Burdens of the Scientific Revolution: Construction of Europe and its non-Western 'Other'

<strong>Centre for Historical Studies School of Social Sciences</strong> a lecture on <strong>Burdens of the Scientific Revolution: Construction of Europe and its non-Western 'Other' </strong> <strong>Amit Prasad </strong> University of Missouri-Columbia <strong>10th August 2016</strong> The Scientific Revolution, directly or indirectly, informs much of the history of diffusion of science and technology across nations and societies. History of science in India, and also in other non-Western societies, often draws on Joseph Needham's metaphor of 'modern science being like an ocean into which the rivers from all the world's civilization have poured their waters' to present 'ecumenism' of modern science. Although such a historiographic exercise has resulted in very productive critiques of linear models of diffusion, it rarely disturbs the singularity and universality of modern science and its origin in the Scientific Revolution. The phrase Scientific Revolution, as we know, gained currency after it was first presented by Herbert Butterfield in the lectures he 'delivered for the History of Science Committee in Cambridge in 1948.' In this presentation I provide a deconstructive reading of Butterfield's placing of 'the Scientific Revolution in the history of the Western Civilization' and suggest that the historiographic birth of the Scientific Revolution was inseparable from Orientalist construction of Europe and its non-Western 'other.' Amit Prasad is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology and the Director of the South Asian Studies Program at University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the author of Imperial Technoscience: Transnational Histories of MRI in the United States, Britain, and India (MIT Press, 2014).