- Email: [email protected]
Science and technology in the Industrial Revolution
653
Book Reviews
very different ways. Foster’s prose is elegant, literary, undulating and he is more subtle in his iconoclasm. Lee’s style is aggressive, jabbing and punctuated with harsh wit. Thus his critique is rendered more obviously scathing. Commenting on the suggestion that Ireland’s disappointing economic performance might be due to the prevalence of antimaterialistic spiritualism, Lee concludes that the Irish may have been ‘inefficient materialists’ but that this was ‘not due to any lack of concern with material gain. If their values be deemed spiritual, then spirituality must be defined as covetousness tempered only by sloth’ (p. 522). At times Lee reachesalmost Rushdie-esquelevels of cultural insult. Indeed, one of the few hesitations which readers may have about the book is that its author has on occasions screamed where a whisper might have proved more persuasive. An example can be taken from Lee’s discussion of the scepticism among Irish business peopfe regarding the value of ideas. He cites one explanation of this suspicion of ideas-that it derives from the ~ti-intellectualism of Irish culture-but then proceeds to argue that, ‘Even this may be too generous. Much of the suspicion may be more sub-intel~ectua1 than anti-intellectual. ~ti-intellectualism is too intellectually demanding’ (p. 577)! A further reservation about the book is that in deriding Irish performance Lee sometimes underplays the degree to which English/British performance actually sets the neighbouring island’s failures in a less depressing context. He observes that Britain was ‘the great economic failure of the postwar world’ (p. 359) and later implies that business scepticism about thought can be found in Britain as well as in Ireland (p. 578). But this theme could have been pushed further. Is not a major reason for Irish under-achievement simply that Ireland has remained heavily Anglocentric while-judged by previously demonstrated potential-England/Britain has itself under-performed in the modern period? Links with (and a measure of obsession regarding) England/Britain may perhaps have contributed rather more than Lee suggests to the Irish under-performance which he so brilIiantiy identifies. Richard
English
Queen’s University, Belfast
NOTES 1. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (London,
1988).
Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution, A.E. Musson and Eric Robinson, Classics in the History and Philosophy of Science, volume 3 (New York City: Gordon and Breach, 1989), xi + 534 pp., $43.00, paper. The importance of the nineteenth century, steam power-based, ‘Industrial Revolution’ hardly needs to be argued. That said, the nature of the Industrial Revolution’s importance, the significance of the roles played in it by technical knowledge and by technological innovation, the validity of calling it a revolution, its causes, and its relationships to earlier and later ‘revolutions’, industrial or otherwise, remain open to interpretation. This book examines relevant interactions among technical knowledge, innovation, and their social settings in Great Britain prior to and during the Industrial
654
Book Reviews
Revolution. Although its core is research done during the 1950s-and thus antedates the emergence of the current consensus favoring a social process interpretation of technological innovation by at least a decade--Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution remains, twenty-two years after its original publication, indispensable to an informed appreciation of the Industrial Revolution. That is a mark of a classic, however premature it may seem to label anything only twenty-two years old a ‘classic’. As Margaret Jacobs points out in her brief Foreword, the initial critical response to Musson’s and Robinson’s book was cautious on two, related, grounds. As recently as the very early 1970s there was no broad consensus that science and technology were, as Musson and Robinson unapologetically treated them, essentially social enterprises. The critique of the objectivity of technical knowledge that was launched in the 196Os, and that opened technical knowledge to social-historical interpretation, had not yet been widely assimilated. The critique was still identified by many with the anti-establishmentarian ideology of the period, as expressed in mass protest demonstrations, the flaunting of ‘counter-culture’ lifestyles, and impassioned denunciations of Western culture generally and of science, technology, and reason in particular. Nor had the critique of objectivity generated by 1969 the mass of supporting historical, philosophical, and sociological studies of modern science, technology, and industry that have been produced over the past twenty years. Jerome Ravetz’ pathbreaking Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems, published in 1971, had to wait fifteen years for the recognition it now enjoys, especially among sociologists of science and technology. A second ground for caution on the part of contemporary reviewers was Musson’s and Robinson’s conflation of ‘pure’ and applied science, worse yet, of science and something that, if it was not mere tinkering, was no better than engineering! Today, the putative purity of so-called basic science is understood by many as a mask for the socially conditioned character of the conduct of science, and of at least the norms for validating the content of science. As a result, distinctions among theoretical science, applied science, and engineering become contingent cultural