Economic divergence and its connections to technology and the formation of natural knowledge

The inspiration for this survey is a meta-narrative in global history that is concerned with the timing and reasons behind the emergence of contrasts in labour productivities and standards of living in eastern and western Eurasia. More than a decade ago, a wave of revisionist historiography emerged, which problematized explanations for a ‘great divergence’ in levels of human welfare, based upon Smithian models of long-term economic growth.Footnote ¹ This successful assault upon a triumphalist tradition of Eurocentric global economic history has prompted counter-attacks, which proceed on two fronts.

The first attempts to undermine data utilized by the ‘California School’, suggesting that divergence in the East had not set in before the late eighteenth century. It includes an ongoing programme of statistical research that is designed to produce acceptable estimates for standards of living enjoyed by typical peasant households living in the Qing empire and to measure differences in average levels of real wages, human health, literacy, and numeracy among populations resident in large Eurasian towns over several centuries before 1800. Provisional results suggest that north-western Europe had probably drawn discernibly ahead well before the turn of the nineteenth century.Footnote ²

The second counter-attack seeks to revive and update an explanation for divergence associated with views formulated decades ago by Max Weber and Joseph Needham.Footnote ³ Neither of these great scholars addressed divergence in quantifiable economic terms. Both, particularly Needham, focused on a famous conjuncture in global history, the ‘Scientific Revolution’, when the West reordered its cosmographical belief system and established a promotional regime, or cluster of institutions, for the discovery, development, and diffusion of superior technologies for manufactures, services, and agriculture, as well as for warfare and imperialism.

How, when, and why western Europe experienced this reordering is a question that could only be satisfactorily addressed by a programme of historical research based upon cogently specified reciprocal comparisons, heuristic concepts, and an aspiration to become global by transcending the myopias imposed by the frontiers and chronologies of continental, national, or local histories. Implicitly, my article shares this aspiration, but it is necessarily far more limited in its ambition. Its aim is to survey a bibliography in modern history dealing with European sciences, technologies, philosophies, cosmographies, and religions, in order to construct a simplified narrative of how Western societies progressed through time towards a ‘Scientific Revolution’. Since modern historians currently represent that revolution in ways that range all the way from a conjuncture to a non-event, it seems timely to insert a selective and simplified summary of that literature into current discourses in global history. From that perspective, much of the modern debate on the ‘Scientific Revolution’ looks Eurocentric, provincial, and obsessed with local detail.Footnote ⁴ This article from an ‘outsider’ is designed to convey histories of Western sciences and technologies into the divergence debate. It may also help to reconfigure the economic significance of knowledge that was formed locally to the west of Eurasia and then adapted globally.Footnote ⁵

Historians have become aware that representations of any supposedly unique European trajectories are all too often based upon foreshortened chronologies. They usually cover periods of time when the reordering of Western culture, and the reconstruction of Western institutions, could safely downplay histories of prior connections, when significant flows of knowledge occurred from eastern to western Eurasia – as explored in Arun Bala's ‘dialogue of civilizations’.Footnote ⁶ Historians appreciate that all claims for any trajectory selected as peculiarly ‘European’ must ultimately be subjected to Marc Bloch's tests for reciprocal comparisons. Indeed that is why the programme of research from which this article flows includes comparative studies of regimes for knowledge formation in China, India, West Asia, and Japan, as well as Europe, in early modern times.Footnote ⁷

Thus, this article proposes to survey a discussion concerned with the scientific-cum-technological elements behind economic divergence, which may have emerged in the West as early as 1500, became discernible before 1700, and were unmistakeably operational by 1800. The concept utilized here to structure a narrative of Europe's transition through a ‘Scientific Revolution’ also presupposes that technological innovations can be heuristically comprehended as connected, in either ex post or ex ante senses, to their actual or potential epistemic bases.Footnote ⁸

Any conflation of ‘science’ with technology is clearly a simplification, but it makes for an integrated and cogent narrative. Moreover, it conveniently circumvents inconclusive discussions concerned with the relative but immeasurable degrees of significance that might be accorded to artisanal skills, instruments, and transferable scientific knowledge, or the roles of theory, enlightened patronage, and state support. These, and numerous other tangible and intangible inputs, have been studied and implicitly weighted for their connections to increases in flows of innovations before the era of techno-science came fully on stream in the late decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁹

This article selects and references recent research in separated but, after the cultural turn, potentially conjoined histories of science, technology, religion, philosophy, cosmography, and skill formation. Its purpose is to reconfigure and update answers to the problem posed by Needham and Weber. They posited that a widening of a stock of disembodied and embodied knowledge became accessible to support a gradual acceleration in rates of innovation observed in the West after 1500, and possibly even earlier. They suggested that this might plausibly be connected to changes in hegemonic conceptions of the natural world, which culminated in a conjuncture for global history that has enjoyed an established status as an explicable ‘Scientific Revolution’ that emerged in western Europe.

The economically significant outcome of that revolution was that conceptions of the natural world, and prognostications for its manipulation based upon systematic investigations, became steadily more optimistic. Educated and wealthy elites across Europe were prompted to lend sustained support to the extension of embryonic regimes of interconnected institutions that might predictably generate and adapt knowledge and that embodied a potential to become instrumental for private profit, for the geopolitical power of states and, by way of unintended consequences, for the health, wealth, and material welfare of Western populations. Today's successors of such regimes generate flows of modern science, which is grounded in observations, experiments, and rigorous reasoning. Modern regimes employ a plethora of experts attached to a multiplicity of disciplines, who are supported and institutionalized in ways designed to be efficient for the comprehension and manipulation of the celestial, terrestrial, and biological spheres of our natural world.Footnote ¹⁰ For global economic history the question is when, how, and why did proto-regimes become significant?

