The Transformation of the World (174 page)

The spectacular rise of certain American universities would have taken much longer if they had not been able to profit from the economic boom of the last quarter of the century. Ever since the days of John Harvard and Elihu Yale they had been dependent on private donations and foundations, but around 1850, wealthy individuals began to show an increased willingness to support the
academic world philanthropically. After 1880, as the great American fortunes were being made, sponsors sought to perpetuate their memory in the title of universities: whereas John D. Rockefeller, for example, had contributed anonymously to Columbia University, many institutions now bore the names of railroad, tobacco, or steel barons. Often religious motives also lay behind this. New university buildings were built in a uniform neo-Gothic style—sometimes, as at Palo Alto at the Stanford family's request, in accordance with Mediterranean taste. The old American colleges had been small and plain, and in their architecture too. Now large spaces were required to accommodate new libraries, laboratories, and sports facilities. More than in Europe, affluent civic pride found expression in splendid university buildings that were the architectural highlight even of a city as large as Chicago. German influence was evident in the ambitious orientation to research and the allocation of subjects and faculties, but state planning, direction, and funding, essential to the German model, were confined to a minority of universities in the public sector. The fast-growing top universities built up their own internal bureaucracies; professors, though held in ever-higher social esteem, were regarded as employees subject to management. University presidents saw themselves increasingly as entrepreneurs. Among administrators and those involved in teaching and learning, pride in the institution was combined with a cool, market-oriented vision of education and science. All this made late nineteenth-century American research universities an unmistakably original development on their side of the Atlantic.
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Japan: A Semi-Import of the German Model

In comparison with the United States, Japanese universities were still weakly developed on the eve of the First World War. All sciences considered at all modern had a place in Tokyo or one of the other imperial universities, but the lavish funding received by American and some German universities was not forthcoming. The two faculties enjoying the most generous support were medicine and engineering, where Japan's early successes had attracted attention abroad. In other spheres, the dependence on the West was still so strong that teaching did not progress beyond the repetition of textbook wisdom. Meanwhile hundreds and thousands of Japanese went to study in Europe and the United States, and those who returned to take up a responsible academic post imitated their Western teachers in every detail for the time being. Western advisers and lecturers had formerly played a major role in building certain departments, but this gradually declined in the late Meiji period. Altogether some eight thousand such experts were employed,
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giving a crucial impetus not only in natural science or medicine but also in law or history. Since it was not possible to recruit abroad systematically, and since a career in Japan, despite quite high pay, was not everyone's dream in life, much depended on luck and chance. The example of modern historiography, introduced by the Berlin-trained Ludwig Rieß shows the limits of the transfer.
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Academics in Japan adopted the positivist source criticism
of the German historical school (which fit in well with national traditions of textual criticism originating in China), but not its philosophical program and literary techniques. Nor could they claim to have the same public appeal that Rieß's German masters enjoyed. Historiography remained narrowly specialist and did not dare to tackle the new national myths of the Meiji regime, such as its fictitious imperial genealogy. Unlike in the admired German example, history did not become the leading discipline in the humanities or among the educated middle-class public.

Another weak point of the early Japanese university system was the extreme hierarchy that made Tokyo the unchallenged top dog. This prevented the kind of competition to be found among American universities as well as in the strongly decentralized federal German system, where the job market encompassed not only the German Reich but also Austria, Bohemia (mainly Prague), and German-speaking Switzerland. Nevertheless, by the 1920s at the latest, it was clear to the international scientific public that a start had been made in East Asia on the development of a research-oriented academic system—not only the organizational forms of the European university but also its research imperative. This was one of the differences between Japan and China on the one hand and the Ottoman Empire on the other. In the view of the Turkish historian Ekmeleddin Ä°hsanoğlu, the considerable efforts of the Ottoman reform elite (decades before similar initiatives in China) to translate or “buy” Western knowledge from European experts stopped at the threshold of an experimental spirit and a research culture capable of learning from results.
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4 Mobility and Translation

