Search results

Students of modernization commonly assume that, whatever else from the West may be rejected or modified to fit particular cultural and political preferences, science and technology are essential for any conscious effort to transform a traditional society. Indeed, despite the Western origins of modern science, would-be modernizers in Asia and Africa can reasonably claim that science is now universal. The degree to which it is possessed and practiced in various countries may differ, but in principle the spirit, methodology, and fruits of modern science are cosmopolitan, not bound to any particular culture. They are the legitimate property of all men aspiring to be modern. And from Tokyo to Nairobi all such men have passionately sought to possess them.

In recent years a number of visitors to China have remarked on the rather surprising preservation and even revival of the country's ancient native medical tradition. To Westerners, so accustomed to associating modern medicine with progress and scientific advance, the continued existence of this obviously prescientific art has been one of the more curious anachronisms in the new society. Moreover, for a revolutionary government so firmly committed to science and modernisation, this support and encouragement of traditional medicine has seemed paradoxical indeed.

Among the most obvious and durable monuments to the colonial age in Asia are the great engineering projects which have permanently transformed the physical and economic geography of the continent. Many of these have an interesting history of their own, both in the political and commercial history of the country building them and on the level of international politics. This is true not only for such successfully completed projects as the Suez Canal or the Trans-Siberian Railway, but also for great schemes which were never realized. In Southeast Asia the long-discussed Kra Canal is the most famous instance of the latter, but it is not unique. Throughout most of the second half of the Nineteenth Century the British Government and especially the British business community dallied with the idea of a rail link between the Bay of Bengal and the interior provinces of China. Those familiar with the building of the Burma Road will understand the enormous engineering problems involved in such a plan. But for most of the Nineteenth Century geographic knowledge of Southeast Asia was extremely vague and the lure of a several thousand mile shortcut to the perennially fascinating markets of China exerted a strong pull on the imagination of a commercial nation. Ultimately, international political complications and sound economic logic killed ven the idea of such a railway. But the light it throws on government — business relations within the British Empire and on imperial rivalries in Southeast Asia makes the story of the first Burma Road, the one that was never built, well worth the telling.