Christian monotheism and natural philosophy

From the secular vantage points of our own times, a modern school of historians of religion has suggested that the emergence of monotheism not only helped to degrade the complexities, confusions, and fantasies associated with ancient myths and folk tales about the natural world, but also, in the fullness of time, provided a logically acceptable and spiritually consoling impetus for a ‘gestalt switch’ in the perceptions of educated elites towards possibilities for its manipulation.Footnote ¹¹ This contestable view claims that the gradual diffusion of faith in a single God, who controlled the destiny of everyone and the motions of everything in his divinely created universe, embodied a greater potential for the development of a metaphysical cosmography for the comprehension of nature than the polytheistic, hermetic, and animistic views that it gradually replaced.Footnote ¹² Although cultural anthropologists and cognitive psychologists have published convincing rationalizations for other metaphysical views of nature, they have not suggested that such beliefs might have matured into effective metaphysical foundations for a transition to modern science.

Meanwhile, monotheism may not be represented as a necessary condition for that transition.Footnote ¹³ Long before its diffusion, ‘pagan’ intellectuals of eastern and western Eurasia had extended the cognitive capacities of mankind for accurate observation, reflection, and logical styles of argument. They came up with some inspired counter-intuitive theories about the operations of the natural world, which were restored to prominence during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁴ Nor, when the cases of Islamdom and Byzantium are brought into the frame, could interpretations of the natural world as manifestations of the designs of a single divine creator be regarded as a sufficient condition for western Christian Europe's transition to modern science.Footnote ¹⁵

Nevertheless, historians of religion, well read in the history and philosophy of science, are currently developing a view that argues that in several respects, and to ‘some’ significant degree, the ‘Scientific Revolution’ may be historicized as a quasi-theological conjuncture in the intellectual history of western Europe.Footnote ¹⁶ Their analyses commence with the triumph of Christianity over classical traditions of thought that had emerged in ancient Greece and continued under the Roman empire. These traditions ran into the buffers of scepticism, embracing rival schools as rigorous and skilled in the destruction of plausible theories about morals and nature as more famous Greek and Roman intellectuals became in demonstrating their logical coherence.Footnote ¹⁷ Over centuries that witnessed the geopolitical and natural disasters that attended the decline and fall of the western Roman empire, they also succumbed to intellectual subversion, associated with the rise and diffusion of monotheistic Christianity and Islam.

Yet, even before the spread of these Abrahamic religions, all schools of classical philosophy had already become vulnerable to three debilitating attacks. First, they offered nothing approximating to proofs for their theoretical and logical speculations. Secondly, their recommendations for actions and policies, based upon theories about the operations of political, social, and natural worlds, never became highly regarded as economically useful or efficacious for ruling elites. Finally, none of Epicureanism, Platonism, Stoicism, or Aristotelianism offered clear-cut designs for material welfare, effective prescriptions for bodily health, or, above all, any alleviation for humankind's eternal angst about life after death.Footnote ¹⁸

When Christianity eventually became a hierarchically organized and powerful religion that consolidated its hold over the minds and hearts of rulers and their subjects, it suppressed polytheism and atheism, and condemned most rival forms of hermetic thought as heresies. Its initial phase of development included fundamentalism, which inspired onslaughts on all philosophies that had elevated reason above revelation and that conceived of no place for the divine in the operations of an eternal natural world.

Over the centuries between the fall of Rome and the times of Copernicus, a protracted debate evolved concerning classical modes of thought about the natural world. Before the medieval renaissance of the twelfth century, it was by no means clear that clerical intellectuals, in the service of an increasingly successful Church, wished to engage seriously with classical perceptions of nature, or with methods for the comprehension of a natural world that humans inhabited for but a short while on their way to eternal salvation or damnation.Footnote ¹⁹ They preached that God had created humanity's habitat and that everything in it operated according to his divine will and intentions. A long line of Christian fundamentalists, including Saints Ambrose and Bonaventure, were antipathetic to the more conciliatory views of Saint Augustine. Both the Roman and Eastern Churches held onto the belief that all speculations based upon modes of thought that elevated reason above revelation could become dangerous to their claims to possess the truth about human nature, the destiny of humanity, and an incomprehensible universe that was God's creation and humankind's temporary abode.Footnote ²⁰

Over time, however, it became more difficult for the Roman Catholic Church to suppress or evade the Eastern-cum-classical intellectual heritage of the West, or to deal with the encroachment of secular power.Footnote ²¹ Attempts to supplant classical beliefs were easier perhaps during the early Middle Ages, preceding the consolidation of monarchies, before the rise of Islam, and during the several centuries that it took to translate, transcribe, and reproduce in printed form a body of accessible Latinized texts that constituted a core of the classical heritage for circulation among literate elites in the West.Footnote ²²

Eventually, the medieval Catholic Church found it expedient to make concessions to established ‘pagan’ modes of rational argument, and to accept views of nature held by western Europe's aristocracies and ruling elites. Once the Church had become established as a powerful, quasi-official organization, its clerical intellectuals cautiously embarked upon a protracted process of Christianizing elements of ‘their’ classical philosophical heritage. They formulated ways of conceiving the operations of nature in terms that could be reconciled with their own beliefs and interests in the propagation of revealed truths about the world, for which they held a monopoly of interpretation.Footnote ²³

Furthermore, although Christianity's initial transition from sect to religion was propelled by Roman power structures, thereafter the task of Christianizing the elites and populations of western Europe was arguably assisted by the division and collapse of the Roman empire. Centralized empires could promote conversions of pagan populations to monotheism, but imperial favour alternated with repression, and progress remained dependent upon the unpredictable decisions of emperors to extend support to one true faith and ideology. Political units smaller than empires, and operating in competitive geopolitical contexts, provided conditions conducive to varied, adaptable, and flexible departures from inherent tendencies towards fundamentalist and canonical interpretations of nature.Footnote ²⁴

