As an addict of Telugu media, I found the notable civil activist Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd's interviews difficult to miss. He gasconaded about whom he considered the real scientists and engineers of India - the Shudras. As against the Vaishyas - the merchants and the highly elitist Brahmins, the Shudras and untouchables had made astounding contributions, the barber's blade and the butcher's knife and so on. What then had the Brahmins done - Aryabhatta, Kanada, and Shushruta and suchlike? Ilaiah wou

As an addict of Telugu media, I found the notable civil activist Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd's interviews difficult to miss. He gasconaded about whom he considered the real scientists and engineers of India - the Shudras. As against the Vaishyas - the merchants and the highly elitist Brahmins, the Shudras and untouchables had made astounding contributions, the barber's blade and the butcher's knife and so on. What then had the Brahmins done - Aryabhatta, Kanada, and Shushruta and suchlike? Ilaiah would respond to this, fairly instinctively that they were rationalisers, men who cooked up abstractions and thinkers who did little engagement with the actual world. Conner shows in this decisively provocative book that Faust had echoed similar ideas and responded to the Gospel - in the beginning was the deed.



That in short is Clifford Conner's thesis in his subaltern version of science's history. He seeks to show how the love for drawing principles in explaining the natural world, that inescapable platonic want might be fine but categorically impossible without working with materials. And who works with materials? - the workers of course, Plato's producers and Marx's proletarians. The scientists and the other hand were elites with much leisure. Conner's is not an entirely chronological history. He focuses on particular junctures in science (or as we are told in western historiography) and important theses that have been posited and tries to offer antitheses to them and in some cases, nuance the thesis itself to give voice to the suppressed.



These moments are broadly: the neolithic revolution (is it the agricultural societies that are inclined to be scientists?), the Greeks (all natural philosophy and science emerged from Hella we are told), the age of exploration (does Henry the Navigator really deserve the epithet?), the Scientific Revolution and aftermath (was it a revolution and as he asks who was victorious - a question that is usually levelled against the French revolution), industry and capitalism (Marx and the chartists may come in), the present.



It is an uneven history in that Conner is interested in earlier periods than post-enlightenment developments. For instance, he comes in defence of the hunter-gatherer. The hunter-gatherer has his own sciences and technologies. The Amerindians apparently had an indigenous study of cartography and cosmology. That had had an independent cure to scurvy and could even cure small pox. He furnishes great details from very many studies of different extinct civilisations and surviving 'primitive societies'. In the Greek realm of course, he has the archenemy of his thesis - Plato making dismissal very easy. He finds to the Greeks as alternatives Arabs (but they too held as their grandfather, Aristotle an elitist to be sure) and to them the Hindus and to all, the Chinese. The Chinese to his fortune had recorded some of its smiths and weavers (he ignores consciously, characters like Eratosthenes and Archimedes). He is perhaps most convincing in the chapter on navigation. How could one prince have taught a whole nation of sailors to fare in the open sea? Is the very thought of the assassination of a long legacy of sailing to the sea utterly preposterous? In the Early Modern, Aristotle's descendant is Francis Bacon. Bacon had not just prioritised the collaboration of scientists but put the workers on silent. So Galileo forgot to give credit to the small time engineer who made the lens for his telescope and Vesalius, the engravers and artists who were the underbelly of the renaissance. The other assassination Conner argues Bacon does is give power to the mad voices which accused women of witchcraft and hunted them. How on earth is Bacon, a man funded by James I, be a prophet of reason and a paradigm that he conceived, a revolution? He also conceives in the struggle of sciences, along with classes, politics. Had the diggers won, would the miners have gotten credit? Would Paracelsus who re-envisioned metallurgy in the context of medicine have taken the status of Edward Jenner? Had Rousseau triumphed over the Bonapartists, would romantics have won over George Cuvier and the Academy that placed cold rationality over humanism?



Conner leaves eventually the reader with some mind-boggling facts, anecdotes about some fascinating figures (look up Hugh Plat guys!) and yet too many questions for his thesis to be complete and opens up too many roadways perhaps to make even the thesis confused.



I don't know why I wrote such a long review.