Relationships Between Early Modern Christian and Islamicate Societies in Eurasia and North Africa as Reflected in the History of Science and Medicine

Abstract

 During the last two decades, it has become fashionable not merely to write about issues concerning the exchange of knowledge between Jesuits and China or the acquisition of goods and knowledge in the Iberian colonial empires, as was previously the case. Historians of science now direct their attention also to other areas of the globe, where such processes took place during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Depending on their specific expertise, they focus on Dutch trade in what is called today Southeast Asia, networks of knowledge in the Mediterranean or in the Transatlantic world or on colonial institutions in the western parts of the Spanish colonial empire. The actors relevant to these broader historical explorations are mostly men from a selected number of states in Christian Europe. The exclusion of most parts of the world, among them many parts of Europe, from these new narratives continues to be their most glaring deficit.1 In this paper, I will highlight the continued, even if at times submerged, existence of Eurocentric views and attitudes as expressed in some highly appreciated publications of the last twenty years.