Science under European Auspices in 16-18th Century India (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
The present paper seeks to explore the paradigms of scientific development in colonial India. The history of colonial India during the eighteenth-nineteenth century spectacularly illustrate a close link between science and imperialism and my endeavor will be to underline the nature, course and significance of this link with the help of a little theoretical discussion to be substantiated by a few illustrative examples from certain scientific works. A history of science in India must also be a history of India, not merely a history of the projection of western science in India. Pre-colonial stage means Ancient and Medieval times was India's own science, technology and medicine, themselves subjected to wide internal variation and different historical influence and cultural practice and the legacies these provided for the subsequent era of British rule.
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The Great Tradition of writing about what came to be called The Scientific Revolution developed in the mid-twentieth century and helped to shape what came to be termed “early modern” Europe. At least two fundamental structural elements of the framework were that a small group of independent minds had been set free to grasp new truths, and that rivalries among many groups in Europe never allowed “European civilization” to achieve homeostasis, thus continuing to encourage innovation in conditions of freedom. It is worth noting, however, that the first of these structural elements had religious overtones that were important in the early stages of the Cold War, and that the second placed innovation within a tradition of great texts rather than material culture and practice. Both changed the earlier conversation of the 1930s, which had been about political economies, connecting the new history of science to a history that offered to explain European superiority on the basis of the search...
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European Review, 2006
Since the Enlightenment, the history of science has been enlisted to show the unity and distinctiveness of Europe. This paper, written on the occasion of the award of the 2005 Erasmus Prize to historians of science Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, traces the intertwined narratives of the history of science and European modernity from the 18th century to the present. Whether understood as triumph or tragedy (and there have been eloquent proponents of both views), the Scientific Revolution has been portrayed as Europe's decisive break with tradition – the first such break in world history and the model for all subsequent epics of modernization in other cultures. The paper concludes with reflections on how a new history of science, exemplified in the work of Shapin and Schaffer, may transform the self-image of Europe and conceptions of truth itself.
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