Recently I read the new book How Progress Ends: Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations, by Carl Benedikt Frey of the University of Oxford, published by Princeton University Press (2025). The book has a section (pages 63-64) that made me think of the Galileo story.
The section was on the Chinese “‘literary inquisition,’* when the Qing government [1644-1912] imposed severe crackdowns on intellectuals”. Frey writes:
Consider the case of Wang Xihou, a sixty-four-year-old dictionary maker who had passed the provincial-level examinations in 1750 and then spent much of his life improving indexing techniques for a new dictionary. When the governor general and the provincial governor examined his work, they found nothing inappropriate. But when the case was passed on to the Qianglong emperor [reigned 1735-1799], he decided to punish Wang for not showing enough respect and deference to the dictionary his grandfather, the Kangxi emperor, had once commissioned. The consequences were severe: the provincial governor, who had not aligned with the emperor’s verdict, only narrowly escaped execution; more than a hundred individuals faced investigations; and the publishers of the dictionary, along with those who contributed prefaces, were subject to punishments. Wang himself received the harshest sentence conceivable: nine familial exterminations, including his own. Tragically, all his sons met the same fate, while an additional twenty-one family members for consigned to lives of enslavement.
“Nine familial exterminations” was a punishment meted out for offenses such as treason and involved killing off the offender’s extended family. Apparently, there were a variety of Qing literary inquisition cases in which the families of writers were executed.
Frey continues:
According to the contemporary Chinese poet Gong Zizhen, the fear of persecution left a deep mark on intellectuals and prompted many to withdraw from public life altogether…. Recent statistical analysis of literary inquisitions from the Qing Imperial Archives shows that this wave of repression had long-lasting consequences for the growth of civil society and schooling….
I am sure it did! This was one really serious inquisition!
Despite the title of Frey’s book, what the book is about is what makes scientific and technological progress happen. Frey argues that the scientific frontier advances in places where people with ideas can mix freely with and communicate easily with one another, and there is protection for new ideas, such as through inexpensive and easily-accessed patent systems. Thus, no scientific/industrial revolution was likely to occur with the Qianglong emperor in charge. (Frey also argues that if a country is technologically well behind the frontier, authoritarian governments can be very effective at playing “catch-up”.)
A “literary inquisition” of course brings to mind the Roman Inquisition and “the Galileo Affair”. My opinion is that “the Galileo Affair” had much to do with the personality of Pope Urban VIII. He once had birds killed off when their noise irritated him — and it seems that Galileo, whose telescopic discoveries Urban once praised with poetry and who he had once addressed as “a brother”, had irritated him.
But Urban had Galileo threatened with torture and imprisonment, and actually placed under house arrest. These are not good things to do, especially to a guy you once called “brother”. But no doubt Pope Urban, and the Roman Inquisition generally, never even thought about wiping out Galileo’s family. And the Galileo Affair did not prompt scientists to withdraw from public life in Italy or in Europe generally — just ask my man Giovanni Battista Riccioli!
*Literary Inquisition: 文字獄 (according to Wikipedia — note that I have no particular expertise in Chinese history, writing, etc., so what I discuss in this post is what I gleaned from Frey’s book and from basic internet research).