constructs; and treating the three as correlated and mutually influencing loses its scandalous implications. The upshot of all this is that Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution is an eminently current work, worthy of close and critical study. In fifteen wide-ranging chapters, Musson and Robinson defend by detailed illustration the view that industrial technology in the period 1750-1850 was rooted in natural philosophy, that industrialists, inventors, and engineers explicitly located their empirical work in theoretical studies and systematic experimentation, and that natural philosophers were actively, often closely, involved in industrial technological innovations. The authors’ survey of eighteenth century science, and of interactions between ‘scientists’ and industrialists or inventors, is enriched by a focus on figures of the second rank, active practitioners of natural philosophy whose names are found, if at all, only in specialist histories of their disciplines. The authors pay special attention to the institutional infrastructure of the Industrial Revolution, discussing the creation and diffusion of technical knowledge within Great Britain and between Great Britain and western Europe, the education of new ‘captains of industry’, the conduct of business in the new ‘high tech’ industries, and the origins and growth of British industrial engineering. In addition to the expected treatment of the steam engine, the authors examine industrial chemistry, particularly bleaching, dyeing, and alkali manufacture. Throughout, the numerous and detailed citations are a rich resource even for those who will challenge the claim that the technology underlying the Industrial Revolution was significantly science-based. What emerges from a careful reading of these essays isa recognition of how much more conceptually and methodologically complex and multi-faceted modern nature philosophy was, prior to the mid-nineteenth century, than it is commonly depicted as being. Grand theories and mathematical innovations do not begin to exhaust the modern study of
655
Book Reviews
nature. It is only by identifying the latter with the former that one can plausibly contend the modern science and technology developed effectively independent of one another, at least until the second half of the nineteenth century. Musson and Robinson make a convincing case for the self-consciousness on the part of technological innovators of the relevance to their work of the parallel work of ‘scientists’, and on the part of ‘scientists’ of the uses to which innovators wished to put their work. Read together with such books as David Landes’ The Unbound Prometheus Hiram Caton’s The Politics of Progress, and Ravetz” Scientzyic Knowledge and its Social Problems, Musson’s and Robinson’s book helps us to see in the Industrial Revolution the mutual determination of ideas, machines, institutions, and values. Steven Louis Goldman
Lehigh University, U.S.A.
Conscripts and Deserters. The Army and French Society During the Revolution and Empire, Alan Forrest
(New York: Oxford
University
Press, 1989), viii + 294 pp., $45.00, cloth.
It is a commonplace that the French Revolution and Napoleon achieved prodigies of militarisation which became models for the rest of Europe, from the /e&e en masse of 1793 to the remorseless and increasingly desperate extraction of conscripts under the First Empire. But how was it done, at what and whose cost, and with what broader social consequences? And how did those who had to pay the physical and social costs of revolutionary crusades and Napoleonic megalomania respond to the state’s demands on them? This book offers an excellent account of how it was done: recruiting legislation, methods and enforcement are lucidly described, from the euphoric but very brief phase of patriotic volunteering in 1791-1792 through the disguised requisition of the IevPe en masse, which made the young men recruited in 1793 amongst the worst victims of the revolutionary upheaval (there was no legal limit on their term of service), to the open abandonment of egalitarian and voluntary principles from Year III, and finally the harsher, more centralised and more bureaucratic methods of the Consulate and Empire, Forrest brilliantly analyses the tensions between central and local authorities, particularly the endless f~stration of the former with mayors and juges de paix who were indispensable but always susceptible to community hostility against conscription, He uses the issues of conscription and desertion to re-examine the role of the Catholic church first in the counter-revolution and then, by striking contrast, in underpinning Napoleonic militarism after the Concordat of 1801. There is valuable and richly documented discussion of policing which gives as much insight into the troubles of the aging, isolated, overworked gendarme as into those of the draft dodger (insoumis) and the deserter. Exploitation of class differences in rural society was tried, with ingenious but not obviously effective attempts to give richer peasants an interest in facilitating the conscription of the poorer ones. Spies, bribes, agentsprovocateurs, collective punishment, none of them worked very well against the recalcitrance of the remoter communities. The Napoleonic administrative elite was generally far too clever to resort to atrocities, and in the end it was the remorseless application of administrative measures, backed up by the cotonnes mobiles, army units big enough and disciplined enough to intimidate difficult areas, which wore down peasant resistance in the late Empire.
