The 14th Joseph Needham Memorial Lecture Series - After Needham’s The Epic of Gunpowder

Abstract

Much research has examined the question of why the West leapt ahead of China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (the ‘Rise of the West’), and Joseph Needham set out to answer it throughout his monumental series Science and Civilisation in China. He focused on various issues deriving from his famous “Needham Question.” After him, the California school of economic historians focused on the parallels between the West and the Rest and claimed that the ‘Great Divergence’ occurred as late as the nineteenth century with the advent of industrialization. More recently, scholars have studied the military dimensions of the competition between East and West, especially the transmission of gunpowder technology. There has been significant interest in the West in China’s military history with many new monographs devoted to specific periods of time and conflicts, such as the Great East Asian War at the end of the sixteenth century. Most notably, Tonio Andrade in his influential volume, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (2016), has attempted to correct old mistakes in the interpretation of Chinese military history and to offer some new insights, interpretations, and explanations complicating the question of the ‘Great Divergence.’ This lecture will evaluate the successes and limitations of scholarship on the question of East-West exchanges, comparisons, and mutual influence in military science and technology since Needham published his volume on the ‘Gunpowder Revolution’ in 1986 and will assess the relevance and value of Needham’s work today.

About the speaker

Prof. Robin D.S. Yates started his career by collaborating with the late Dr. Joseph Needham on the second of the military volumes of Science and Civilisation in China. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, he has received many awards and honours over the years. He specializes in the history of science and technology in China, particularly that of military and medical science, and law, and recently has focused on newly excavated and retrieved manuscripts related to his interests. He has published many articles and books on various topics in Chinese pre-modern social and cultural history, including Law, State, and Society in Early Imperial China: A Study with Critical Edition and Translation of the Legal Texts from Zhangjiashan Tomb no. 247 with Anthony J. Barbieri-Low (2015), and co-edited Birth of an Empire: The State of Qin Revisited (2013)".