Patterns of Perception

The science that blossomed in these new organizational forms was European in origin; only a few other elements entered into the edifice of what by 1900 was universally valid science. The study of nature in the medieval Arab world might have been superior to that in the Latin West, and the ancient Indians might have been supreme mathematicians and linguists: yet nineteenth-century European science was less in debt to non-Europeans than the early modern collectors, classifiers, and cartographers in Asia, whose work could be carried out only with the help of local experts. In the eighteenth century, Europeans had still believed they could learn from Asian textile technologies or agrarian practices such as fertilizer use or crop rotation.
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In the nineteenth century, such trust in the practical knowledge of others was on the wane. “Scientific” colonialism, much vaunted at the end of the century, often arrived at agronomic insights that had long been known to peasants living in the area, or made mistakes against which they could easily have been warned. At the height of colonial narrow-mindedness, local topographical expertise and the skills of indigenous craftsmen were used at best in the construction
of roads and houses, but otherwise no serious notice was taken of other people's knowledge. It would, however, be naive to romanticize “local knowledge” in non-European cultures, and unjust to charge an expanding Europe with its wholesale suppression—a sin more grievous than that of simply ignoring it.

Asian and African elites recognized the significance of the scientific and technological knowledge coming out of Europe, and increasingly the United States. They tried to acquire it, to put it to the test, to translate it into non-Western languages and conceptual frameworks, and to relate it to their own traditions and experience. The mobility of individual complexes of knowledge proved to be quite varied: some “traveled” easier and faster than others. The old idea that the worldwide “diffusion” of European sciences, by virtue of their innate superiority, was a more or less natural process is not altogether misguided, but it is simplistic insofar as it overlooks the particular cultural and political conditions under which contact was made and knowledge transferred.
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Nakayama Shigeru, a historian of science who has studied various patterns of transfer in East Asia, argues that since Japanese mathematics was self-enclosed and incompatible with European mathematics in its structure and notation system, it dropped out of the picture soon after the Meiji Renewal. This did not happen because it was more primitive, but because it was more practical and economical for Japanese mathematicians to adopt the new system en bloc than to tinker with the old one. In medicine, by contrast, Chinese or Japanese systems survived intact alongside others imported from the West; the two were never fused into one. The combination was (and is) effected at the level of practice rather than theory. In Japan, however, where all transfer decisions reflected the drive to shake off China's long-term tutelage and to become the star pupils of Western modernity, indigenous medicine lost its scientific status during the Meiji period; either it was not taught at all at the new universities or it was demoted to a popular (but widely used) art. Nakayama finds yet another pattern in astronomy. Jesuit missionaries introduced the European science into China as early as early as the seventeenth century, but their data and calculation methods could be incorporated without too many problems into Chinese calendar astronomy. The Jesuits thus helped to reinforce the traditional role of court astronomy as a support for the emperor's legitimacy. For two and a half centuries no one ever thought of regarding Western astronomy as “modern” or superior. The main reason why its indigenous equivalent disappeared was not that it was defeated in a battle of ideas, but that it lost its function in society. When the offices of court astronomer and state custodian of the calendar were eventually abolished—not before the late nineteenth century!—the game was up; young astronomers trained in Europe and America soon built up a new discipline in the universities. Until then, however, the imported science had actually served to strengthen indigenous traditions.
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The dissemination routes of Western knowledge were tortuous and unpredictable. An international community of researchers, such as we take for granted
today, came into being only in the late twentieth century. In the nineteenth century, non-European cultures had to acquire not simply existing stocks of knowledge but complete scientific worldviews. Thus, although the Jesuits acquainted Chinese scholars with Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, full translations of the
Elements of Geometry
and the
Principia Mathematica
were not completed until the 1860s.
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At that time, when Protestant missionaries and Chinese scholars were beginning to work closely together on translation projects, there was a preference for compact information in Western textbooks, which were themselves popular digests of previous research. By the early twentieth century, Chinese scientists were nearly always capable of understanding specialist literature in English or German. Their efforts tended to be derided in the West, both then and later, as attempts to catch up that often took them down a blind alley. But a different way of looking at things is also possible. Given the inertia of traditional scholarly cultures, it was a respectable performance to absorb Western knowledge within just a few decades in countries such as Japan, China, or the Ottoman Empire. Only in Japan did the state give systematic financial support. Where missionaries were the decisive agency of transfer, as they were in China, many initiatives remained private.

