Toby Huff

Toby E. Huff (born April 24, 1942) is an American academic and emeritus professor at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He was born in Portland, Maine. He was trained as a sociologist but has research interests in the history, philosophy and sociology of science. He has published Weber-inspired studies of the Arab and Muslim world, as well as China, including field work in Malaysia. He is best known for his book ''[https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/rise-of-early-modern-science/9B29A8E0D238FC9F842E18582BF47C88 The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West]''. Now in a third edition, it has been translated into Arabic (twice), Chinese, Korean, and Turkish. His explanation of the cultural and scientific divergence between Arabic/Islamic and European science in the medieval period has been widely influential, especially among economic historians such as Richard Lipsey, Jan Luiten van Zanden, Peer Vries, among others.

Huff’s sociological approach to the European development, its legal transformation, along with the rise of the universities and modern science has been incorporated in several mainstream history texts. Provided by Wikipedia