expansion. Clockwork gears were part of Matteo Ricci’s arsenal of soft power.
Nevertheless, clocks came to embody an affront to China’s sense of self-regard, and timekeeping was one field among many where Chinese intellectuals began to argue for a Chinese origin to what had by then become a clearly superior European technology. Chinese scholars began to argue that Western clocks were derived from the Chinese clepsydra, and that such methods had since been lost to Chinese craftsmen. Others argued that clocks were merely playthings, and of no real intellectual or practical use. Despite such self-serving rhetoric, “timepieces were among the few Western artifacts the Chinese were ready to pay for” in the early nineteenth century, and such objects were one of the few goods that Chinese merchants were interested in trading for highly valued tea, porcelain, and other goods that brought the British Empire such extreme trade deficits in the run-up to the Opium Wars (Landes, 46–50). The introduction of timepieces, astronomical methodologies, and techniques of mensuration were understood by both sides of the exchange as tools of empire. Chinese rulers’ interest in science was aimed at using its predictive power to reaffirm the legitimacy of their own dominion by arguing that it was expressed in the natural world.
The shift that distinguished the nineteenth century from previous eras was the sense that Western science and technology were indeed superior and that an adequate response demanded their popularization. The increasingly undeniable superiority of Western science at the close of the nineteenth century15 and the social implications of Darwinian theories of evolution brought challenges not only to Chinese conceptions of time and their place in world, but also to the Chinese framework of cosmology and nature.16 A combination of factors contributed to an increasingly widening scientific and technological gap between Britain and France on the one hand and China on the other that emerged during the eighteenth century. This included Jesuit resistance to adopt Newtonian calculus into their mathematical repertoire, an information gap between Jesuits in China and their European counterparts, the diminished status of the Jesuit order in the eyes of the papacy, and an inward turn beginning during the Kangxi reign (Elman 2006, 169, 183–189). “The Newtonian revolution in physics and engineering in Britain and France was not transmitted to China until the Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) via French engineers at the Fuzhou Shipyard and British machine workers at the Jiangnan Arsenal” (244).17 A simultaneous Jesuit “muddling” of Newtonian physics and a Qing turn inward prevented China from adapting the engineering and technological expertise that sparked off the industrial revolution in Europe.
At the same time, the eighteenth century saw a restoration of Chinese mathematical and medical classics and a diminished interest in foreign bodies of knowledge. In a familiar process of empire building, Qing rulers oversaw efforts to gather and assimilate the historical, literary, and scientific achievements of previous dynasties. For the Qing, this effort often entailed a process of reconstruction and extraction that attempted to discern Han and pre-Han texts from their Song dynasty neo-Confucian scholarly traditions (Elman 2006, 225–280). These restorative efforts eventually led to the Yangwu, or Foreign Affairs Movement, the argument that European technologies and scientific methods were derived from Chinese origins, a pervasive intellectual trend that saw its strongest expression in the years between 1860 and 1895.18 This argument played an important role both as a balm for China’s defeat at the hands of European powers and, as some have argued, as an explanation for why it was acceptable to adopt so-called foreign concepts. This term was at the center of an intellectual and political paradox—in order to survive as a nation, China would have to give up the epistemological system that defined it; or, in other words, in order to repel their Western aggressors, China would have to adopt a substantial portion of the Western worldview. Arguments in favor of the importation of Western technologies often had recourse to this notion, though it is unclear whether this was out of real conviction or political expediency. This idea arose as a response to a series of agonizing defeats at the hands of European colonial aggression, and in the words of Theodore Huters, “the relationship between domestic and foreign learning has been one of the most enduring issues in determining the intellectual direction of modern China” (Huters 2005, 23).
In “The Fate of ‘Mr. Science’ in China” (1995), Wang Hui argues that an instrumentalist orientation, focused on function and progress, with little interest in the idealist pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, defined late imperial Chinese approaches to science. For a period of centuries Chinese scientists, especially mathematicians and astronomers, were engaged in a process of engaging with Western science, technology, and theology. At the same time, they were engaged in a constant reassessment of their own traditions, among other things attempting to uncover the “true essence” of Han dynasty learning before it passed through the hands of Song scholars. The early to high Qing saw a renewed interest in Chinese mathematics and a reexamination of the universal principles of Zhu Xi’s neo-Confucian lixue (“teaching of the principle”). During the late nineteenth century, “science” in the Chinese context began a transition of both terminology and ideology. Originally, the term “science” was translated and understood using the vocabulary and philosophical orientation of the neo-Confucian interpretation of the “Greater Learning” (Daxue).19 “Investigation-extension” (gezhi), “investigation of things,” “the study of probing thoroughly the principle” (qiongli zhi xue), and “to investigate things so as to extend knowledge” (gewu zhizhi) all emphasize the importance of personal experience and cognition. Gezhi is an internal process of individual cultivation and cognition that leads to the subjective apprehension of knowledge and results in the capacity to bring universal order (Wang Hui, 2–14; Qiu Ruohong, 63–67; Yue, 13–17). Initially, the Chinese understanding of European sciences was characterized by an attempt to frame Western sciences in neo-Confucian terms. A parallel trend was the philological shift that saw a reassessment of Song textual studies and attempts to recover early Chinese textual traditions from exegetical traditions that emerged during and after the Song dynasty (Elman 1984). Vestiges of this mode of translation remain to this day: the Chinese term for physics, wuli, is an abbreviation of the term gewu qiongli, investigation of things and fathoming of principles, from the same section of the Greater Learning (Kioka and Suzuki, 35–51).
Nineteenth-century Atlantic trade networks were not as significant in terms of financial and capital accumulation as they were for their role in expanding Europe’s limited supply of land and energy. Europe of the seventeenth to the nineteenth century was indeed Europe, the Americas, and colonial Africa (Pomeranz, 23–24, 264–297). The development of European science and technology was inextricably intertwined with the expansion of European empire. Fa-ti Fan refers to the negotiations between various interest groups, aesthetic principles, horticultural practices, natural history, folk knowledge, and Sinology that occurred in colonial contact zones in coastal China and helped drive the development of British natural history from the second half of the nineteenth century onward as “scientific imperialism,” noting the “symbiotic, even integral relationship between scientific and imperialist enterprises” (Fan, 4; see also Secord, 37). From the sixteenth century on, European exploration and the expansion of scientific knowledge were often dependent on one another. Scientific institutions played a major role in the dissemination of “energy, manpower and capital on a worldwide basis and an unprecedented scale” (Brockway, 6). Botanical knowledge of economically valuable plants helped aid the expansion of empire by assisting colonial entrepreneurs in the establishment of new plantations with raw materials and knowledge necessary for those plantations to succeed. Rubber and cinchona (used to make quinine) were two key products, transplanted from one colonial holding to another, which played a key role in European penetration into South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. Both of these products were necessary war matériel in such military efforts.20 In tropical colonial holdings, the material and knowledge-oriented capital met with relatively abundant labor, in various forms of servitude and at low cost to entrepreneurs.
Global commercial networks made use of diffuse access to local knowledge to make local observations in building universal understandings of fields as diverse as astronomy and gravitation, in efforts to catalog the natural world, and in the formation of Darwin’s theories of evolution. Darwin’s
