James Poskett:

The history of science is often told as a triumph of European minds, leading to the modern scientific age. However, historian James Poskett, Reader in the History of Science and Technology at the University of Warwick, PhD of the University of Cambridge, argues that this Eurocentric narrative overlooks the crucial contributions of scholars from the Islamic world, Asia, and beyond.

In this interview, we speak about the role of history in shaping our worldview—should textbooks be rewritten to reflect a more global perspective? Which scientific breakthroughs from the East have influenced our lives without receiving due recognition? And as AI continues to redefine knowledge, could ancient wisdom from non-Western traditions help bridge the gap between technology and humanity?

— I suppose there wasn't one moment. It was more that I kept coming across particular individual episodes that seemed to suggest that there was a worthwhile story to tell about the history of science outside of Europe. Many historians for decades 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.

That started when I was doing a PhD in the History of Science and later, while lecturing on this subject and teaching in university history departments. That’s when I really wanted to find a way to connect all these stories from around the world—which I believe was possible.

— I think it's largely due to nationalism, both in Europe and elsewhere, and the legacies of colonialism and the Cold War.

It was really during the Cold War that the idea of the separation between East and West became so ingrained in people's consciousness and in the history of science and the world of science. The idea 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 19th century, earlier 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 18th- and 19th-century Asia had science, which again was not true.

A lot of these ideas of science being purely European came out of the Cold War and before that, colonialism. And today, they are still popular because of nationalism. Nationalism is on the rise again across the world, and 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.

— Decolonizing science can mean lots of things, and some of them can be quite surface-level. 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.

— The biggest "wow" moment for me was looking at the diagrams of astronomical calculations made by a 13th-century Persian astronomer and then comparing them to the diagrams made by the famous 15th-century European Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus. Two centuries between, 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 this 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 that were coming from Persia, from this astronomer named Nasir al-Din al-Tusi. That was really exciting for me.

— A lot. Firstly, the term ‘Islamic Golden Age’ can be sometimes unhelpful because it's a term that on the one hand, it rightly celebrates that there was amazing science being done in the Islamic world in the medieval period, particularly in places like Baghdad in the 8th and 9th, 10th centuries. But also, as I tell my students, if you hear this term Golden Age, you should be a bit suspicious because it implies that there was once a great civilisation and then it implies that's not the case anymore, right? So there is the term ‘Golden Age’ that was actually first coined by French and then later British kind of colonial historians who were colonising places like Egypt, interested in getting more influence in the Ottoman Empire. And they were the ones that first developed the narrative that medieval Islamic science was wonderful, amazing, but then had declined. So that's why I'm a bit suspicious of the term, because my book shows that Islamic science continues right throughout the 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st centuries.

And there is a really strong link between science and religion across the world through much of history and that applies just 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 in the Hadith, in which the pursuit of knowledge is itself a religious undertaking. And 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.

And then in various different Islamic traditions, it works differently in Shia and Sunni Islam, but a quite strong idea about continually returning to the past, renewing the religion. And that too, the process of renewal was something that required not just knowledge of texts, not just interpreting the Quran, but also knowledge of the stars, the planets, mathematics, natural history, and so on, in order to continually renew our knowledge of God's creation. So there were lots of ways in which science and Islam went together and continue to go together.

I don't think it'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.

- I suppose the history of the Mongols is perceived differently in different places.  And traditionally—again, maybe 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. 

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 settling. 

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 13th 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. So 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 and sole cause of any supposed decline in Central Asia. 

I think the bigger issue is how Central Asia has been historically overlooked, as I mentioned earlier. 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 19th and 20th centuries, in my view, had a much greater effect on Central Asia than the Mongols did.

—I'll go for:

1.    Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, who developed something called the Tusi couple, which was a special mathematical technique that was later used by the European astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus in the 15th century.

2.    Jagadish Chandra Bose, who was a 19th-century Bengali scientist and who made one of the first public demonstrations of radio waves.

3. Hideki Yukawa, who was a Japanese physicist in the 20th century, and he discovered a fundamental particle called the meson. So these are three scientists from outside of Europe who made amazing contributions to science. 

— 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 19th and 20th 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 also in places like Japan and later even in India, there was that kind of sense of disconnect.

For me 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 19th and 20th centuries. I think actually, often Western scientists might pretend otherwise, but if you look in the 19th and 20th centuries, there's 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 20th 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.

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

— 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 one to think through as well. Non-Western art has been recognized a lot more than non-Western science over the past 50–60 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—the Renaissance, etc.

And that this was "modern," and this would often be contrasted to more "primitive" art of the rest of the world. I think the reasons for that are the same—to do with 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.

— I just wouldn’t start in 15th-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 say 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 15th-century Europe. Nor do you get the impression it’s just from 9th-century Baghdad or just from 10th-century Beijing. I’d want a multipolar, multi-perspective approach in which science is coming out of many places that are connected together.