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The Spread of Western Science

Basalla's 1967 Science paper that preceded his evolutionary framework by two decades and displayed its characteristic features: anti-heroic, attentive to institutional context, and skeptical of triumphalist narratives about Western technological superiority.

Published in Science in 1967, 'The Spread of Western Science' examined how European science was appropriated, translated, and reframed as it moved into non-Western contexts. The paper proposed a three-phase model: non-Western societies first served as reservoirs of data for European investigators, then developed their own scientific communities operating under European tutelage, and finally established independent scientific traditions that could engage European science on equal terms. The paper was controversial in its implications — it insisted that the spread of science was a cultural and institutional process rather than a triumph of Western rationality — and it displayed the characteristic features of Basalla's mature work two decades before The Evolution of Technology would fully articulate them.

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The paper's lasting contribution is methodological. By treating the spread of science as a social and institutional process rather than as the natural diffusion of self-evidently correct knowledge, Basalla established the framework he would later apply to technology. The same analytical moves — attention to institutional context, skepticism of triumphalist narratives, insistence on the complexity of the process — would animate his account of how artifacts evolve. The 1967 paper is the prequel to The Evolution of Technology, displaying in nascent form the intellectual commitments that the 1988 book would develop into a general theory.

Key Ideas

The paper displayed Basalla's mature methodology two decades early.

It treated science diffusion as institutional rather than natural.

Its three-phase model anticipated the more general evolutionary framework.

It was controversial in its refusal to celebrate Western scientific triumph.

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