anthem.

45. The rise of industrial, scientific and racially
arrogant Europe
In the early decades of 19th century English
cotton machinery achieved its cherished goal of
making textiles equal to the best Indian weaver
could provide. In the history of technology, grant
of a patent constitutes a landmark; for growth of
industry its expiry. Cartwright’s power-loom
patent expired in 1801, opening the field of textile
manufacture wide open. Britain’s industrial
progress can be gauged from the figures of its
consumption of cotton.

46. Table 3. Import of cotton into Britain25
Between 1815 and 1832, the value of Indian
cotton goods exported out of India fell from £1.3
million to a mere £100,000. In the same period,
the value of English cotton goods imported into
India rose from a paltry £26,000 to £4,00,000. 26
Year Cotton imported into Britain/million lb
1764 3.8
1785 18
1830 265

47. Till now, Europe in its encounters with the East had
been in a learning mode. Now began the era of
cultural superiority and racial arrogance. Industrial
revolution and modern science provided Europe with
the physical means of subjugating and colonizing
most of the world. In the case of the Old World it
also gave the ideological justification for the
exercise. (No such justification was needed in the
case of The New World.) In 1837 a Bengal cavalry
officer, Captain James Mackenzie, was asked to
report on ‘the practicability and probable advantage
of establishing permanent steam navigation
communication between England and India’ through
Egypt and Arabia.

48. The immediate fall out of the exercise would
be the British annexation of Aden in 1839. In
his report, Mackenzie declared:

49. ‘It seems to be a law of nature
that the civilized nations should
conquer and possess the countries
in a state of barbarianism and by
such means, however unjustifiable
it may appear at first, extend
the blessings of knowledge,
industry and commerce among
people hitherto sunk in the most
gloomy depths of superstitious
ignorance’.27

50. In a significant slip, the Cambridge History of
Africa28
dilutes the quote by saying ‘It seems to
me’ instead of ‘It seems to be’, making the
observation personal rather than universal.
The use of the phrase ‘law of nature’ in the
context of human affairs is significant. It is as if
the authorship of the powerful knowledge
system of modern science bestowed such
cultural and racial superiority on the Europeans
as to give them a divine right to rule over
others.

51. References:
1. Ford, Thayne R. ( 1998) Stranger in a Foreign Land: Jose de Acosta's
Scientific Realizations in Sixteenth-Century Peru. Sixteenth Century
Journal, Vol. 29, pp. 19-33; see p. 19.
2. Kochhar, Rajesh (2006) Early modern natural history: Contributions from
the Americas and India. Journal of Biosciences, Vol. 37, pp. 937-947.
3. Goodman 1991, pp. 119-120
4. The statement occurs in Bacon’s The masculine birth of time. See
Farrington, Benjamin (1964) The Philosophy of Francis Bacon; an Essay
on Its Development from 1603 to 1609 (Liverpool: Liverpool University
Press).
5. Van Helden, Albert (1977) The Invention of the Telescope
( Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society).
6. Markham , Clements R. (1903) Presidential address at the
Commemoration of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Geographical Journal,
Vol. 21 (June), pp. 589-602; see p. 599. The name of the islands does not
exist anymore.
7. Naval Review, 1956, Vol. 44, no. 2, pp. 156-173; see p. 161.

52. References:
8. Ref. 7, p. 164.
9. Glouberman, Sholom (2009) Knowledge transfer and the complex story
of scurvy. Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice, Vol. 15, pp. 553–
557; Baron, Hugh Baron (2009) Sailors' scurvy before and after James
Lind–A reassessment. Nutrition Reviews, Vol. 67, No. 6, pp. 315–332
10. Carpenter, Kenneth J. (1986) The History of Scurvy and Vitamin C
( Cambridge University Press); Bown, Stephen R. (2003) Scurvy: How
a surgeon, a mariner, and a gentleman solved the greatest medical
mystery of the age of sail (New York: Thomas Dunne Books)
11. Honigsbaum, Mark (2001) The Fever Trail: Malaria, the Mosquito and
the Quest (London : Macmillan)
12. Headrick, Daniel R. (1981) The Tools of Empire Technology and
European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century ( Oxford University
Press), p 67
13. http://teacherweb.com/KS/StMarysColgan/KyleWolf/READ----Knowing-H

53. References:
14. http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/history/panama_canal.html
15. Jurgens, Hanco (2004) German Indology avant la letter: The
experiences of the Halle missionaries in Southern India, 1750-1810.
In :Sanskrit and Orientalism (ed: Douglas T. McGetchin et al.)
(Delhi: Manohar), pp. 63-64.
16. Trautman, Thomas R (1997) Aryans and British India (New Delhi:
Vistaar Publications), pp. 28-61.
17. Mather 1722, p.5.
18. Mather 1721, p.9.
19. See Tucker, Jonathan B. (2001) Scourge: The Once and Future
Threat of Smallpox (New York: Grove Press).
20. Bronson, Bennet (1986) The making and selling of wootz, a crucible
steel of India. Archaeomaterials, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 13-51.
21. Mushet, David (1840) Papers on Iron and Steel ( London: John
Weale), see pp. 662-663.

54. References:
22. Hadfield, Robert (1933) A research on Faraday’s ‘Steel and Alloys’.
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series A,
Vol. 230, pp. 221-292; see p. 225.
23. Ref. 28 , p. 671.
24. Science, 1982, Vol. 216, No. 4543, pp. 242-243.
25. Ashworth 1858, p. 256.
26. Dutt 1949, Vol. 2, p. 101.
27. Mackenzie, James (1837) Egypt and Arabia. The Literary Gazette;
and Journal of Belle Lettre, Arts, Sciences & co., No. 1072, 5 Aug.,
pp. 489-492; see p. 490.
28. Flint, John E. (1977) The Cambridge History of Africa, Vol. 5: From
c. 1790 to c. 1870 ( Cambridge University Press), p. 495

55. Thank you