China, the West, and World History in Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China

Long before the death of Joseph Needham in 1995 at the age of ninety-four, his Science and Civilisation in China was acclaimed as one of the monumental achievements of twentieth-century scholarship. One reviewer greeted the first volume in 1954 by declaring that Needham's project represents "perhaps the greatest single act of historical synthesis and intercultural communication ever attempted by one man." 1 When the twenty-eighth and last text in the series comes out sometime in the next ten years, the volumes will provide an encyclopedic survey of Chinese achievements in almost all areas of science and technology--physics, astronomy, metallurgy, chemistry, botany, agriculture, biology, language, geology, ceramics, and sericulture. 2 [End Page 265] Nothing like it exists for the history of Europe, and, given the special conditions that produced Needham's masterwork, it is unlikely that there ever will be.