The Needham Question Re~visited

Joseph Needham

As you know from my previous Blog, this October is the 75th anniversary of the New China which started in 1949. I hope you know too that next year is the 60th anniversary of our own SACU, which was inaugurated in May 1965 when Joseph Needham himself gave a speech to an audience of over 1000 at Church House Westminster. As my last Blog explained, since 1949 China has made spectacular progress in Science and Technology, so much so that China now has the most patents in terms of ranking of patents by country globally. By the end of 2023, Chinese inventors had filed more than 4 million patents.

In the light of these two anniversaries it seemed to me like a good time to go back to the question that drove Joseph Needham all through his passionate research both in China and on his return to Cambridge University, the passion which led him to write the 25 volumes of his book, ‘Science and Civilisation in China’. This question has come to be known as ‘the Needham Question’ which he expressed as  “the essential problem [is] why modern science had not developed in Chinese civilisation (or Indian) but only in Europe.”

Joseph Needham significantly changed public attitudes towards China through his meticulous history of the incredible number of inventions which China has contributed to the world, book printing, the compass, gunpowder, suspension bridges and even toilet paper. Indeed, the Needham Question is so important that academics continue to work on it to this day.

In this Blog I will share with you my understanding of two key books which have proposed their own answers to this fundamental question – ‘The Great Divergence’, originally published in 2000, but updated in 2021, written by the University of Chicago Professor of History, Kenneth Pomeranz. The other is ‘Why the West Rules..For Now’, published in 2010 and written by Ian Morris, Professor of Classics at Stanford University. They are both long and detailed volumes and in this article I can only pick out and comment on some key arguments that they make and possibly pique your curiosity to read either or both books for yourself.

Why the West Rules~ For Now

Of the two, I would say that ‘Why the West Rules..For Now’, is the more enjoyable read, although Professor Morris is so determined to give an objective, scientific answer to the conundrum that he assembles mountains of evidence that can at times be hard-going. To balance this he brings the question vividly to life by painting scenes from the 1.6 million years of history that his research stretches over, beginning with the migration of proto-human beings out of Africa, apparently diverging into differing East ward and West ward paths. Of the vivid imaginings perhaps the most memorable is the opening of the book where Morris paints a picture of a London in 1848 where Queen Victoria is kowtowing at the East India Docks to show loyalty and obedience to the Chinese Qing Emperor DaoGuang, before her beloved Prince Regent Albert is taken to Beijing to guarantee British co-operation.The irony of this picture is that it is a reversal of exactly the way the British were exercising colonial power all over the globe at this time, including the looting of the royal Summer Palace in Beijing twice, in 1860 and 1900.

In defence of his own explanations for this history, Ian Morris dismisses other explanations as either ‘long-term lock-in theories’ or ‘short-term accidental causes’. By the former he means the idea that there was no industrial revolution in China because of fixed, unalterable factors such as climate, or geography or culture. Ian Morris goes to great lengths to demolish the idea of cultural superiority on either side, West or East, arguing that throughout history, societies have got the thinking they need. Humans, he argues, are fundamentally the same wherever they live on Earth. In place of ‘long-term’ and ‘short-term’ causes, Morris develops a theory of analysing ‘social development’ by giving progress in different societies a numerical value based on a number of traits: energy capture, urbanisation, the ability to process information and lastly the ability to wage war.

Morris then proceeds to apply his formula for social development to the whole of human history. For a lover of history this is an intriguing journey, but for others it could be rather tedious. From plotting the rise and fall of social development Morris comes to the following conclusions: that from the dawn of history until 541 CE the rate of social development both West and East follows a very similar trajectory, but with the West marginally ahead. Then from 541 to 1774 the convergence continues but with a slight lead for the East. The pattern from 1773 to the modern day shows an initially widening gap in favour of the West, followed by increasing convergence since 1950. Although I’m no professional historian, like anyone who’s watched Michael Wood’s inspirational TV series, ‘The History of China’, its not difficult to conclude that you’d rather live in T’ang Dynasty Xi’an (Chang’an as it was then known) or Song Dynasty Kaifeng than Medieval London during the equivalent times.

Song Dynasty Kaifeng

But what of the Needham Question? How does Morris’ complex formulae help us to understand the period of the industrial revolution in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth centuries? The conclusion reached by Morris is that the critical dividing factor was Geography. He parallels two geographical events, in the West, the opening up of the Atlantic trade routes and in the East, the final settlement along China’s western border of the centuries old problem of invaders from the Eurasian Steppes. These differing realities he argues, set in motion a series of events and thought processes that opened a gap in Science and Technology between nineteenth century Europe and America (the West) and much of Asia. Morris evidences that there were scientists and engineers in China and Japan that could have developed steam and then fossil fuel driven technology. What was different was the level of drive towards industrialisation arising from the challenges facing the differing societies.

