Enjoy fast, FREE delivery, exclusive deals and award-winning movies & TV shows with Prime
Try Prime and start saving today with Fast, FREE Delivery

List Price: $46.99 Details

Save: $13.75 (29%)

Get Fast, Free Shipping with Amazon Prime FREE Returns

FREE delivery Monday, November 13 on orders shipped by Amazon over $35

Or fastest delivery Monday, November 6. Order within 22 hrs 49 mins

Select delivery location

Only 1 left in stock - order soon.

$$33.24 () Includes selected options. Includes initial monthly payment and selected options. Details

Payment

Secure transaction

Payment

Secure transaction

We work hard to protect your security and privacy. Our payment security system encrypts your information during transmission. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Learn more

Ships from

Amazon

Ships from

Amazon

Sold by

Springfield Collectibles

Sold by

Springfield Collectibles

Returns

Returnable until Jan 31, 2024

Returns

Returnable until Jan 31, 2024

For the 2023 holiday season, eligible items purchased between November 1 and December 31, 2023 can be returned until January 31, 2024

Read full return policy

Details

Add a gift receipt for easy returns

FREE delivery November 8 - 13. Details

Select delivery location

Used: Good | Details

Sold by Better World Books: West

Access codes and supplements are not guaranteed with used items.

Have one to sell?

Sell on Amazon

Follow the author

Toby E. Huff

The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West 2nd Edition

by Toby E. Huff (Author)

4.5 10 ratings

See all formats and editions

Price

New from

Used from

Hardcover

"Please retry"

$28.29

—

$28.29

Paperback

"Please retry"

$33.24

$7.99

There is a newer edition of this item:

The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West
$39.99
(5)
In Stock

{"desktop_buybox_group_1":[{"displayPrice":"$33.24","priceAmount":33.24,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"33","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"24","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"YgsDx%2FGnEYbEsJnSe3yAkAZW%2FjUI7BrPBBfNF469GoEOg0bWaalX4mN%2BRs8IbrDfkw89R5VZfvDld8akKbK4Ej1I2ROR06w9yPo5T7zpjo5MHv%2BaQHhOAMfra90xTkTE2Hk0gKVdiCzacZmI8syAI16jrLHABrBdHOQTq%2BsCUEmuTeIq2C4Sog%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"NEW","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":0}, {"displayPrice":"$10.87","priceAmount":10.87,"currencySymbol":"$","integerValue":"10","decimalSeparator":".","fractionalValue":"87","symbolPosition":"left","hasSpace":false,"showFractionalPartIfEmpty":true,"offerListingId":"YgsDx%2FGnEYbEsJnSe3yAkAZW%2FjUI7BrPMJqOkIXEiStuILLG8RdtKCzDAKInc7UDPDXBpHy56Mlk6zb7k%2BJej1VduhFQw6QPnx3dym5M5jevYuFvCh4HGALoPkaZgKdT6WghiFZtxeQqQOyNtOpDkWFDhjnp2GcdBmDISfou4F%2FBfP7TQO0dvA%3D%3D","locale":"en-US","buyingOptionType":"USED","aapiBuyingOptionIndex":1}]}

Purchase options and add-ons

Toby Huff examines the long-standing question of why modern science arose only in the West and not in the civilizations of Islam and China, despite the fact that medieval Islam and China were more scientifically advanced. Huff explores the cultural contexts within which science was practiced in Islam, China, and the West. He finds major clues in the history of law and the European cultural revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, as to why the ethos of science arose in the West and permitted the breakthrough to modern science that did not occur elsewhere. First Edition Hb (1993): 0-521-43496-3 First Edition Pb (1995): 0-521-49833-3

ISBN-10

0521529948
ISBN-13

978-0521529945
Edition

2nd
Publisher

Cambridge University Press
Publication date

August 18, 2003
Language

English
Dimensions

6 x 1.25 x 9 inches
Print length

448 pages
See all details

Toby E Huff
5
Paperback
27 offers from $28.85
Toby E. Huff
7
Hardcover
38 offers from $5.99
Toby E. Huff
18
Paperback
23 offers from $14.73
Toby E. Huff
2
Paperback
18 offers from $4.38
Toby E. Huff
Paperback
12 offers from $10.99
Toby E Huff
Paperback
16 offers from $17.90

Editorial Reviews

Review

"...Huff provides a thorough, coherent hypothesis and thus helps sharpen the debates on the rise of modern science." MESA Bulletin

Book Description

This 2003 book examines why modern science arose only in the West and not in other civilizations.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Cambridge University Press; 2nd edition (August 18, 2003)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 448 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0521529948
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0521529945
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.33 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.25 x 9 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #2,964,184 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,557 in History of Engineering & Technology
- #3,577 in History of Technology
- #10,339 in History & Philosophy of Science (Books)

Customer Reviews:
4.5 10 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Videos

Help others learn more about this product by uploading a video!

Upload your video

Important information

To report an issue with this product, click here.

