On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900

Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550-1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). Pp. xxxviii + 567. $55.00.

Among the many emblems of the modern age, there are few that have been afforded as much attention as "modern science." as a translator and a diplomat, it has bartered enduring peace agreements between concepts that once battled in our minds as irreconcilable opposites: the infinite and the infinitesimal, matter and energy, application and abstraction, the line and the curve, the square and the circle. In its less than benign manifestations, it has collaborated with the modern state to achieve a power at once devastating and clinical, where a simple "go code" can, through a cascade of transmissions and subdivisions of the horrific totality, project power transoceanically and turn whole cities and their inhabitants into dust. The modern age, it sometimes seems, was itself a by-product of the rise of modern science.

Among the many loose ends in this narrative, there is one in particular that deserves a nice, sharp tug: how do we reconcile modern science's claims to universalism with its parallel claim to european origins? how can it be both universal and occidental at the same time? Is it not curious that, without exception, the sciences now deemed modern were coined, formalized, and professionalized by scholars hailing from a small handful of western european countries-many of which were emerging as global colonial powers at roughly the same time?

In his bold new work, On Their Own Terms: Science in China, 1550- 1900, Benjamin Elman sets out to reposition the classically eurocentric account of modern science. The author mounts a resplendently empirical argument, which commences with a brief but engrossing analysis of late ming modes of knowledge formation. This is followed with a sustained exploration of a three-part process of transmission, mediation, and incorporation that shaped China's encounter with european science. In each of these three stages, a complex interplay of historical and cultural factors resulted more often than not in a checkered and turbulent transmission of scientific information from the West to China, a choppiness that, for Elman, partially explains the uneven development of modern science in China as compared to Europe.

Elman's study focuses on...