DECOLONIZING SCIENCE AND RETHINKING THE GLOBAL HISTORY OF KNOWLEDGE

The history of science is often told as a triumph of European minds, culminating in the modern scientific age we live in. However, historian James Poskett, Reader in the History of Science and Technology at the University of Warwick, challenges this Eurocentric narrative by highlighting the crucial and historically overlooked contributions of scholars from the Islamic world, Asia, and beyond.

In this interview, we speak about how history and historiography shapes our worldview and understanding of scientific progress. Should textbooks be rewritten to reflect a more global perspective? Which scientific breakthroughs from the East have influenced modern science without receiving due recognition? And as AI continues to redefine how we process knowledge, could ancient wisdom from non-Western traditions help bridge the gap between technology and humanity?

James Poskett (JP): I suppose there wasn't one single moment. It was more that I kept coming across specific individual episodes that seemed to suggest that there was a worthwhile story to tell about the history of science outside of Europe. For decades, historians have written about the history of science in China or the history of science in Mexico or sub-Saharan Africa. But what I wanted to do is to show that those individual stories weren't exceptions to the rule—they were part of this bigger picture.

I began to do that when I was doing a PhD in the history of science and later, while lecturing on this subject and teaching in history departments in various universities. That’s when I really wanted to find a way to connect all these stories from around the world, which I believe was possible.

JP: I think this is largely due to nationalism, both in Europe and elsewhere, and the legacies of colonialism and the Cold War. You see, it was really during the Cold War that the idea of the separation between East and West became fully ingrained in people's consciousness and in the history of science and the world of science. The idea was that there was some kind of fundamental difference between science in the West, which was free and liberal, and science in the East, which was controlled and backward—that, of course, wasn't true.

In the nineteenth century, before the Cold War, there were many colonial scientists and historians, particularly in the British and French empires, who believed that ancient civilizations might have had advanced science. They talked a lot about the medieval Islamic world and ancient China. But they refused to believe that modern eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Asia had science, which, again, was not true.

A lot of these ideas of science being purely European came first out of colonialism and then Cold War propaganda. Today, they are still popular because of nationalism, which is on the rise again across the world—and, of course, it’s very attractive to think that your country, your culture, and your society were the place that modern science came from. But there is no single place that modern science came from.

JP: Decolonizing science can mean lots of things, and some of them can be quite superficial. But at its core, it’s about addressing the legacies of colonialism in the world of science. Step one of that is getting the history right. I don’t think we can address issues like who gets to become a scientist, what language science is written in, and which kinds of ideas are taken seriously unless we recognize, specifically, how different places were affected in different ways by colonialism in the world of science.

JP: The biggest ‘wow’ moment for me was looking at the diagrams of astronomical calculations made by a thirteenth-century Persian astronomer and then comparing them to the diagrams made by the famous fifteenth-century European Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Two centuries between them, physical worlds apart—one in Persia, one in Europe—and yet, the diagrams are essentially the same. They are even labeled the same way.

Some experts on Islamic astronomy had pointed this out earlier, but when I saw it, it really clinched it for me that there was a concrete connection between Islamic and European science in the period we think of as the scientific revolution. Not just in the medieval period, but really at the height of the scientific revolution, with this figure, Nicolaus Copernicus, who argued that the sun was at the center of the universe. He knew about the astronomical and mathematical techniques coming from Persia, from this astronomer named Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. That was really exciting for me.

JP: A lot! First, the term ‘Islamic Golden Age’ can sometimes be unhelpful because it's a term that, on the one hand, rightly celebrates the amazing science being done in the Islamic world in the medieval period, particularly in places like Baghdad in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries. But also, as I tell my students, if you hear the term ‘Golden Age’, you should be a bit suspicious because it implies that there was once a great civilization and then it implies that's not the case anymore, right? So the term ‘Golden Age’ was actually first coined by French, and later British, colonial historians, people who were colonizing places like Egypt and looking to expand their influence in the Ottoman Empire. And they were the ones who first developed the narrative that medieval Islamic science was wonderful and amazing, but had since declined. So that's why I'm a bit suspicious of the term, because my book Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science shows that Islamic science made huge contributions from the seventeenth century right until the twenty-first century.

There is a really strong link between science and religion across the world through much of history, and that applies as much to Islam as it does to other religions. So a lot of Islamic science was motivated, like many religions, by the idea of understanding the world that God had created was itself a religious kind of act. It was also motivated by a very strong tradition in the Quran and the Hadith, in which the pursuit of knowledge is itself a religious undertaking. So, again, there's quite a strong tradition in Islam of seeing the pursuit of knowledge as something that is not just a kind of useful thing, but something that is pious as well.

Also, in various different Islamic traditions—it works differently in Shia and Sunni Islam—there is a quite strong idea about continually returning to the past, renewing the religion. This process of renewal wasn’t just about knowing the texts or interpreting the Quran; it also involved knowledge of the stars, the planets, mathematics, natural history, and so on. All of this was seen as essential to continually renewing our understanding of God’s creation. So there were many ways in which science and Islam were—and still are—deeply connected.

JP: I don't think that’s to do with the lack of sources because there are lots of sources for Central Asian history, spanning centuries and even millennia, preserved in multiple languages and covering various empires—from the Mongols to the Russian Empire and the Soviet era.

The real challenge is visibility. Сertain regions of Asia, particularly China and India, receive significant historical attention. However, Central Asia—especially countries like Kazakhstan and the broader heartlands of the region—remains underrepresented in global historical narratives, including the history of science.