The challenges of the Atlantic frontier produced Westerners who clamoured for answers to new kinds of questions…China’s new steppe frontier, by contrast, produced much milder challenges. The well paid scholars in Kangxi’s (the Qing Emperor) scientific institutes felt no need to invent calculus for themselves or figure out that the earth went round the sun’. (Page 564)

I wonder what you make of his conclusion. For all that Ian Morris details the work of thinkers like Dan Zhen and Gu Yanwu who in eighteenth century China were promoting the same kind of observation based, scientific and technical thinking as people like James Watt or Robert Boulton (the pioneers of the steam engine), this still sounds uncomfortably close to a cultural explanation to me.

Ian Morris’ graph of social development East and West

It’s at this point that I think it’s helpful to pivot to ‘The Great Divergence’ by Kenneth Pomeranz. This is a very different reading experience. Whereas Morris is happy to sweep through the whole of human history, the focus of Pomeranz is much more selective. He takes a deep dive into fine granular details of the economic changes in Europe and China between 1750 and 1850. There is of course a cross over with Morris here, because it’s at this time that Morris proposes Western social development overtakes the East. Heroically Pomeranz tries to collect detailed data to be able to precisely evaluate the respective economies of the two areas at this time. To his great credit he understands that both the ‘West’ and the ‘East’ are meaninglessly large areas to compare. At most points in history until the policies deployed since 1950 to distribute the wealth of China more equally, it would have been pointless to compare areas outside China from Guangzhou in the south, through the Yangzi Delta up to Shandong Province in the north with the developed areas of Western Europe, just as pointless as comparing the underdeveloped European regions of Scandinavia or the Balkans.

From data regarding textiles, cotton, silk and the production of other non-grain crops during the period 1750 to 1850, when Morris proposes the social development pendulum swings in favour of the West, Pomeranz finds no significant advantages for either central China or the most advanced areas of Western Europe.

So where does Pomeranz identify his ‘great divergence’? If I’ve understood him correctly, his answer looks in the same direction as Morris, but for different reasons – and that is America. Whereas Morris sees the momentum towards industrialisation coming from a series of responses in western societies to the challenges and opportunities of the New World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Pomeranz focuses in on the economic benefits. His analysis shows that there was a largely parallel ‘proto industrial’ phase of development happening in both China and Britain at roughly the same period in the 1750’s. There were advantages and disadvantages in the movement from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy on both sides.

The critical difference he argues, is that especially for Britain, the arrival at the same time of the new resources of the Americas and the new wealth of Atlantic trade brought in the resources which made industrialisation sustainable. As an example he explains the benefits that sugar, tea, coffee and cotton all produced. These easy to consume, energy giving commodities were well suited to the conditions of factory work. They all had to be imported into England, which meant that industrialisation was critical to manufacture goods to be traded. He argues that the improved military technology of the West at this time was both funded by trade and came about because of the need to fight for and defend trade routes. Moreover, taxes imposed on the movement of goods across the Atlantic brought unparalleled wealth to governments, which could be used for further investments.

Manchester cotton mill

My interpretation of this is that an important part of the answer to the Needham Question is colonialism and empire. These were the goals of most west European countries and indeed of America itself, at exactly the period that both Morris and Pomeranz discuss. In line with the arguments for reparations and restitution we have to acknowledge that much of the wealth which fuelled industrialisation in Britain, France and America was a result of the slave trade. And in the case of Britain we have to add to this the ‘looting’ of wealth from India, which the economist Utsa Patnaik, has estimated at 9.2 trillion pounds. Ironically ‘loot’ is a Hindustani word which entered the English language along with the stolen wealth.

Another part of the answer to the Needham Question must surely be that it was in the economic self interest of industrialised western countries to exactly prevent the start up of industrialisation anywhere else in the world. Why? Because this might have threatened the trade systems they monopolised, with consequent threats to the privileges and stability of their domestic societies. I think a case can be made that this is exactly what we are seeing now. Western countries are trying to take their economies behind protective walls and tariffs as the modern industrial technology of the digital age is being more evenly distributed across the world.

Finally I want to cautiously suggest an extension to the Needham Question. I want to follow the way that Ian Morris extends Needham’s focus on the development of ‘modern science’ to wider questions of social development. Morris has his own formula for the four components of social development – urbanisation, energy use, information processing and the capacity to wage war. Surely these indicators of social development are open to challenge. They remind me of ‘gross domestic product’, the GDP which is widely seen as the key way of measuring the development of a country, but which we now know puts equal value on wealth from polluting industries alongside health-care products.

Changing the metrics might have significant effects on our understanding of the relationship between East and West. Some suggest substituting Gross Domestic Product for Gross Domestic Happiness. Personally, I would argue that ‘biodiversity and harmony with nature’ deserves as much, if not more focus, than the capacity to wage war. Perhaps the adoption of a different set of values might finally lead us away from the competitive thinking of ‘divergence’ and ‘the West rules’ towards histories that prioritise co-operation and common purpose, the wealth of history that we should learn to share.

The harmony of East and West, another way of looking at social development?