Scientific Aspects of European Expansion

Traditional models of the 'spread of Western science', informing and colonising the world, are rejected in the papers included here. Presenting the most significant interpretative problems in its field, some chapters demonstrate that European states did indeed use science overseas as a way to increase their power and this interpretation can be applied even to the history of cartography; others show how Amerindian knowledge of geography contributed heavily to North American mapping. Examples of Ayurvedic and Arabic medical expertise with tropical diseases, Chinese astronomy and Ottoman science illustrate the cultural dimensions of scientific interactions: a two-way interchange took place in this period, with other cultures often rejecting major sections of the Western scientific and medical canon.