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Toby E. Huff

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Toby E. Huff was born in Portland, Maine and has been living in the Boston area since 1960. His interest in big questions in the philosophy and history of science led to a life long interest in the problems of Arabic-Islamic science and the question of why modern science developed only in the West. These interests resulted in two major studies, The Rise of early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West (1993), and Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution (2010). The former book was chosen as the Alternative Selection of the Library of Science Book-of-the-Month Club in 1994. While doing research on Islam, science and development, Huff lived in Malaysia and also visited Indonesia, Morocco, Tunisia, and Syria. He taught courses on Women and Islam at UMass Dartmouth for a many years. He is currently a Research Associate in the Dept. of Astronomy at Harvard University.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5

10 global ratings

3 star

0%

2 star

0%

1 star

0%

How customer reviews and ratings work

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Mark Tier

The retreat of Christianity in the face of science and religion (among many other things!)

Reviewed in the United States on March 20, 2012

Verified Purchase

The book chronicles the retreat of Christianity from pure faith (and Islamic-style fundamentalism) in the face of reason and science. Huff explains how and why it happened in the west--and NOT in Islamic countries, Eastern (Byzantine) Christianity, or in China.

Arab scholars preserved and extended Greek thought -- yet Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras and other Greek thinkers had no impact in the Islamic or Byzantine Empires (where the language of Aristotle was the language of everyday life).

Huff exhaustively establishes the reasons why western Europe was different. There were many factors, the most significant being:

THE CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF FREE WILL, and the corollary that man has a conscience, which has no counterpart in Islam. In Christianity, the human being is free to choose his own destiny -- admittedly, between the narrow choices of heaven or hell. A corollary is the principle of secondary causation: when you hit the white billiard ball which strikes a red one, the movement of the red ball is caused (secondarily) by the action of the white. In Islam, there is no secondary causation: everything, including the movement of the red billiard ball, is caused by Allah.

THE SEPARATION OF STATE AND CHURCH: After the collapse of the western Roman Empire, Europe still had its monopoly Catholic church, centered in Rome, which was occasionally divided by dissension; but political power was fragmented between dozens of kingdoms and tiny principalities. Thus, temporal and spiritual power were separated, and competed for power. In Islam (and the Byzantine Empire) the Caliph was the ruler of both church and state, and the law of the state was the law of the church, and vice versa.

THE "UNIVERSITAS" AND THE REDISCOVERY OF ROMAN LAW: The rediscovery of Roman Law led to the idea of regular, universal laws, the codification of civil and canon (church) law, and the universitas, or corporation. Unlike today's corporation, the universitas was a cross between a guild and a mini-state: it could make laws binding its members which had equal force with the laws of the state and church. One profession that established the universitas was that of teachers, the result being the University, which became yet another center of power, jealously guarding its legal privileges against both church and state. No equivalent to the flourishing universities of Oxford, Paris, and Bologna existed anywhere else on earth. They became transmitters of knowledge: a certificate from one university was recognized by others. In the Islamic world, a student could learn from an individual teacher, but if he changed teachers he would usually have to begin again. In any event, to Muslims everything was (and still is) to be found in the Koran, so any other source of knowledge was seen to be unnecessary, if not dangerous to the health of state and society. Such independent scholars as did exist did so on sufferance, or thanks to the (usually temporary) protection of a relatively-open-minded ruler.

The European universities of the time offered just four courses: Natural Philosophy (mainly Aristotle), Medicine, Law, and Theology. Natural Philosophy was the prerequisite for any of the other three schools. One result: Catholic theologians were all steeped in the methods of reason they learned studying the Greek philosophers. The greatest of these was Thomas Aquinas who, so to speak, turned Augustine on his head. (Another consequence, the reaction, was the Inquisition.)

In the process--without, perhaps, necessarily intending to--Huff shows why Islam remains hostile to science and reason (in the same way early Christianity was).

I've touched on merely a few of Toby Huff's work. There's lots more here, as other reviews demonstrate. HIGHLY recommended.

9 people found this helpful

Helpful

posQuant

Good Institutional History

Reviewed in the United States on March 27, 2010

Verified Purchase

Really, it's an excellent read. Well documented. I love books debunking the Dark Ages, showing how they lit the light on the future.

Although it's very "sociological" in the early part, to Huff's credit, he largely succeeds in tightening up the weak definitional / conceptual framework he has inherited from some of his less disciplined peers. Some very weak concepts there. And, though I enjoyed the historical exposition in the intervening pages, I found it strange that he didn't introduce the powerful new analytics from institutional economics (Douglass North et. al.) and economic history until near the end of the book. I would have given it five stars, but for that.

5 people found this helpful

Helpful

matt mahmood

Good read for a historically developmental perspective on science

Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2016

Verified Purchase

Informative, illuminating. Good read for a historically developmental perspective on science.

Helpful

Excellent Source with many details

Reviewed in the United States on January 21, 2021

I found this a well researched book that explains the differences in the philosophical, legal, economical and political fields of a Europe influenced by Roman and Hellenic tradition, the Islam and China that seem to have formed the nurturing framework for the development of science in Europe, but prevented them in other cultures.

