Huff, Toby H.

East Asian Science, Technology, and Medicine (EASTM - Universität Tübingen)

222                                                                                                 EASTM 34 (2011) 
 
Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of 
Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900, London: Palgrave 
MacMillan, 2007, 285 pp. 
Toby E. Huff 
[Toby Huff is Chancellor Professor Emeritus at UMass Dartmouth and Research 
Associate in the Department of Astronomy at Harvard University. He is the 
author of The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West (2nd 
ed. Cambridge 2003), and co-editor with Wolfgang Schluchter of Max Weber and 
Islam (Transaction Books, 1999). Recently he published Intellectual Curiosity 
and the Scientific Revolution. A Global Perspective (Cambridge University 
Press, 2010). He has lectured in Europe, given talks across the Muslim world and 
lived in Malaysia. Contact: thuff@fas.harvard.edu] 
 
This is an unchanged paperback release of a book published several years 
ago. The focus of the book is on the “contact area” between Europeans and 
non-Europeans in India and south Asia mainly in the eighteenth century. 
Although the author raises big questions about the history of modern 
science and its origins, the materials dealt with are far from adequate to the 
task. He seeks an “alternative vision” of the generally understood view that 
modern science was almost completely a Western creation. He mentions 
mathematical reasoning but does not mention the Hindu-Arabic numeral 
issue according to which important benefits allegedly accrued to the 
pioneers of modern science. 
While setting the stage for this foray, Kapil Raj introduces a number of 
straw men such as the idea of “immutable” scientific rules of procedure, 
solely “logical step-by-step reasoning” along with the notion that the major 
discoveries leading to modern science took place in “enclosed” places such 
as laboratories, observatories, or possibly museums. These are juxtaposed 
to other spaces, such as coffee houses, pubs, breweries, or trading compa-
nies in south Asia. These caricatures miss the fact that Galileo and others 
used telescopes at home but mostly en plein air as the instrument was in fact 
a portable laboratory. Likewise, pioneers of microscopy in the middle of 
the seventeenth studied insects, plants, animals, and human specimens in a 
great variety of places, many of them on location. 
These unhelpful allusions to putative scientific methods distract the 
author so that he does not ask just which scientific advances really do mark 
the rise of modern science. I should think that anyone who gave this 
question serious attention would have to consider that the revolution in 
astronomy starting with Copernicus lies at the heart of the great advance of 
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modern science. That path leads through Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Kepler, 
perhaps Descartes and some others but culminates in Newton’s new 
science of mechanics. That nonpareil achievement unified celestial and 
terrestrial physics, governed by universal gravitation, and gave us modern 
physics. It would be exceedingly difficult to find Arab, Indian, or Chinese 
scholars who contributed directly to that revolution. The telescope was 
available especially in India by 1615, slightly later in China and the Middle 
East, but no indigenous scholars sought to use it to advance astronomy in 
the seventeenth century. Likewise the science of motion was neglected 
outside of Europe. 
Further thought about this would reveal the extraordinary advances in 
human, plant and animal anatomy, as well as the discovery of bacteria 
made possible by the invention of the microscope, all absent outside 
Europe in the seventeenth century. To this we can add the advances in 
pneumatics and hydraulics leading to the discovery that air has weight, an 
indispensable discovery on the way to the invention of the atmospheric 
steam engine. Nor can we overlook the discovery of electric charge by 
William Gilbert in 1600 which gave birth to the whole area of electrical 
studies, the laboratory demonstration of electric lighting in 1706, and 
eventually the invention of electric motors, the telegraph, telephone, and 
radio waves. 
Instead of acknowledging those paths of discovery that made possible 
microbiology and modern medicine as well as the modern mechanical 
world and the electronic society, Kapil Raj looks at studies of natural 
history, surveying, map-making, legal inquiries, and linguistics mainly in 
the Indian subcontinent. Unfortunately, Raj focuses mainly on Western 
sources and the European writers who were able to extract from indige-
nous sources useful information once it was recast in the framework then 
well-established in various European sciences. Microscopes had been in 
use in Europe since the 1620s but this book contains no hint of such use in 
the following century in India. 
For example, the author discusses a major work by the French writer, 
Nicholas L’Empereur (known as L’Empereur). He is credited with a major 
botanical volume called Jardin de Lorixa, apparently completed on site in 
Chandernagore, India in 1725, but neglected thereafter. Raj points out that 
L’Empereur’s project (a wholly European initiative) was based on 
interviews with native medicinal workers and the “translation” of an 
indigenous materia medica text. However, it was not a strict translation and 
the result was a hybrid botanical work, “recognizably European” (p. 44). Raj 
points out that L’Empereur was highly versed in European conventions of 
botanical research, and that his descriptions were put into “standard 
format starting with physical descriptions of each plant, its roots, its flower, 
fruit, and seed, its habit, and finally it properties and uses.” In other words, 
224                                                                                                 EASTM 34 (2011) 
 
this was based on European, not Indian conventions. Furthermore, the 
Indian materia medica, Raj points out, “do not describe the plants, but 
enumerate their properties and uses and, above all, had no illustrations [my 
italics]” (p. 43). All of this suggests that from beginning to end, this 
potentially useful knowledge was first organized and illustrated by 
European draftsmen, although in some cases it appears that native painters 
were trained up to the task. In other words, L’Empereur’s product is his 
invention based on reading some native accounts and then interviewing 
fakhirs and other medicinal workers to flesh out the account. There were 
many similar European works prior to this. Instead of providing examples 
of indigenous advances, Raj tells us how Europeans needed to conduct 
additional research and thus to reorganize otherwise incomplete native 
accounts in order to contribute to the ongoing work outside India. 
The vast difference in artistic skills between Europeans and natives in 
the seventeenth century is illustrated by the native-authored frontispiece 
(p. 33) and the later botanical illustrations on p. 47f. Anyone who compares 
European artistic realism from the thirteenth century forward with seven-
teenth century Mughal and/or Persian miniatures would see that even 
seventeenth and eighteenth century Indian works are not on the same level 
of detailed realistic representation and perspective as the European pain-
ters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. There is need for a major look 
at how and when Indian painters or illustrators were trained in the Euro-
pean style. 
It is most unfortunate that this book has been so strikingly mistitled, 
turning it into an ideological wedge rather than an interesting account of 
mutually beneficial encounters between European naturalists and those of 
India in the eighteenth century. Indeed, had the book been titled something 
like, Interesting Encounters Between European Naturalists and Indigenous 
Indian Populations in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century, the reader would 
be prepared to benefit from Raj’s research and discussions. In addition to 
the subjects mentioned above they would include the difficulties of “insti-
tutionnalizing European learning in India,” the difficulties of communi-
cation between Western religionists and natives, as well as the introduction 
of “modern science” to India (pp. 171 and 175). Raj gives the reader a 
copious list of all sorts of scientific instruments and lab devices presented 
to a Calcutta School, shipped and paid for by the East India Company in 
1823 (pp. 176-78). An attentive reader would also notice that all sorts of 
new scientific perspectives and devices were being introduced into India in 
every chapter of the book. Nevertheless, the author is completely wedded 
to his unworkable scheme as his concluding chapter on “Relocations” 
makes clear. 


Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900

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Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science: Circulation and the Construction of Knowledge in South Asia and Europe, 1650-1900

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