Cosmographies for the Discovery, Development and Diffusion of Useful and Reliable Knowledge in Europe and China

This final chapter presents a survey of a protracted, persistent and perhaps unresolvable debate concerned with the roles of cultures for innovation and technological progress over the centuries of widening economic divergence between Imperial China and Western Europe. Until recently the significance of cosmographies (beliefs about the celestial, terrestrial and biological operations of the natural world) for technological innovation has not attracted interdisciplinary support as a relevant meta question to pursue, let alone the cooperation required among several highly specialized sub-branches of comparative history. That kind of history transcends not merely countries but continents, religious traditions, educational systems, ideologies and institutional frameworks promoting or obstructing the diffusion of beliefs concerned with possibilities for the comprehension of nature. My examination of an increasingly extensive volume of literature surrounding the global history of factors promoting or obstructing the development of science in pre-industrial Europe and Imperial China led me to conclude that science and technological change in the West were promoted by local endogenous forces connected to the Reconnaissance, Renaissance and Reformation as well as Europe’s Christian and classical traditions.