Book Reviews
very different ways. Foster’s prose is elegant, literary, undulating and he is more subtle in his iconoclasm. Lee’s style is aggressive, jabbing and punctuated with harsh wit. Thus his critique is rendered more obviously scathing. Commenting on the suggestion that Ireland’s disappointing economic performance might be due to the prevalence of antimaterialistic spiritualism, Lee concludes that the Irish may have been ‘inefficient materialists’ but that this was ‘not due to any lack of concern with material gain. If their values be deemed spiritual, then spirituality must be defined as covetousness tempered only by sloth’ (p. 522). At times Lee reachesalmost Rushdie-esquelevels of cultural insult. Indeed, one of the few hesitations which readers may have about the book is that its author has on occasions screamed where a whisper might have proved more persuasive. An example can be taken from Lee’s discussion of the scepticism among Irish business peopfe regarding the value of ideas. He cites one explanation of this suspicion of ideas-that it derives from the ~ti-intellectualism of Irish culture-but then proceeds to argue that, ‘Even this may be too generous. Much of the suspicion may be more sub-intel~ectua1 than anti-intellectual. ~ti-intellectualism is too intellectually demanding’ (p. 577)! A further reservation about the book is that in deriding Irish performance Lee sometimes underplays the degree to which English/British performance actually sets the neighbouring island’s failures in a less depressing context. He observes that Britain was ‘the great economic failure of the postwar world’ (p. 359) and later implies that business scepticism about thought can be found in Britain as well as in Ireland (p. 578). But this theme could have been pushed further. Is not a major reason for Irish under-achievement simply that Ireland has remained heavily Anglocentric while-judged by previously demonstrated potential-England/Britain has itself under-performed in the modern period? Links with (and a measure of obsession regarding) England/Britain may perhaps have contributed rather more than Lee suggests to the Irish under-performance which he so brilIiantiy identifies. Richard
English
Queen’s University, Belfast
NOTES 1. R.F. Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (London,
1988).
Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution, A.E. Musson and Eric Robinson, Classics in the History and Philosophy of Science, volume 3 (New York City: Gordon and Breach, 1989), xi + 534 pp., $43.00, paper. The importance of the nineteenth century, steam power-based, ‘Industrial Revolution’ hardly needs to be argued. That said, the nature of the Industrial Revolution’s importance, the significance of the roles played in it by technical knowledge and by technological innovation, the validity of calling it a revolution, its causes, and its relationships to earlier and later ‘revolutions’, industrial or otherwise, remain open to interpretation. This book examines relevant interactions among technical knowledge, innovation, and their social settings in Great Britain prior to and during the Industrial
654
Book Reviews
Revolution. Although its core is research done during the 1950s-and thus antedates the emergence of the current consensus favoring a social process interpretation of technological innovation by at least a decade--Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution remains, twenty-two years after its original publication, indispensable to an informed appreciation of the Industrial Revolution. That is a mark of a classic, however premature it may seem to label anything only twenty-two years old a ‘classic’. As Margaret Jacobs points out in her brief Foreword, the initial critical response to Musson’s and Robinson’s book was cautious on two, related, grounds. As recently as the very early 1970s there was no broad consensus that science and technology were, as Musson and Robinson unapologetically treated them, essentially social enterprises. The critique of the objectivity of technical knowledge that was launched in the 196Os, and that opened technical knowledge to social-historical interpretation, had not yet been widely assimilated. The critique was still identified by many with the anti-establishmentarian ideology of the period, as expressed in mass protest demonstrations, the flaunting of ‘counter-culture’ lifestyles, and impassioned denunciations of Western culture generally and of science, technology, and reason in particular. Nor had the critique of objectivity generated by 1969 the mass of supporting historical, philosophical, and sociological studies of modern science, technology, and industry that have been produced over the past twenty years. Jerome Ravetz’ pathbreaking Scientific Knowledge and its Social Problems, published in 1971, had to wait fifteen years for the recognition it now enjoys, especially among sociologists of science and technology. A second ground for caution on the part of contemporary reviewers was Musson’s and Robinson’s conflation of ‘pure’ and applied science, worse yet, of science and something that, if it was not mere tinkering, was no better than engineering! Today, the putative purity of so-called basic science is understood by many as a mask for the socially conditioned character of the conduct of science, and of at least the norms for validating the content of science. As a result, distinctions among theoretical science, applied science, and engineering become contingent cultural constructs; and treating the three as