Indian Science and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: Some Contemporary European Accounts c6.7

c6.7

It is in this context of widening horizons as well as the urgent need for materials and processes (partly resulting from constant warfare in which the Europeans were engaged during the greater part of the eighteenth century) that accounts of the kind presented here were written and submitted by individual Europeans to their respective patrons. It is in these European writings of the period (i.e., from about 1720 to 1820), that one discovers the observed details about science and technology as well as about the societies, institutions, customs and laws of various parts of the non-European world. Before this period, the European ability to comprehend this new world was limited; after about 1820, the knowledge and institutions of the non-European world also began to have much less usefulness to the problems of Europe. Further, by the 1820s, most parts of the non-European world are no longer themselves. Their institutions, sciences and technologies are not what they were 50 or a 100 years earlier, and have met the same fate as their political systems and sovereignty. By the 1820s or so, most of the non-European world had become, at least in European theory and most conventional history texts, if not actually in practice, ‘backward and barbarian’.