According to Benedict Anderson, the historian of nationalism, “few countries give the observer a deeper feeling of historical vertigo than the Philippines.” The history of science in the Philippines produces a similar giddy sensation – indeed, one might easily substitute apparent conundrums of scientific development for Anderson’s strange political and social juxtapositions. For example, after three hundred years of Spanish clerical colonialism, fewer than 10 percent of the local inhabitants were literate in Spanish, yet the Catholic religious orders had supported pioneering natural history and astronomical research, and from the seventeenth century had even sponsored universities in the archipelago.

Greece became an independent state in 1830 and reached its present frontiers after the end of World War II, with the acquisition of the Dodecanese islands from Italy. Before the foundation of the Greek state, Greek-speaking communities expanded throughout a large part of the Ottoman Empire and the Venetian possessions, a geographic area consisting of present-day Greece, the Balkans, Asia Minor, and the Middle East. In this chapter we will deal with these communities before 1830 and with the Greek state afterward.

The main objective of this volume of the Cambridge History of Science is to explore modern science using different frames of reference: national, transnational, international, and global. The chapters in the volume primarily analyze the history of modern science during the late-eighteenth, nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. However, authors were encouraged to explore earlier periods where appropriate, especially when necessary as background. Chapters in Part II of the volume focus on particular national and regional contexts covering all parts of the world.

The Middle East is diverse in terms of language, ethnicity, religion, and degrees of modernization. This chapter deals with a number of predominantly Arab countries, mostly Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, and Egypt, where science was present throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and only episodically with other Arab countries in the region, relative newcomers to science. It also covers three largely non-Arab countries: Turkey, Iran, and Israel, the latter being a special case in many respects. By 2015 the territories under Israeli control actually had a majority of Arabs even though the official ideology of the state, Zionism, stipulated that Israel is a “Jewish state.”

The Maghreb is located at the confluence of Mediterranean civilizations. This circumstance has conferred on the region a scientific and cultural heritage unique in Africa. Maghreb is a foreign word incorporated by the Arabic language meaning island of the west, or the land between the sea and the sands of the Sahara. The Maghreb covers present-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. This chapter focuses principally on Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia from the era of European colonization through political independence.

The national sentiment that had already resonated in the background of the International Geomagnetic Project would, in the following decades, grow into an influential co-determinant of international cooperation: its extension, depth, and stability. During the war of 1870–1 renowned scientists would confront each other in acrimonious debates revealing dregs of resentments and distrust that would never be absorbed completely, the oncoming upswing and diversification of transnational relations notwithstanding. Increasingly aware of their contribution to their fatherlands’ industrial strength and intellectual prestige, scientists were going to reflect more and more on their role in society and their nation’s status in the world.

In writing the history of modern science in Spain, we want to highlight specificities while remaining attentive to the role of global and regional developments. The nation-state is a relevant unit of analysis for at least two reasons. First, as elsewhere, Spanish politics posed both opportunities and constraints for the reception and development of most disciplines, even beyond public universities and state-funded research institutions. Second, Spanish scientists and engineers were relevant actors in the making of the modern Spanish state.

Perhaps the most basic fact impinging on the rise of modern science in Japan has been its relative isolation – geographic, cultural, and linguistic – from the rest of the scientific world. Especially during the years between 1639 and 1853, political isolation was largely deliberate and self-imposed. This sense of difference has provided a basic frame of reference for both Western and Japanese perceptions of the history of science in Japan. Even after the so-called opening of the country to the West (kaikoku) following Matthew Perry’s expedition (1853–4) and up to the present day, many Japanese intellectuals have seen themselves in rivalry with the West, as if in a contest to catch up to, or even surpass, Western nations in the race for scientific distinction.

Historical studies of French science during the nineteenth century have been dominated by three recurring themes that echo the traditional polemical preoccupations of French scientists themselves. First, there has been a focus on the administrative centralization of French science under the aegis of the state. Related to this structural centralization has been a second issue, that of geographical centralization: the concentration of resources, manpower, and influence in Paris at the expense of the provinces. And finally there is the question of the relations between these two factors and a perceived view of scientific decline, or at least of a relative decline, manifested as a sense of failure to maintain the position of international leadership to which the French scientific community has commonly aspired, and even in some cases that it thought to be its due.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, European thinkers created a powerful and enduring new scientific culture partly by forging close alliances with Christianity. Over the following centuries, as European empires burgeoned, science and Christianity spread round the world. Yet historians have only recently begun systematically to investigate the connections between science and missions in the modern world.

A century ago the only scientists in the far southern region of the planet were locked tight in the coastal ice of Antarctica’s Weddell Sea. There the British Antarctic expedition led by Ernest Shackleton was held fast in 1915 by the impenetrable ice that slowly crushed his ship during the long Antarctic winter. Russia and the United States returned to that forbidding area in 1992, capping off thirty-five years of unusual Cold War political cooperation in Antarctica by jointly staffing a research station on Weddell Sea pack ice. Both of these expeditions took place near the only continent without indigenous people or any legacy of effective national sovereignty.

This chapter explores the significance of scientific surveys of national territories in the development of modern science. National surveys have necessarily been linked to the centralizing tendencies of nation-states beginning especially during the eighteenth century. The surveys were considered scientific because they used the principals and methods of empirical physical science, astronomy, and abstract mathematics to produce precise and rigorous results. Surveying and mapping of national territories fulfilled an Enlightenment desire to rationalize and bring order to nature.

When the thirteen English colonies in North America became the United States of America in the 1770s, they possessed relatively few scientific institutions. However, by this time Americans enjoyed sufficient wealth and leisure to support fairly robust scientific communities in Philadelphia and Boston and moderately active ones in Charleston and New York. The most enterprising members of these communities worked closely with the major scientific centers of the Old World while at the same time developing intercolonial ties. Cultivators of natural history established an informal network of correspondents, and the American Philosophical Society, though essentially a Philadelphia institution, reached out to natural philosophers in every colony.

In the early summer of 1914, the Dutch University of Groningen celebrated its 300th anniversary. The students’ representative, Melchior Bos, in an address to foreign guests on the first night of the festivities, reminded his audience of the glorious past of the Netherlands, especially during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Dutch Golden Age. In commerce, the arts, science, and scholarship Holland had then taken the lead in Europe. The founding of the University of Groningen in 1614 had been part of that spectacular flowering of Dutch culture. However, Bos argued, this Golden Age was more than just a memory. His country experienced a new wave of economic and cultural expansion, and perhaps, he concluded, a future generation would describe the period he lived in as a second Golden Age, or even a Diamond Age.

Unlike other sections of this volume, which are composed of groups of countries or regions that are geographically contiguous and share general cultural affinities, this section includes regions that do not as clearly share common borders and that are culturally much more diverse. Nevertheless, common issues do exist. In general this section covers the contiguous region from Africa, across the Middle East and to South Asia. Individual chapters discuss regions that are internally very diverse, and diversity and a general openness to outside influences characterize the regions. But perhaps most important, the chapters analyze regions of the world that are seen as non-Western and that share a common heritage of having dealt with the impact of European colonialism.