The pluralism that prevailed as a persistent discourse among rival schools of Christian theologians was, moreover, sustained by the post-seventh-century conflict with Islam. Islam became a serious monotheistic contender for religious and political hegemony on Europe's southern and eastern frontiers.Footnote ²⁵ Meanwhile, the development of its advanced economies also suggested that the forces of nature could be manipulated technologically to improve the health, security, and material welfare of the faithful, and thus promoted the case for their systematic study.Footnote ²⁶

Over the centuries, as it evolved into a supra-national organization with a privileged and quasi-autonomous position within European states, the hierarchy of the Roman Church recognized that faith underpinned by the gospels, and supplemented by a limited range of canonical references, could not remain powerful enough to maintain a position of intellectual hegemony. This became true both for its conflicts with Islam and for struggles against internal heresies. Moreover, despite the autonomy allowed under constitutions for the separation of Church and State in 1122, the former found it hard to resist the encroachments of increasingly powerful political authorities.Footnote ²⁷

By the twelfth century, the medieval Church had reacted to threats to its power by strengthening its intellectual foundations, in order to resist Muslim infidels, heretics, and secular authorities. Thus, under strictly regulated rules and conditions, the papacy allowed, and even encouraged, the introduction of faculties and curricula for the study of natural philosophy, based upon recovered texts by Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, Galen, Hippocrates, and many other ‘classical authorities’.Footnote ²⁸ Natural philosophy emerged along with the establishment of cathedral schools and monasteries, before developing into compulsory preparatory courses in institutions for higher education (prototype universities), which spread across the cities of medieval Europe.Footnote ²⁹

Faculties of natural philosophy appeared between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries to provide advanced preparatory courses for the education of clerics, lawyers, doctors, officials, and philosophers. By way of written commentaries, they carried forward to new levels of sophistication the methods and insights derived from a gradually restored heritage of classical thought. That heritage had been primarily concerned with human nature but had always included some rudimentary observations upon, theories of, and recommendations for rational and potentially heuristic modes of enquiry into the demarcated celestial, terrestrial, and biological spheres of the natural world.Footnote ³⁰

For some three to four centuries preceding the Reformation and the time of Copernicus, ‘pagan’ texts (emanating from Byzantium and, in elaborated form, from Islamdom) flowed in a succession of waves into western Europe.Footnote ³¹ They were translated, absorbed, accommodated, and utilized in different ways and degrees by a multiplicity of competing institutionalized authorities, both secular and clerical. Resistance and bouts of suppression marked the propagation of views based upon the circulation of pagan and Islamic ideas that contradicted core tenets of Christianity. These were that God created and controlled everything in the world and could, through divine interventions (miracles), suspend the operations of familiar natural forces as comprehended by common sense, and which classical philosophers had ‘rationally’ explained.Footnote ³² Tensions between revelation and reason thus remained an omnipresent source of conflict among and within Europe's courts and aristocracies, and between and within faculties of theology and natural philosophy at universities and academies in the West, where communities of urban-based intellectuals became charged with emotion in their search for truth.Footnote ³³

Nevertheless, Europe's ‘secularized’ Roman Catholic establishments and their obedient theologians found no insuperable difficulties in accommodating selected, expurgated, and reconfigured classical philosophies with Christian beliefs, as set out in canonical texts written by evangelists, founding fathers, and saints. They even found analogous notions of God behind the design and operations of the universe in analyses attributed with ecumenical ingenuity to Plato, Aristotle, and Seneca. They welcomed observations and investigations into nature, which could be read allegorically as signs of God's presence in the world and which could be interpreted metaphorically as lessons for personal and political morality.Footnote ³⁴

Although scholastic theologians resolutely insisted upon the sovereignty of revelation over reason, they encouraged the application of syllogistic logic and mathematical techniques derived from oriental and Greek mathematics and classical concepts of proof to major, complex, and counter-intuitive elements of revealed Christian beliefs. ‘Liberal’ theologians anticipated that, with help from methods and theories deployed by natural philosophers trained in such logical modes of argument, they too might construct rational proofs for the existence of God, the virgin birth, the resurrection, transubstantiation, the Trinity, the immortal soul, miracles, and other articles of faith.Footnote ³⁵

As true believers, natural philosophers accepted the subordinate status of their discipline as a handmaiden to theology. For centuries before, during, and after the ‘Scientific Revolution’, most prudently refrained from entering into disputes concerned with any of Christianity's foundational beliefs. They concentrated upon translations into Latin of books written in Greek, Arabic, and Syriac. They also focused on the restoration, analysis, elaboration, and critique of classical authors who had attempted to render nature's celestial, terrestrial, and biological phenomena more intelligible for humankind's sojourn on earth. They operated within authoritarian regimes for the extension of knowledge about the natural world, were confined by personal faith based upon revelation, and took the risk of persecution for heresy by secular and ecclesiastical hierarchies with vested interests in a sacred canon. In this context, the record of natural philosophy in constructing a Christian cosmography with potential for development is not nearly so unimpressive as suggested by the vehement criticism that ‘scholasticism’ attracted during periods of Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment, which generations of liberal social scientists and historians have found congenial to repeat.Footnote ³⁶

The historical record shows that scholastic philosophers read, taught, and deferred to prestigious classical authors, particularly Aristotle but also Plato, Ptolemy, Galen, and Hippocrates. More courageously, they referred for support and guidance to Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Avicenna (Ibn Sina), and other Muslim commentators and critics of Greek and Greek-inspired writings.Footnote ³⁷ They also deployed classical modes of logical reasoning to persuade ecclesiastical and secular elites in the West that God had created and designed a natural world to operate on intelligible principles, which were open to investigation and explanation. That said, they all agreed that God could intervene at will in the operations of the natural world, in unpredictable and arbitrary ways that ran counter to common sense.Footnote ³⁸

