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The Spread of Western Science
Basalla's 1967 <em>Science</em> paper that <strong>preceded his evolutionary framework by two decades</strong> 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.
In The You On AI Field Guide
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
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