Explain how Western ideas about science and technology came to dominate in regions such as India and China, where alternate traditions including philosophy, medicine, and religions had an equally rich history of explaining natural law

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: Western science worked. Military technology won wars. Industrial technology multiplied food and wealth. Medicine saved lives. Information systems devised in the West revolutionized communications, business, leisure, education, and methods of social and political control. Paradoxically, the only way for the rest of the world to beat the West, or catch up with it, was to "modernize"—code for imitating the West in science and technology. Second, Western science offered the promise of infallibility: of knowledge that was certain because it matched observation, fulfilled predictions, and withstood tests. Chinese revolutionaries actually called science a faith and represented "scientism" as an alternative to Confucianism. Systematic, continuous Chinese reception of Western science began in the 1860s, at the start of the "self-strengthening" movement. In China, Western science had to rely on its inherent appeal to make headway, except in a few, relatively small urban areas that were under foreign custody or control. Elsewhere, European empires often acted as agents for the spread of Western science. India had a colonial government committed to promoting science and a native intelligentsia anxious to learn. The Indian model—imperial promotion of science, educational opportunities for natives, the emergence of an indigenous scientific establishment—reappeared in other areas of European dominion or influence in south and southeast Asia, in the Middle East, and, to some extent, in the Philippines, which was ruled by the United States. Medicine was the banner-bearer of Western science. Missionaries valued and practiced it as an antidote to what they called superstition and magic. Western administrators saw it as a means to gain favor from indigenous elites and power over native populations who became dependent on Western medicines. From the 1930s until the 1980s, as Western medicine increasingly relied on medication with new pharmaceuticals, which were invented at a dizzying pace, the power of Westerners slashed death rates and helped bring a population explosion to Africa.