The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable

by Amitav Ghosh

It is a fact, in any event, that exchanges of technology and knowledge accelerated in the early modern period. In the sixteenth century, for instance, innovations in weaponry and fortifications travelled very quickly between Europe, the Middle East and India. The same was true of ideas: early botanical works, like the seventeenth-century Hortus Malabaricus, were often produced in collaboration by Europeans and savants from elsewhere. A continuous cross-pollination of ideas occurred in mathematics too. It is now known that the Kerala School of Mathematics anticipated the work of ‘Gregory, Newton and Leibniz by at least 250 years’; it is by no means unlikely that these developments were transmitted to Europe by Jesuits. Although non-Western influences usually went unacknowledged in Europe, in at least one instance, that of the nineteenth-century logician and mathematician George Boole, they were explicitly recognized. Boole’s wife, Mary Everest Boole, even made the claim that nineteenth-century European science ‘could never have reached its present height had it not been fertilized by successive wafts from the . . . knowledge stored up in the East’. Philosophy provides a particularly interesting example, both of parallel development and of the circulation of ideas. As the philosopher Jonardon Ganeri has shown, the innovations of the Nava-Nyaya school of philosophy in Bengal contain striking similarities to the thought of early modern philosophers in Europe. So rapid was the ...