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.