As the status of natural philosophy rose at royal courts and among noble households, and became an established part of the curriculum taught by all faculties of Europe's corporate and quasi-autonomous institutions for higher education, its agendas widened to include observations and investigations into a range of natural phenomena. Among these were the age, size, shape, and limits of planet earth, the sun, the moon and the stars, tides, climates, earthquakes, minerals, chemical substances, soils, plants, animals, and human bodies.Footnote ³⁹ One strand of natural philosophy even questioned the subordination of reason to revelation, although most natural philosophers prudently pursued their endeavours for higher intellectual and political status by advocating rational methods for the study of medicine, law, and even theology. A minority elaborated upon premature, and for theologians outrageous, arguments for the recognition of two separable kinds of knowledge, each with its own mode of reasoning: the metaphysical and the physical (or the sacred and the secular).Footnote ⁴⁰

Although theology had embraced dialectical methods and logical arguments, and coexisted in a state of uneasy tension with natural philosophy, clerical intellectuals became disappointed that classical methods could not substantiate revealed truths. They also remained hostile to the claims of rival natural philosophers that ‘rational’ procedures for the acquisition of knowledge provided a superior mode of access to understanding the mind and designs of God for his universe. Despite the ingenuity on display in the writings of Thomas Aquinas and his Dominican followers, reason and revelation could not be reconciled.Footnote ⁴¹

For their part, most natural philosophers concentrated upon philological analyses of the classics, the theories and semantic abstractions connected with meta-cognition, and investigations into logical and mathematical ways of knowing. A minority, including Roger Bacon, Bradwardine, Grossteste, Albertus, Oresme, and Buridan, produced texts that have become posthumously famous among historians of science for their critiques of Aristotelianism. They anticipated meta-theories and speculations about the universe that appeared during the ‘Scientific Revolution’. These included laws of motion, atomic theories of matter associated with Epicurus, Democritus, and Lucretius, and early premonitions that controlled experiments might become superior to reason and common sense as ways of settling disputes about the operations of the natural world. Some even considered an embryonic heliocentric view of the universe.Footnote ⁴²

These advances essentially consisted of restoring classical modes of reasoning to positions of political and theological acceptability. They defined, exposed, and refined knowledge about celestial, terrestrial, biological, and chemical objects. Medieval Christian contributions to a deeper intelligibility about the natural world, embodying Islamic discoveries, included astronomy, the anatomies of human bodies, and optics. They treated the natural world as something that could be investigated and explained in terms that could be separated from revealed and sanctified truths about the origins, operations, and limits of the universe as a spiritual, moral, and political habitat for humanity's life on earth.Footnote ⁴³ Deeply indebted to a famous line of Islamic philosophers and scientists, Christian scholastics cleared the way for what continues to be represented as a profound ‘gestalt switch’ in Western approaches to conceptualizing, comprehending, investigating, and manipulating everything and anything in the natural world.Footnote ⁴⁴

While Christendom's natural philosophers conceded to the omnipotence of God the creator, eventually they virtually convinced the secularized and politicized hierarchy of the Roman Church that God's universe was broadly designed on principles that could be exposed by utilizing the methods for rational investigation that were outlined in the expurgated texts of classical authors, particularly Ptolemy, Galen, and, above all others, Aristotle. However, these principles did not question the sanctity surrounding doctrines of the Trinity, the birth and resurrection of Christ, the eucharist, and a plethora of intuitively implausible miracles.Footnote ⁴⁵ The agendas of Christendom's natural philosophers had, moreover, been functional for diminishing the appeal of a rival set of ‘false claims’, based upon hermetical modes of thought. These were derived from ancient sages, astrological signifiers, occult portents, magic, and demonic and other supernatural forces. All were castigated as offensive to God, and were condemned as both heretical and ‘irrational’ by his Church.Footnote ⁴⁶

In short, Europe's ‘Scientific Revolution’ took off on the basis of a prior critique of a traditional and established set of religious, ‘pagan’, and hermetical conceptions, theories, and methods for investigations of the natural world. Claims to truth about the operations of nature, as held by educated Europeans, suggest that displacement had already been taken forward and upward to a plateau of possibilities by the late Middle Ages. This occurred through the restoration of classical texts, borrowing from Islamic knowledge, and the introduction of logical modes of reasoning into curricula for all forms of higher education, including the study of theology. These ideas were conveyed, mutatis mutandis, in simplified and memorable forms into the consciousness of aristocratic, plutocratic, and professional elites. Scholastic forms of Aristotelian, Platonic, and other ancient modes of thought, infused with and clarified by Muslim commentaries and innovations, had over the centuries undermined appeals to authority about the operations of nature as revealed in the Bible, the scriptures, and the writings and lives of saintly theologians.Footnote ⁴⁷

The Scientific Revolution in the West as a conjuncture for a global history of knowledge formation

Irreversible and fundamental changes in flows of useful and reliable knowledge in line with developments anticipated during the Middle Ages came on stream during the Renaissance and accelerated between the times of Copernicus (1473–1543) and Newton (1642–1727).Footnote ⁴⁸ Despite a generation of postmodern scholarship written to undermine its status, an older alternative historiographical tradition has continued to maintain that the lives of these two scientists mark a conjuncture when the intellectual, philosophical, and cosmographical foundations behind the extension and reconstruction of Western regimes for the discovery, development, and diffusion of such knowledge became radically transformed in scope and scale.Footnote ⁴⁹

That tradition does not, however, command a consensus among competing tribes of historians. The Scientific Revolution has been portrayed as reductively cognitive in character, rejected as a discontinuity with the past, and depicted as repressively Western in origin. Moreover, the link to subsequent and divergent developments in technology and power between Orient and Occident arouses ideological ire. Indeed, the entire notion of a Scientific Revolution is either regarded as a Eurocentric and anachronistic concept for the writing of global history or dismissed as tangentially connected to the technological and economic rise of the West, which, according to Pomeranz, only became discernible about a century after the publication of Newton's Principia Mathematica in 1687.Footnote ⁵⁰ Sceptics about the conjuncture might be advised that the reordering of conceptions of the natural world held by Western elites seems to have been clear enough to educated and enlightened contemporaries of the day.

