The Marriage of Science and Empire

Premodern traditions generally assumed that everything worth knowing was already known, contained in scripture or ancient authority. Modern science began with the opposite premise: that we do not know the most important things, and must go and find out. Harari illustrates the shift with maps — medieval maps confidently filled empty regions with imagined lands and monsters, while early modern maps left blank spaces, honest confessions of ignorance that were also invitations to go explore.

Exploration, in his account, was never pure curiosity; it was also a political and economic project. Empires funded voyages, surveys, and scholars because knowledge translated directly into power. To govern a territory, a state first had to count, name, map, and categorize it, so scientific expeditions frequently traveled alongside soldiers and merchants, each enabling the other. Charting a coastline served the botanist and the admiral at once.

The relationship ran both ways. Science gave empires the tools to navigate, to understand foreign lands and peoples, and to exploit new resources; empires gave science the funding, the reach, and the vast new data — plants, animals, languages, geographies — that no single society could gather on its own. The captain who claimed a coast for his king and the naturalist who cataloged its species were partners in the same expanding enterprise.

Harari uses figures like Captain James Cook to show the fusion in a single voyage: expeditions carried astronomers and biologists as well as cannons, advancing knowledge and conquest in the same motion. The scientific results were real and valuable; so were the maps that made colonization possible. The two were not rivals but collaborators.

He connects this to the larger question of why Europe, rather than China or the Islamic world, came to dominate the modern era despite starting from no obvious advantage. The answer, he suggests, lies in a distinctive feedback loop between science, empire, and capitalism: the drive to discover, the power to conquer, and the capital to fund both reinforced one another in a way other civilizations did not replicate.

The applied lesson is that the prestige of modern science should not blind us to its entanglements. The same restless willingness to admit ignorance and seek new knowledge that produced extraordinary discoveries was also harnessed to projects of conquest and control. Knowledge, in Harari's telling, is rarely innocent of the power that pays for it.