correlated and mutually influencing loses its scandalous implications. The upshot of all this is that Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution is an eminently current work, worthy of close and critical study. In fifteen wide-ranging chapters, Musson and Robinson defend by detailed illustration the view that industrial technology in the period 1750-1850 was rooted in natural philosophy, that industrialists, inventors, and engineers explicitly located their empirical work in theoretical studies and systematic experimentation, and that natural philosophers were actively, often closely, involved in industrial technological innovations. The authors’ survey of eighteenth century science, and of interactions between ‘scientists’ and industrialists or inventors, is enriched by a focus on figures of the second rank, active practitioners of natural philosophy whose names are found, if at all, only in specialist histories of their disciplines. The authors pay special attention to the institutional infrastructure of the Industrial Revolution, discussing the creation and diffusion of technical knowledge within Great Britain and between Great Britain and western Europe, the education of new ‘captains of industry’, the conduct of business in the new ‘high tech’ industries, and the origins and growth of British industrial engineering. In addition to the expected treatment of the steam engine, the authors examine industrial chemistry, particularly bleaching, dyeing, and alkali manufacture. Throughout, the numerous and detailed citations are a rich resource even for those who will challenge the claim that the technology underlying the Industrial Revolution was significantly science-based. What emerges from a careful reading of these essays isa recognition of how much more conceptually and methodologically complex and multi-faceted modern nature philosophy was, prior to the mid-nineteenth century, than it is commonly depicted as being. Grand theories and mathematical innovations do not begin to exhaust the modern study of
655
Book Reviews
nature. It is only by identifying the latter with the former that one can plausibly contend the modern science and technology developed effectively independent of one another, at least until the second half of the nineteenth century. Musson and Robinson make a convincing case for the self-consciousness on the part of technological innovators of the relevance to their work of the parallel work of ‘scientists’, and on the part of ‘scientists’ of the uses to which innovators wished to put their work. Read together with such books as David Landes’ The Unbound Prometheus Hiram Caton’s The Politics of Progress, and Ravetz” Scientzyic Knowledge and its Social Problems, Musson’s and Robinson’s book helps us to see in the Industrial Revolution the mutual determination of ideas, machines, institutions, and values. Steven Louis Goldman
Lehigh University, U.S.A.
Conscripts and Deserters. The Army and French Society During the Revolution and Empire, Alan Forrest
(New York: Oxford
University
Press, 1989), viii + 294 pp., $45.00, cloth.
It is a commonplace that the French Revolution and Napoleon achieved prodigies of militarisation which became models for the rest of Europe, from the /e&e en masse of 1793 to the remorseless and increasingly desperate extraction of conscripts under the First Empire. But how was it done, at what and whose cost, and with what broader social consequences? And how did those who had to pay the physical and social costs of revolutionary crusades and Napoleonic megalomania respond to the state’s demands on them? This book offers an excellent account of how it was done: recruiting legislation, methods and enforcement are lucidly described, from the euphoric but very brief phase of patriotic volunteering in 1791-1792 through the disguised requisition of the IevPe en masse, which made the young men recruited in 1793 amongst the worst victims of the revolutionary upheaval (there was no legal limit on their term of service), to the open abandonment of egalitarian and voluntary principles from Year III, and finally the harsher, more centralised and more bureaucratic methods of the Consulate and Empire, Forrest brilliantly analyses the tensions between central and local authorities, particularly the endless f~stration of the former with mayors and juges de paix who were indispensable but always susceptible to community hostility against conscription, He uses the issues of conscription and desertion to re-examine the role of the Catholic church first in the counter-revolution and then, by striking contrast, in underpinning Napoleonic militarism after the Concordat of 1801. There is valuable and richly documented discussion of policing which gives as much insight into the troubles of the aging, isolated, overworked gendarme as into those of the draft dodger (insoumis) and the deserter. Exploitation of class differences in rural society was tried, with ingenious but not obviously effective attempts to give richer peasants an interest in facilitating the conscription of the poorer ones. Spies, bribes, agentsprovocateurs, collective punishment, none of them worked very well against the recalcitrance of the remoter communities. The Napoleonic administrative elite was generally far too clever to resort to atrocities, and in the end it was the remorseless application of administrative measures, backed up by the cotonnes mobiles, army units big enough and disciplined enough to intimidate difficult areas, which wore down peasant resistance in the late Empire.