Nevertheless, and if global historians wish to retain the Scientific Revolution as a major chapter locatable within meta-narratives concerned with long-term economic material progress, they will have no problem in conceding that the representation of this period in European history as central for an analysis of divergence does not imply that it came without Eastern, as well as Western, antecedents. They will agree that it cannot be represented as any immediate triumph for rational over religious and hermetic modes of thought. They will recognize that its tempo was neither revolutionary in pace nor linear in trend. And they will not suggest that it became pervasive across the whole of Europe, or connected, directly and without lags, to an ongoing process of technological change in the West.Footnote ⁵¹

To circumvent other irrelevant criticisms, global historians may certainly concur with the view that variations in any society's cognitive capacities to undertake potentially useful investigations into the natural world are socially, politically, and economically, as well as intellectually, constructed. They do appreciate that the ‘Scientific Revolution’ does not refer to a ‘victory’ of a progressive Europe over an unenlightened Asia, or the triumph of moderns over ancients, which was followed by rapid and extensive uplift in scientific and technological understandings. Above all, they will certainly reject any explicit or implicit claim for the neural superiority of Western minds.Footnote ⁵²

However, what does seem evident, from a library of books testifying to a tide of theoretical discourse and a wave of experiments that appeared between the lives of Copernicus and Newton, is something approximating to a pronounced leap forward in the perceptions, conceptions, and confidence of Europe's educated minorities. People making decisions of significance for the development of Western economies came to believe that the natural world had become more intelligible and manipulable for improvements to human health and material welfare than their ancestors had imagined, and that it could well become even more so in future.

Thus, historians engaged with the divergence debate may sensibly retain the ‘Scientific Revolution’ as a venerable and heuristic label for an interlude in European history when trajectories for the discovery, development, and diffusion of useful and reliable knowledge became more steeply inclined, more productive, and potentially universal in their applications. These trajectories have been plotted as lists of recognized contributions to the accumulation of many systemic bodies of knowledge. Several matured into specialized disciplines, based upon methods and paradigms for investigation that were particular to demarcated problems, phenomena, things, and human bodies. These disciplines have been traced by historians of modern sciences, author by author, book by book, and subject by subject.Footnote ⁵³ Their scholarship leaves historians of knowledge formation on a global scale with a firm impression that, between c.1543 and c.1727, frontiers for speculation, theorizing, and observations about the natural world were significantly extended within long-established spheres, and moved outward into new areas for investigation.

Historians have also elaborated on ranges of evidence that show how many more educated and skilled Europeans became involved with, networked with, and attached to republics of letters, associations, societies, and other institutions for the advancement of such knowledge.Footnote ⁵⁴ They have also traced and quantified pronounced discontinuities in flows of printed and illustrated books, encyclopaedias, manuals, and treatises of a proto-scientific nature published over these years.Footnote ⁵⁵

Scholars have noted an increase in the volume of seminal contributions towards the comprehension of natural forces, particularly in the celestial sphere but also in terrestrial and biological spheres. These contributions emerged from a line of famous European names active in research in astronomy, physics, mathematics, chemistry, and medicine during this period. Nearly all of them were committed Christians, but presented their observations, theories, and discoveries as innovative. Of their time, they nevertheless anticipated a different future for humanity. To paraphrase the words of their most famous promoter, Francis Bacon, they operated as participants in a loosely connected programme for the production of a rich storehouse of knowledge for the glory of God and the relief of man's estate.Footnote ⁵⁶ Whatever historians of modern sciences might expose post hoc about their claims for ‘innovatory’ ideas, that is how most proto-scientists of the day saw themselves. It was, moreover, how they were perceived by their opponents, who had interests vested in the preservation of established conceptions about the physical universe. Above all, it was also how they obtained support and funding from a wider community of ‘enlightened’ patrons and among Europe's aristocratic, business, and political elites, many of whom had been educated in classical natural philosophy.Footnote ⁵⁷

Historians (including global historians) will be less concerned than their colleagues in the history of science with detecting truly innovative and potentially sustainable ideas that could, in retrospect, be validated as steps towards the consolidation of mathematically rigorous and physically plausible theories. Most of us lack the credentials to understand the wider implications of laws of motion and gravity, or the role of different styles of mathematics as tools for the discovery of new knowledge. Latterly, however, historians have appreciated the potential realized from the experiments of alchemists, who were involved in separating, distilling, liquefying, and compounding organic and inorganic chemical substances. They have also observed that improvements to bodily health and therapies derived from anatomical dissections of early modern times took centuries to mature. They have recognized that the taxonomies formulated for the classification of ever-extending varieties of plants, animals, soils, rocks, and other physical matter would only eventually provide an ontological basis for theories of biological, botanical, and geological evolution.Footnote ⁵⁸

Historians of global economic development might wish to retain the ‘older’ view of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ – as an explicable but fortuitous reordering of western Europe's cosmography – because, in time, that reordering had profound ramifications for the construction of regimes for the formation, development, and diffusion of useful and reliable knowledge, first in the Occident and later on in the Orient. Its initial effect was basically to resituate and reconfigure trajectories upon which systemic bodies of knowledge could be accumulated on more politically secure, better endowed, socially elevated, spiritually acceptable, and economically productive foundations.Footnote ⁵⁹ Furthermore, and although the knowledge embodied in technology was represented by previous generations of historians of science as ‘potentially’ significant rather than immediately seismic in character and outcome, an impressive flow of technological innovations came on stream during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ⁶⁰ Long ago, Max Weber posed a meta-question (tackled in depth for China by Joseph Needham) of why a conjuncture that marked the onset of an accelerated trend towards the comprehension of the natural world occurred when it did in western, rather than in eastern, Eurasia. As Pomeranz himself has always recognized, that question remains central for the unresolved concerns of global economic history with the origins and role of technological innovation for divergence.Footnote ⁶¹