Helpful

Sir Lancelot

A very worthy and well researced effort. Enjoy!

Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2010

Not delving into the thesis over and above written above for fear of spoiling the entirety for future readers. Huff outlines numerous aspects of societal advancement, and the causes or hindrances to advancement, reflective towards the creation of Modern Science within the West, Arabic/pseudo-Islamic and Asia societies; namely China. Although over validation of the "Arabic" or pseudo-Islamic society, Oswald Spengler showed the opposite - modern flaw - of Huff within his "Decline of the West". Huff further outlines the various historical cultural, religious and social differences that spawned evolutionary thought and creativity within the West that had not appeared, or allowed to appear, within the East. Huff's work here tends to supply validation to other related works by authors in other fields in both a historical and modern nature like that of Hanson's "Carnage and Culture" or "Intellectuals" by Paul Johnson. Theo-Politically speaking, Huff's efforts show an aspect that provides a foundation to those written by Ibn Warraq, Robert Spencer, Andrew Bostom and Bat Ye'or efforts relating to the historical and modern interactions between Islam and the non-Islamic world especially that of the Arab-Israel conflict as expounded by the fabulously documented tome by Joan Peters' "From Time Immemorial". Socio-Politically speaking Huff's outline of the development of different paths of thought and social progress in the West give credence to the works by such authors as William Gairdner's "War Against the Family" and "The Book of Absolutes", Zygmund Dobbs' "The Great Deceit" and "Keynes at Harvard", W. Cleon Skousen's "Naked Commun/Capitalist", Rose Martin's "Fabian Freeway", Antony Sutton's various works and of course much within the nightly utterances of News Talk Radio host and author of such works as "Death of the White Male; the Case Against Affirmative Action" and "Trickle Up-Poverty" by Dr. Michael Savage. All of the aforementioned deal with the bi-products and influences of Huff's positions stemming from ancient to modern-day problems in realpolitik. Huffs work is a very well laid out and documented effort that suggests the base differences in differing development and advancement of differing societies. A1.

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Mrr

Thought provoking

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 2, 2011

Verified Purchase

I found this book when I was scanning the reviews of another book, The Long Divergence, that also explains why the culture and the religion of Islamic societes stagnated their progress. As and engineer and scientist, I ended bying Huff's book instead. The main idea is that what distinguished Western Europe from the other cultures was the independent universities, and that these institutions were possible was based on the new system of laws ot the West that emerged in the 11th and 12th century. The core of the laws was the corporation, an independent entity that could have rules of its own, as long as it operated under the main laws. Another key item was the separation of the state and the church already in the 11th century. This made it possible to develop the scientific world view independent of any religion. Nothing such existed in China or in the Arab-Islam societies. China was ruled by bureucracy and in principle everything was governed by the emperor and what science there was, it was conducted by copy-pasting the text of past wise men. This, however, did not prevent chinese from developing clever technology, but not science. The problem with the Arab-Islam society was that after 12th century, the balance of power fell completely into the hands of the religious leaders, and the ideologue of Islam prevented or in its strictest form even forbade people from trying to understand nature. Every single thing that happened was moment by moment created by the god so that even causality was thougt not to exist. This was sad, because until 12th century, Arab-Islamic societies were the forerunners of science.

An interesting idea is that the language and writing system that the culture uses also has an effect on scientific progress. In here, it is explained that especially the Chinese language is too ambiguous. It was shown with an example, where a single sentence could be translated to four different English sentences, whose meaning could even be the opposite.

An interesting similarity between China and Arab-Islam was that scientific progress was prevented because everything to know was already created in the past, and the task of the present people was only to understand the past men better. In Islam all that there is to know was once and for all given by god in the Koran, and in China it was believed that nothing could exceed the ideas of the past wise men. In contrast, in the West the idea was that although god had created the world and the laws of nature that told how it works, it was up to the people to better understand the world.

The main idea is close to what I have previously read in literature about innovativeness. There the main idea is that the creativity and innovativeness of a company is mainly determined by its processess and values, not by who work there and what kind of technology they own. The idea of Huff is that the success in early science in the various societies was also determined by the same things, the processess and values, which again were determined by the laws of the society. Although Europe was hopelessly poor in the high middle ages, its rise was made possible by the right kind of processess and values (the laws), that by a lucky moment emerged in the 11th and 12th centuries.

6 people found this helpful

1931

If you are after academic detail you may appreciate this read

Reviewed in Canada on February 22, 2015

Verified Purchase

Huff does focus almost exclusively on Islam and the west with sidebars to China.
Not a bad thing...Huff is likely more acutely aware of the history of Islam/middle East than that of China.
That fact,of which I may be right or wrong, doesn't really get in the way of the points he is trying to underscore.

If you are after academic detail you may appreciate this read.

See more reviews

Image Unavailable

Follow the author