Abstract
During the past four decades, Arab countries increased their R&D output between 40- and 60-fold as a result of expanding scientific research.1 I thought it would be useful to reflect on these efforts in the context of international science.
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Notes
For a report on the ongoing debate in Germany on this issue, see Carter Dougherty, “Debate in Germany: Research or Manufacturing,” New York Times, August 12, 2009.
See Alvin and Heidi Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth (Currency Doubleday, 2006), 94.
Gavin Weightman, The Industrial Revolutionaries: The Making of the Modern World (Grove Press, 2007).
It seems that cats became domesticated around 1450 BC and were used at that time to protect granaries in Egypt. See, for an interesting account of the cat in Egypt, Jaromir Malek, The Cat in Ancient Egypt (London: The British Museum Press, 2006), 54–55, Revised Edition.
Research concerning the conversion to steam shipping was already well under way. See Christine Macleod, Jeremy Stein, Jennifer Tann, and James Andrew, “Making Waves: The Royal Navy’s Management of Invention and Innovation in Steam Shipping, 1815–1832,” History and Technology, 16 (2000), 307–333.
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (Allen Lane, 2007).
For example, there was not a single Arab university in the top 500 universities list before 2008. See Said El-Sidiqqi, “Arab Universities and the Quality of Scientific Research,” al-Mustaqbal al-Arabi 350, 4 (2008), 70–93. By 2011 a few Egyptian and Saudi universities joined the top 500 universities in the Shangai list.
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© 2012 A. B. Zahlan
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Zahlan, A.B. (2012). Background. In: Science, Development, and Sovereignty in the Arab World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137020987_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137020987_1
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