Reasons for the accelerated displacement of medieval Europe's classical, largely Aristotelian, and beatified conceptions of the natural world and their replacement by a more effective cosmography has been explicated in detail with reference to a library of influential texts that appeared in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries within the established realms of natural philosophy, alchemy, and theology.Footnote ⁶² Along with restored neo-Platonic and related hermetic traditions of writing, as well as the revival of a rhetoric of humanism, flows of printed words contributed battalions of publications to what Jonathan Swift evocatively referred to as the ‘battle of the books’. That literature has been well surveyed, and has been evaluated positively as part of recent and heuristic extensions to traditional boundaries for a cultural history of the rise of European science.Footnote ⁶³

Prior to Newton's death in 1727, the reordering in the education and cultures of Western elites included a confinement of God's role in the operations of the natural world and a derogation of understandings of that world contained in canonical texts of the Roman, Orthodox, and Reformed Christian churches. Above all it had been reconfigured by a conceptual, empirical, and logical demolition of beatified classical knowledge about the universe and its observable properties and operations. This demolition job was anticipated by medieval critiques of classical knowledge, which was, after all, over 2,000 years old by the time of the Florentine Renaissance.Footnote ⁶⁴

The undermining of religious authority and its connections to perceptions and comprehensions of the natural world by the Reformation continues to arouse ire and debate. Protestantism effectively destroyed the control of the Roman Catholic hierarchy over theological beliefs and moral codes for a large segment of the European intelligentsia, including by extension its ‘repressive tolerance’ towards views about the natural world. It would be difficult to prove that translating the Bible and other canonical religious texts into secular texts widened and deepened understandings of nature.Footnote ⁶⁵ Five centuries after the outbreak of the Reformation, it has, however, become apparent that most of the Protestant churches and sects that emerged out of the turmoil unleashed by Martin Luther displayed no greater tolerance than the Roman hierarchy towards the claims of rational compared to revealed truths or faith.Footnote ⁶⁶ Historians who continue to evoke Protestant origins for modern science may be declining into a minority. Agreed, they can plausibly claim that the Reformation fortunately left Europe without a single hierarchical authority capable of enforcing views of nature across the length and breadth of the continent.Footnote ⁶⁷ Yet was it not the barbaric and highly destructive wars of religion that pushed many Europeans, Catholics and Protestants alike, towards states of anxiety and a widespread stance of scepticism towards the claims to truth and authority from all religious hierarchies?Footnote ⁶⁸ Even before that, the fragmentation of the religion of Christendom had caused it to lose a great deal of power to prescribe on philosophical as well as moral matters to secular rulers, whose interests lay in harnessing useful knowledge to serve political, geopolitical, and economic ends, rather than in moral or spiritual purposes.Footnote ⁶⁹

Many historians continue to contest and obfuscate the very notion of conjunctures in comprehensions of the natural world. Typically, such historians are based in national archives, constrained by short-term chronologies, or suspicious of any notion of major discontinuities in modes of conceptualizing, comprehending, and investigating nature. They are particularly sceptical about notions of a ‘revolution’ that proceeded over a span of two centuries, remained concentrated for a long time in the minds of elites, and took far longer to trickle down into folk wisdom.Footnote ⁷⁰ Such scepticism is not persuasive because commitment to the novel ideas of intellectuals, which could undermine religion and contradict classical authorities, could only have occurred gradually. Furthermore, in pre-modern times, educated elites, with an interest in the status quo, continued to be the principal agents involved in patronizing the personnel and institutions behind the accumulation and diffusion of knowledge. Divergences in technological development, material progress, and geopolitical power only became unmistakeable after the death of Newton.Footnote ⁷¹

Other objectors argue that significant areas of modern scientific endeavours, such as chemistry, geology, botany, medicine and engineering, remained on systemic bases that were only marginally improved by innovatory contributions contained in the reconfigured conceptions of nature and the proto-scientific knowledge that appeared during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. However, these views have been exposed as exaggerated by recent research into a plethora of manuscripts, manuals, printed books, and contemporary records of discourses in alchemy, astrology, natural history, medicine, and the mechanical arts.Footnote ⁷²

Again there is no need to enter specialized debates. Let us instead consider in general terms what a majority of educated Europeans may plausibly have read, considered, and believed about the intelligibility of nature. By the second half of the seventeenth century their views had been informed by European voyages and imperial expansion overseas, the intellectual vibrations of the Renaissance, the turmoil of the Reformation, and the horrendous catastrophes of religious warfare between the time of Luther and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

First and foremost, educated Europeans believed in a God who had created and designed his universe on rational principles, which he could revoke at any time, but rarely did. Those principles were, moreover, accessible to rational investigations, to explication, to potential manipulation for geopolitical power, and ultimately for the welfare of populations existing in poor states of health and low levels of literacy on the margins of subsistence. For millennia before the ‘Scientific Revolution’, people had lived in a world surrounded by an enormous variety of organic and inorganic matter which they could see, touch, smell, understand with their senses, reflect upon with their minds, and systematize and store in many ways as useful knowledge.Footnote ⁷³ Following Aristotle, other classical texts, and elaborations upon them by Islamic and scholastic philosophers, educated Europeans had for several centuries classified and comprehended an ever-expanding proportion of such matter, bit by bit, in terms of its perceptible attributes – substances, forms, colours – and, above all, by way of the teleological purposes or functions of all natural things contained within specific environments.Footnote ⁷⁴ Change proceeded in stages that, for a reordering of cultures and comprehensions based upon common sense, could hardly take the form of short, sharp discontinuities. First came a Renaissance, which, in retrospect, has been represented as a period of preparation for a ‘Scientific Revolution’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Then, over the course of the seventeenth century, Aristotelianism, as an intuitively plausible, conceptually satisfying, and widespread way of understanding forces and phenomena in nature, came under sustained and ultimately successful attack.

