Authoritative and highly accessible account of how and why modern science arose in Europe through sustained comparison with other civilisations.

H. Floris Cohen studied history at Leyden University. He is Professor of Comparative History of Science at Utrecht University, where he serves as the Editor of the History of Science Society (journal: Isis). He first explored the rise of modern science by way of writing Quantifying Music (1984), and examined how other historians conceived of the rise of modern science in The Scientific Revolution: A Historiographical Inquiry (1994). He solved the problem of how modern science arose in How Modern Science Came Into the World: Four Civilizations, One 17th-Century Breakthrough (2010), of which the present volume is a shorter version, written in a different tone of voice for a larger academic public.

Introduction: the old world and the new; 1. To begin at the beginning: nature-knowledge in Greece and China; 2. Islamic civilization and medieval and Renaissance-Europe; 3. Three revolutionary transformations; 4. A crisis surmounted; 5. Expansion, threefold; 6. Revolutionary transformation continued; Epilogue: a look back and a look ahead; Timeline 1: pre-1600; Timeline 2: 1600-1700; Literature; Provenance of quoted passages; Index.