This is partly due to a lack of awareness outside the region. Central Asia is often misunderstood, not as a rich cultural and intellectual center but as an empty space or a post-Soviet geopolitical construct. This perception reflects a broader global bias.

That said, the real challenge lies in investment. Expanding opportunities for Central Asian historians, particularly historians of science, is crucial. They need access to the necessary resources and training to contribute to this field. Language proficiency is another barrier. Researching medieval Central Asian science often requires knowledge of Persian or Arabic in addition to modern languages. Training in these languages and access to relevant archives are already scarce in Europe, let alone in other parts of the world.

Ultimately, recognizing Central Asia’s contributions to science and history requires greater investment in academic research outside of elite universities in Europe and North America.

JP: I suppose the history of the Mongols is perceived differently in different places. And traditionally—again, perhaps during the Cold War—the Mongols were seen as purely destructive. So maybe that’s why you’re asking this question. The idea is that the Mongols arrived as a particularly destructive force that wiped out civilizations. But I don’t think that’s entirely true. 

The sources are more difficult to interpret, but in different ways, the Mongols did engage with certain fields of science, such as medicine, astrology, and astronomy. And when they conquered places, they were quite good at doing what many successful empires did at the time: adopting the customs of the regions they took over, particularly once they began to settle. This is exactly what happened in China. The Mongols conquered the Song dynasty, and what did they do? They established the Yuan dynasty and became Chinese emperors. And in fact, during this period, you see remarkable interactions between Islamic and Chinese science. 

Similar things happened in other regions as well. Sometimes, when the Mongols invaded a place, it created opportunities for new centers of knowledge to emerge. For example, they invaded Baghdad in the thirteenth century, and yes, that was a devastating event. The same happened in Persia. But after that, another wave of cultural exchange followed. 

A lot of what I talk about in my book focuses on these cultural interactions, and I don’t believe the Mongols can be blamed for everything. They certainly had a massive impact, but I don’t think their conquests were the direct or sole cause of any supposed decline in Central Asia. 

I think the bigger issue is, as I mentioned earlier, how Central Asia has been historically overlooked. And beyond that, there were more immediate geopolitical factors—the expansion of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, the rise of Qing China, and later Republican China. The political developments of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in my view, had a much greater effect on Central Asia than the Mongols did.

JP: Well, I'll go for:

• Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, who developed something called the Tusi couple, which was a special mathematical technique that was used by the European astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus in the fifteenth century.

• Jagadish Chandra Bose, who was a nineteenth-century Bengali scientist from India, who gave one of the first public demonstrations of radio waves.

• Hideki Yukawa, who was a Japanese physicist in the twentieth century, who discovered a fundamental particle called the meson. 

So these are three scientists from outside of Europe who made amazing contributions to science.

JP: You're right, sometimes science seems to make us disenchanted with the world. Actually, that was a major concern that people had around the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. So this isn't the first time technology has come along, and people have said, ‘Oh no, we're disconnected from nature, we're kind of disconnected from our spiritual side.’ That was the case in Britain during the Industrial Revolution, but in places like Japan and later even in India, people felt that kind of disconnect.

As a historian, I don't like the idea that non-European science is more spiritual and Western science is more materialist. This, again, is a kind of hard-and-fast distinction that comes out of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I actually think that though Western scientists might often pretend otherwise, if you look at the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was a lot of enchantment with the world as well 

And my interest in science is motivated by that more philosophical and spiritual side of things. That said, I think the history of different scientific traditions is a good place to look for that, precisely because even in the period of really modern science in the twentieth century, if you look at some of these scientists, they are motivated by religious and spiritual concerns, both in the East and the West.

So you get committed Buddhist biologists who are making really important contributions to understandings of evolution because they have this particular conception of nature drawn from Buddhist teachings. Or you have leading Indian scientists who see their work within a kind of cosmic Hindu framework.

aving a better understanding of all the different traditions of science is a great way to counter feeling disenchanted with the world and seeing science as purely about the material, technological world in which humans don’t matter.

JP: It definitely works for other aspects of culture, like philosophy, for example. Sometimes, I think I could have written this book about philosophy and how philosophies around the world—like Neo-Confucianism and religious philosophies—all interacted.

Art, I think, is a great field to think through as well. Non-Western art has been recognized a lot more than non-Western science over the past fifty to sixty years. But you’re right that there’s a kind of canon of modern European art, which traditionally was seen as coming out of the same period as modern science like the Renaissance, etc. And this was considered ‘modern’, often in contrast to what was seen as the more ‘primitive’ art of the rest of the world. I think the reasons for that are the same—colonialism, the Cold War, and the separation between East and West narratives that were politically powerful but not really grounded in reality.

I suppose art is different because it is more obviously subjective, more obviously reflective of different cultures. But there are parallels too, particularly in the global art market. Art is about money, and today science is also about technology and money.

JP: I just wouldn’t start in fifteenth-century Europe. I think it’s the starting time and the starting place that are the problem. And everything follows from that. It’s a simple thing, but if you say, ‘Right, I’m going to write a history of science,’ the first thing you ask is, ‘Well, where and when am I going to start?’ And for decades and decades, we've started in around 1400 in Western Europe.

That’s the problem. I don’t think science started just there or just then. It’s not that I don’t think Europe is important—of course, that time period in that place is important—but it’s one of many places around that time, and, actually, a little bit earlier, that are fundamental to understanding where modern science came from.

I would like a textbook that starts by juxtaposing a few different times and places together so you don’t get the impression that science is just from fifteenth-century Europe. Nor do you get the impression it’s just from ninth-century Baghdad or just from tenth-century Beijing. I’d want a multipolar, multi-perspective approach in which science is coming out of many places that are connected together.