What Did European Science Take From the Rest of the World?

Modern science did not arise from Europe alone. Greek, Indian, Chinese, Islamic, African and Indigenous intellectual traditions long preceded the scientific institutions consolidated in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Colonial expansion then gave European states, universities, museums and companies coercive access to other peoples’ environments and expertise.

What was taken included medicinal knowledge; seeds and living plants; botanical, zoological and geological specimens; maps; astronomical observations; agricultural techniques; languages; artifacts; measurements of colonized people; and human remains. European intermediaries frequently translated this material into publications, patents, collections and careers while naming local experts only as servants, collectors or anonymous “informants”—a recurring form of stolen credit.

The process was institutional, not merely individual. The British East India Company, Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, British Museum, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, universities and colonial surveys accumulated material through conquest, forced labor, taxation, unequal trade and grave robbery. Colonial education simultaneously privileged European classifications over existing systems of knowledge.

Botany shows extraction operating as an imperial system. In India, the East India Company employed Indian collectors, artists, physicians and gardeners to identify plants and record their uses. British-sponsored works such as William Roxburgh’s Plants of the Coast of Coromandel, issued in 3 volumes between 1795 and 1819, depended heavily on unnamed or poorly credited Indian labor. Cinchona seeds and seedlings were smuggled from South America by Clements Markham and other British agents in 1860–1861, enabling plantations in British India; Dutch cultivation in Java later dominated the quinine trade.

“The whole earth is the garden of nature, and each fruitful country a particular paradise.” — John Parkinson, 1629, Paradisi in Sole Paradisus Terrestris

That language of universal availability concealed ownership and coercion. European collectors treated territories and bodies as open repositories. During the 1832–1836 voyage of HMS Beagle, Charles Darwin gathered specimens with imperial naval transport and relied on local guides and collectors, although his evolutionary argument was his own.

Human remains provide measurable evidence. A German government-backed inventory reported in 2023 that 1,130 human remains from colonial contexts were held across 7 surveyed institutions in Berlin. Oxford’s Pitt Rivers Museum stated in 2020 that it held approximately 1,800 human remains. Harvard University’s 2022 report identified remains of more than 19,000 individuals in its collections, including about 7,000 Native American people and 19 people likely enslaved or formerly enslaved.

There is no scholarly estimate of all knowledge taken by European science. Knowledge has no common unit, archives suppress intermediaries, and collections remain incompletely catalogued. Researchers therefore measure bounded categories: specimens, accessions, individuals, publications, patents or named contributors.

Source or project	Figure reported	Scope and limitation
Natural History Museum, London, institutional figure current in 2024	80 million specimens	Global natural-history collection; not all were acquired colonially
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, institutional figures current in 2024	over 8.5 million preserved plant and fungal specimens	Herbarium and fungarium; origin and consent vary
Harvard University report, 2022	more than 19,000 individuals	Human remains only; includes collections formed inside and outside colonial settings
German Contact Point survey, 2023	1,130 remains in 7 Berlin institutions	Colonial-context remains in surveyed institutions, not all Germany
NAGPRA Review Committee data reported for 2023	about 96,000 Native American individuals not yet made available for return	United States federally regulated holdings; institutions include museums and universities

These figures cannot be added into one total: “specimen” may mean a plant sheet, animal, fossil or tissue sample, while human-remains counts may refer to individuals or separate elements. They nevertheless establish scale. Two institutions alone reported over 88.5 million natural-history specimens by 2024, while the listed surveys documented remains representing well above 100,000 people by 2023. These are lower bounds for selected collections, not estimates of Europe’s total extraction.

The best-supported verdict is qualitative but not vague: appropriation was systematic, global and constitutive of imperial science; its complete numerical extent is presently unknowable.

Some historians reject a simple “theft” model because knowledge moved through multilingual networks and colonized experts exercised agency. Kapil Raj argued in 2007 that modern science was produced through circulation and negotiation between Europe and South Asia, rather than merely diffused outward from Europe. Londa Schiebinger’s 2004 study of colonial bioprospecting likewise showed both transfer and deliberate European refusal to pursue certain knowledge.

That scholarship qualifies the mechanism; it does not erase coercion. Collaboration under conquest was not exchange among equals. States and companies controlled ships, presses, salaries, archives, botanical gardens and legal ownership. European naming conventions made Joseph Banks, Carl Linnaeus or company surgeons legible to posterity while rendering many African, Asian and Indigenous practitioners invisible. Restoring those contributors is central to documenting stolen credit.

A second dispute concerns present-day collections. Museums argue that acquisition histories differ: some objects were purchased, gifted or collected through locally accepted arrangements, and natural-history specimens are indispensable for climate, biodiversity and disease research. Those points require item-level provenance, not blanket innocence. A purchase under occupation, punitive rule or racial law may have been formally legal yet profoundly unequal.

Nationalist accounts also claim modern science was exclusively European because the Scientific Revolution occurred in Europe between roughly 1500 and 1700. This confuses institutional consolidation with intellectual self-creation. European astronomy, mathematics, medicine and natural history incorporated earlier Arabic, Persian, Indian, Chinese, African and American knowledge. Colonial education later presented that composite inheritance as a one-way European gift.

Institutions must publish collection-level and item-level provenance, name Indigenous collectors and knowledge holders, and disclose violent acquisition. Human remains require return and community-led care rather than indefinite research access. The United States enacted the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990; revised regulations effective January 12, 2024 strengthened requirements for consultation and consent over displays and research.

Restitution is not anti-science. Returning ancestors, digitizing records under community rules, sharing benefits from genetic and medicinal research, and transferring curatorial authority can improve evidence by correcting false labels and recovering suppressed context. Researchers should distinguish independently developed discovery from knowledge obtained through translators, healers, guides, enslaved workers and colonial employees.

Intellectual-property reform also matters. The Convention on Biological Diversity entered into force in 1993, and the Nagoya Protocol entered into force in 2014, creating frameworks for prior informed consent and benefit-sharing over genetic resources. Their implementation remains uneven, and they do not retroactively repair centuries of extraction. A defensible history of science therefore joins restitution to education: it treats provenance, labor and power as part of scientific evidence, not as optional ethics.

• Londa Schiebinger, Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Harvard University Press, 2004)
• Kapil Raj, Relocating Modern Science (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
• Harvard University, Report of the Steering Committee on Human Remains in University Museum Collections (2022)
• Natural History Museum, London: collections and colonialism
• U.S. Department of the Interior: Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act
• Convention on Biological Diversity: Nagoya Protocol