Then followed precursors and developers of a Cartesian cosmography, which historians of philosophy and science call ‘mechanism’. This culminated in the acceptance of a Newtonian synthesis over the course of the eighteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁶ ‘Mechanism’ and related natural philosophies developed on the assumption that the best way of including all the manifold organic and inorganic things observed in the world in one universal and acceptable theory would involve the refutation of Aristotelian and other classical views as erroneous, superficial, and useless. After a prolonged rhetorical and philological assault, natural philosophers became free to construct and refine a metaphysical basis for the study of the natural world. Within this reconfigured cosmography, it was perceived to be more rational, and potentially more useful, to conceive of everything in nature as composed of particles at rest or in motion, which could be described and predicted in mathematical terms.

Cartesians of several persuasions proclaimed that this new atomic theory of the universe, which had respected antecedents in Greek and Islamic thought, constituted the best of all possible representations of God's creation and design. It would, they anticipated, stimulate all manner of enquiries into organic and inorganic matter.Footnote ⁷⁷ They wrote polemically, in order to move the dominant natural philosophy of Christendom forward from what they asserted to be limited, opaque, and unsystematic classical and scriptural observations. They parodied scholastic classifications, trivial disputes, and ontologically unreal depictions of diverse natural phenomena in terms of their purposes.

To replace hegemonic but teleological Aristotelianism, a famous line of natural philosophers (Beeckman, Mersenne, Gassendi, Hobbes, Huygens, Rohault, and pre-eminently Descartes) constructed a metaphysical theory of the universe. This was based on axioms that corpuscles, particles, or atoms could be construed to represent the composition, structure, and motions of all natural phenomena. They anticipated that this foundational, non-observable premise about the natural world, together with the systematic deployment of a priori but logically compelling mathematical models, could lead, case by case and problem by problem, to a wider, deeper, and more useful foundation for the formation of knowledge about all natural forces, including the operations of human bodies. God, they believed, and most prudentially posited, had created a universe composed of particles that clustered, moved, and interacted according to his rational designs, operating like the mechanisms of a clock. Slowly but surely, this meta-theory, with its evocative metaphors, together with the cognitive imperialism of mathematics, overcame and displaced both religious and beatified classical cosmographies for rendering nature intelligible. Cartesianism became the means for widening and deepening the metaphysical basis for conducting investigations into the operations of the natural world.Footnote ⁷⁸

In their explanations of changes in the scale, scope, and modes of conducting research into that world that occurred in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, historians have accorded different weights and emphases to the circumvention of ecclesiastical authority (coupled to a reigning Aristotelian cosmography based upon common sense, syllogistic logic, and the taxonomical and intuitive appeal of teleological thought) by an alternative metaphysical theory of the universe.Footnote ⁷⁹ In any event, the new image, metaphor, or cosmography of a mechanistic universe (constructed by a divine clockmaker or geometer) that could be modelled mathematically became intelligible, plausible, and acceptable among western Europeans. Indeed, it matured over time into folk wisdom, and eventually became a secular religion for the West. Gradually it served to promote more extensive, and ultimately more instrumental, investigations and controlled experiments into nature than anything derivable from the metaphysical perceptions that it had displaced.Footnote ⁸⁰

Europe's new cosmography retained, and indeed in some ways strengthened, a belief in the divine origins of the universe that satisfied the spiritual needs of its Christian elites. With God in place as the ultimate cause, the new cosmography, initially in a Cartesian form, and, by the eighteenth century, as a Newtonian synthesis of mathematical axioms under validation by controlled experimental methods, became acceptable as the foundation for the construction of more directly related, systemic paradigms and procedures for research. Within these parameters, Western physics, chemistry, physiology, medicine, botany, biology, geology, mechanics, and other sciences developed, proliferated, and operated over the centuries that followed the ‘Scientific Revolution’.

Fortuitously but fortunately, mechanistic vocabularies and metaphors also appealed to engineers and artisans.Footnote ⁸¹ Following the advocacy of Francis Bacon, and the lead taken by famous Renaissance architects, engineers, and humanist projectors, as well as the acclaimed examples of Galileo, Hooke, Boyle, Beekmans, Huygens, and Newton, more and more ‘scientists’ turned to practical considerations. They reflected upon, consolidated, and unified their styles of constructing knowledge included under the prestigious label of natural philosophy with the mundane practices of mechanics, craftsmen, artisans, doctors, alchemists, and other practitioners, who were directly engaged with the manipulation of natural forces for practical, political, and commercial purposes.Footnote ⁸² Many famous scientists of the period visited arsenals, foundries, and workshops, and engaged with artisans. Some appreciated how indebted they were to these ‘humble’ craftsmen for the development of a range of instruments, devices, and experimental apparatus that made innovations possible, and in effect validated their hypotheses.Footnote ⁸³ In these and other ways, praxis, mathematical models, mechanistic philosophies, and clock-like metaphors all operated as powerful stimuli for the accumulation of useful and reliable knowledge. This occurred in contrast to Aristotle's separation of episteme and techne, his organic conceptions of nature, and his teleological methods for its investigation, which had run into diminishing returns.

