An Oceanic Paradigm of Historical Flows

I deepen Needham’s famous metaphor of world scientific history before modern science as different civilizational rivers flowing into the ocean, by exploring whether it can capture more of what we now know about the flows of historical, including scientific processes. Empires and smaller polities have not developed historically, contra the claims of contemporary national histories, as originary events that progress in a linear, tunneled manner. Rather, histories take a circulatory form: emerging in place A, they move to place B, C or E where, interacting with other local processes and structures, they take on a different form and circulate on. Circulatory history does not privilege notions of ownership of historical processes or historical origins which often become foundational claims of sovereignty. Through a few secondary studies, I explore how a methodology of scientific logic was absorbed by successive religions in Eurasia without recognition and even awareness of their origins.