Cultural History of Modern Science in China

Benjamin A. Elman is Gordon Wu ’58 Professor of Chinese Studies at Princeton University.

• List of Illustrations Conventions Chinese Dynasties Introduction 1. The Jesuit Legacy 2. Recovering the Chinese Classics 3. The Rise of Imperial Chinese Manufacturing and Trade 4. Science and the Protestant Mission 5. From Textbooks to Darwin: Modern Science Arrives 6. Government Arsenals Spur New Technologies 7. The Displacement of Traditional Chinese Science and Medicine Appendixes: 1. Tang Mathematical Classics 2. "Science Outline Series," 1882-1898 3. Table of Contents for the 1886 Primers for Science Studies 4. Twenty-three Fields of the Sciences in the 1886 Primers for Science Studies 5. Some Officially Selected Chinese Prize Essay Topics from the Shanghai Polytechnic 6. Some Translations of Chemistry, 1855-1873 7. Partial Chronological List of Arsenals, etc., in China, 1861-1892 Notes Acknowledgments Index

Elman shows that progress in Chinese science continued after 1600, as it absorbed new ideas from the West, and, for him, China's nineteenth-century failure to respond adequately to Western incursions has been exaggerated...[A Cultural History of Modern Science in China] offer[s] a new and important perspective on Sino-European interaction.