The challenges were huge, starting with formidable problems of terminology. The adaption of scientific Latin had begun here and there in the early modern period, but by no means always did this result in a stable nomenclature; the terms chosen by the Jesuits were frequently criticized and corrected in nineteenth-century China. As in Japan, several translators might work alongside one another in a single discipline, so that long and ramified discussions were often necessary to reach lexical agreement. In philosophy and theology, in law and the humanities, the difficulties were especially great. Concepts such as “freedom,” “right,” or “civilization,” each with complex semantics of Western origin, could not be represented directly and unambiguously in Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, or Turkish. These cultures had their own no-less-intricate worlds of meaning, so that a new Western concept had to be interpreted within the reception context, where it would nearly always pick up nuances alien to it in the original language. For example, by 1870, Japanese lexicographers and translators were conveying the English word “liberty” by means of four different terms in Chinese characters, each of which added a special sense of its own. Only gradually did one of these,
jiyū
(“following one's intentions without restriction”), became accepted as the standard translation.
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“Science” was another concept over which translators wrestled. The classical vocabulary in China had more than one expression that came close, without corresponding to it precisely: the traditional
zhizhi
signified “extending knowledge to the full,” while
gezhi
meant rather “investigating and developing knowledge.” Any Chinese scholar in the nineteenth century knew that these verbal expressions, both containing the character
zhi
(knowledge), should be seen against the background of twelfth-century neo-Confucian philosophy. From the 1860s,
gezhi
gradually stabilized as the translation of “science,” but also of “natural philosophy.” But then the term
kexue
, imported via Japan, appeared on the scene and after 1920 or thereabouts became the standard translation that it still is today.
Kexue
places the emphasis less on the process of knowledge acquisition than on the categorization of knowledge, especially its curricular organization. When the leading minds of the post-1915 New Culture Movement began to feel that the narrow, static quality of this term did not reflect the novelty of the modern concept of science, they actually turned for a while to the rough phonetic imitation
saiyinsi
. This post-Confucian neologism, devoid of the semantic baggage of centuries past, was supposed to convey the idea of a moral awakening from the slumber of sterile tradition, a renewal of Chinese civilization and nationhood through enlightenment and critical thinking.
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Science in Exchange for Art and Irrationalism?

More than ever before, the flow of knowledge around the world in the long nineteenth century was a one-way street. Western natural science devalued the stock of knowledge about nature in other regions, with the result that there was little or no interest in even Chinese or Indian medicine and pharmacology—which has since been rediscovered in the West and is becoming increasingly influential over the last half century or so. All that traveled in an east-west direction was aesthetic and religious impulses. The knowledge involved here did not have transcultural validity underpinned by verifiable research procedures and scientific criticism. Rather, it offered Asian, and later African, responses to the Western quest for spirituality and new sources of artistic inspiration. Indians, Chinese, Japanese, and inhabitants of Benin in West Africa (where a British “punitive” expedition in 1897 hauled off a fortune in ivory and bronze objects highly valued in Europe) did not propagate their culture in the West. Western artists and philosophers themselves went in quest of the unfamiliar and adjusted what they found to their requirements. Romantic poets and thinkers, such as Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling or Friedrich Creuzer, became excited about Eastern mysteries, and for a few decades the ancient Sanskrit literature, translated into European languages since the 1780s, aroused much interest among intellectuals in the West. Recent translations of the classical books of Hinduism fascinated Arthur Schopenhauer, while Ralph Waldo Emerson, the leading North American philosopher of his time, delved deeply into Indian religious thought, criticized the absolute claims of Christianity and Enlightenment rationalism, and advocated a spiritual rapprochement between East and West.
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