5 - Science and civilization in Renaissance Europe

Summary

In the next three chapters I want to discuss three major writers on history. They are not necessarily the most recent, although Needham's conclusion appeared in 2004, but they are the most widely quoted and the most influential historical scholars who have played an important part in the contemporary understanding of world history. First of all there is Joseph Needham, originally a broad-ranging biologist who spent the latter part of his life studying the history of science in China and wrote and edited a magisterial series entitled Science and Civilization in China (1954–), in which he showed that Chinese science had been equal, if not superior, to that of the west until the sixteenth century. For the subsequent period he tried to explain what has been called ‘the Needham problem’, why the west took over. In the following chapter I discuss the influential work of the German historical sociologist Norbert Elias, who looked at The Civilizing Process which he sees as achieving its zenith in Europe following the Renaissance. Thirdly, I examine the writings of the great French historian Fernand Braudel, who in his Civilization and Capitalism, 15^th–18^th Century, discusses various forms of capitalism in different parts of the world, but concludes that ‘true capitalism’ was a purely European development.

These authors are addressing, in their different ways, a very real problem, namely the comparative advantage obtained by Europe following the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century and in some respects following the Renaissance of the sixteenth.