The greatest weight should be accorded to the contributions made by mathematical astronomers to an understanding of a quasi-spiritual celestial sphere of the universe, through which they and their patrons hoped to pass en route to heaven. With indispensible assistance from the development of telescopes and micrometers, they exposed Aristotle's errors about voids above and below mountains on the moon. A famous line of astronomers (Copernicus, Tycho, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton) observed that the heavens contained an infinite number of stars and satellites, comets and planets. They formulated mathematical proofs that planets (including humanity's own planet earth) were propelled along routes that circled the sun. They posited that planets moved in predictable response to Newton's mysterious physical force, gravity, which operated in terms of divine laws of motion in both the celestial and the terrestrial spheres of the universe. It could be represented by a parsimonious, accessible, and ultimately convincing mathematical formula.Footnote ⁸⁴ Earth's route in space and time, and its position in relation to other planets and the stars, could be mapped and predicted with increasing precision. This turned out to be useful not simply for the refutation of pervasive astrological fantasies but also for marking the seasons, for meteorology, for constructing calendars, and for navigating the oceans.Footnote ⁸⁵ As ecclesiastical hierarchies, Protestant as well as Catholic, recognized, the new astronomy represented wonderful and vivid threats to canonical interpretations of the universe.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, astronomers circumvented the dangers associated with heresy by presenting their models and theories as congruent with God's creation and design. By the mid seventeenth century, their discoveries had become famous as an inspirational (or fearsome) portent for science, along with the irresistible rise in the prestige of mathematical forms of natural philosophy associated with Kepler, Galileo, and Newton.Footnote ⁸⁷

The discourse and controversies at the core of the Scientific Revolution culminated in a consensual view that had been long debated among generations of natural philosophers concerned with procedures for the validation of claims to truth about the attributes and operations of natural phenomena. For example, many claims based on accepted truths, which were left undefined as sacred by ecclesiastical hierarchies, were nevertheless published in the Bible and in other canonical texts of the Christian religion. These could now be reconfigured as allegorical, or prudentially set aside.Footnote ⁸⁸ At the same time, ancient and previously venerated classical authorities could be undermined as outdated, weakened by ever increasing flows of systematic observations, and defeated by logical arguments, especially those elaborated in rigorous mathematical forms by Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. As time went on, they could be denied by demonstrations based upon transparent experiments, which moved anatomy towards physiology, alchemy into controlled experiments in chemistry, medicine towards biomedicine, the mathematics of motion towards mechanics, and the latent potential of atmospheric pressure towards steam power.Footnote ⁸⁹

Recent research continues to broaden the parameters of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ by looking into the writings of a plethora of figures who were actively engaged in unscientific and even disreputable branches of early modern knowledge. Connections between alchemy and chemistry, and between primitive anatomy and medical science, are being revised. So are more positive claims for astrology, hopeful pharmacology, and improbable cures for specified diseases. Modern research has brought to our attention an impressive list of innovators and innovations, which now appear in comprehensive histories tracing paths towards chemistry, astronomy, physiology, and biochemical medicine.Footnote ⁹⁰ Doctors conducted anatomical dissections that questioned the almighty Galen's classical authority about the organs of the human body.Footnote ⁹¹ Apart from Boyle, many forgotten names continued to observe, to count, to experiment with minerals, salts, acids, sulphurs, mercury, alum, and other substances, which they melted, cooled, compounded, distilled, fermented, and generally transmuted into metals, dyes, medicines, and other products of potential value and utility.Footnote ⁹² Many represented this potentially useful knowledge and praxis in all kinds of mysterious, magical, and mystical ways, in order to sell themselves and their products to credulous patrons and consumers in early modern Europe.Footnote ⁹³ Others among these neglected scholars aspired to fashion their practices, experiments, and knowhow in the vocabularies of Cartesian and Newtonian theories and natural philosophies, and to wrap them in mantles of systematic quantification.Footnote ⁹⁴

Latterly, historians have recognized that these arcane traditions, steeped in curiosity as well as fantasy and fraud, were engaged with methods for acquiring natural knowledge that anticipated the transparent and prototype controlled experiments of modern science. They have revealed how alchemists, herbalists, numerologists, and even astrologers added to and diffused flows of useful data that served wider and deeper possibilities for the long-term development of systemic knowledge in astronomy, botany, chemical science, biochemical medicine, engineering, and eventually biology.Footnote ⁹⁵ The re-examinations by historians of such flows of potentially useful knowledge, coupled with the spread of semi-efficient and transparent methods for the controlled investigations of the natural world, have exposed tributaries of the Scientific Revolution that an older historiography, concentrated upon histories of celestial and terrestrial physics, had neglected to include as an integral part of this important conjuncture in global history.Footnote ⁹⁶

Thus the ‘Scientific Revolution’ is emerging as something less than a short, sharp discontinuity in the accumulation of scientific knowledge, and more as a profound conjuncture locatable for its time in the history of western Europe. It occurred when methods for the discovery, development, testing, diffusion, and presentation of such knowledge were being gradually but systematically transformed. The once celebrated conjuncture is also being plausibly restored as a period when the dispositions of Europe's ruling classes and the cultures of aristocratic, plutocratic, and even ecclesiastical elites became more hospitable, even promotional, toward the reconstruction of cosmographies and institutions for the production of useful and reliable knowledge. In the fullness of time these ‘regimes’ spawned disciplines (physics, chemistry, engineering, geology, biology, botany, pharmacology, agronomy) producing systemic knowledge for new forms of energy (steam and eventually electrical power). Above all, these sciences operated to accumulate and test bodies of useful and reliable knowledge required to promote and assist in the conception, construction, and development of improved technologies for agriculture, industry, commerce, transportation, health, human welfare, and, alas, an endemic resort to warfare and imperialism by Western states.

That said, although core features of the ‘Scientific Revolution’ are no longer located in any comprehensive range of dramatic and innovative breakthroughs, some were more dramatic than others. Ideas of planetary motion had profound and relatively rapid cultural outcomes.Footnote ⁹⁷ Another great leap forward included the rediscovery of an ultimately highly significant source of energy: atmospheric pressure. This flowed from a long sequence of controlled experiments, following the translation of Heron's classical treatise into Latin in 1571 and the demolition of Aristotle's rejection of the vacuum.Footnote ⁹⁸