TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 947 composed. Essays by Conrad Dale Johnson, Nathaniel Lawrence, and J. T. Fraser sketch out some of this history. Francis C. Haber focuses on the group of Baconians allied with Samuel Hartlib in a description of 17th-century hopes for a productive, and morally edifying, tech nology. Samuel L. Macey describes “Literary Images of Progress” a bit too briefly and makes the extraordinary claim that “Western tech nology may have been founded in part on a rape of labor and re sources, but it has long since passed beyond that state”—as if exploitation and environmental destruction had suddenly ceased (p. 101). Anindita Niyogi Balslev offers a summary of temporal theory in Indian philosophy, including some important remarks on the na ture of cyclic time in the Puranas and epics. Fine essays by Ruth M. Stone and Jonathan D. Kramer on time in African and Western music round out this group of essays on time in the “non-Chinese world.” For me, the most important contribution made by the book is its discussion of temporal issues in Chinese culture—including studies of temporal theory in Chinese science, technology, medicine, philos ophy, and poetry. Though the quality varies, these nine essays, taken in their entirety, constitute a reasonable introduction to the subject of temporal theory and Chinese thought. Other readers may feel, as I did, that too much space (and, yes, time) is occupied with speculations about why China never developed “modern science” (see pp. 179, 181—84), a bit of Eurocentricism that is perhaps not surprising in a volume that generally assumes that “science” is that body of knowledge created in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. In any case, essays by Nathan Sivin (“On the Limits of Empirical Knowledge in the Tra ditional Chinese Sciences”) and Frederick Turner (“Space and Time in Chinese Verse”) are especially good in their suggestion of significant cultural implications of nonlinear perceptions of time. The historian of technology with interests in comparative technological history will want to consult selected essays in this volume as well as Joseph Need ham’s essay, “Time and Knowledge in China and the West,” which appeared in Fraser’s The Voices of Time (2d ed., 1981). George Ovitt, Jr. Dr. Ovlit teaches in the Department of Humanities at Drexel University. Six Galleonsfor the King ofSpain: Imperial Defense in the Early Seventeenth Century. By Carla Rahn Phillips. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univer sity Press, 1986. Pp. xiv + 318; illustrations, tables, notes, bibliog raphy, appendixes, index. $37.50. The discovery of a packet of isolated documents whose trail ulti mately reveals the life histories of six 17th-century fighting ships, from 948 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE the laying down of their keels through more than ten years of service, is in itself something of a scoop for naval history. But when the vessels are Spanish galleons that served both in the New Spain fleets and in European waters, there are certainly grounds for excitement. The galleons, whose construction began in 1625 in the Basque prov ince of Vizcaya, took part in most of the major naval actions between ca. 1628 and the Battle of the Downs in 1639. Their careers thus chronicle an important chapter in Spain’s struggle to preserve its strategic position in Europe and defend its overseas empire, facing the Dutch, French, and English seaborne challenge. In tracking the ships’ fates, however, Carla Rahn Phillips steps broadly out of the bounds of what might have been a conventional history of naval com bat and policy and offers precious insights into the technological and economic factors involved in maintaining an oceanic empire and fight ing a contest for naval power on a global scale. The book presents a wealth of details on ship construction and costs, as well as on outfitting, supply, crews, conditions of shipboard life, pay, and routines of convoy and combat duty. Phillips highlights particularly well the interaction between a shipbuilding technology that, although on the verge of acquiring scientific attributes, remained an empirical craft, and the demands of a vast imperial bureaucracy faced with provincial particularisms, economic constraints, and chronic shortages. The whole represents without any doubt a happy...