Power, Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England (review)

The role of expertise in modern society has never been more central or, indeed, more questioned. Eric Ash's important and wonderfully illustrated book joins a growing historiography seeking to trace the foundations of expertise and, especially, the impetus underpinning its rise. For Ash, a key moment in this transition takes place in Elizabethan England, which immediately reverses the traditional timeline and emphasis by many historians on the second half of the seventeenth century. Despite the author's inclusion of numerous European experts—from Prussian miners and Dutch hydraulic specialists to Spanish navigators—his book does retain, however, the traditional and familiar Anglocentric emphasis on the birth of the modern.

Ash's understanding and use of the word "expert" traces a "shift from an emphasis on practical experience to a more abstract type of understanding" in which his "distinguishing characteristic was his claim to mastery of some rare, valuable, and complicated body of useful knowledge that he could place at the disposal of his patrons" (pp. 8–9). The author chooses to describe this small but growing group of men as "expert mediators" and situates their rise, convincingly, within the context of an ambitious, profit-hungry, and increasingly aggressive early modern English state. Moreover, he demonstrates that the rise of the English expert mediator cannot be separated from the origins and expansion of capital accumulation actively seeking outlets, be they via wealthy merchants, the Crown, or the emergence of joint-stock companies.

The expert mediator arose, according to Ash, because the necessary expertise for investors to manage and monitor expensive projects was not sufficient. He illustrates his argument with examples of copper mining in northwest England, the rebuilding of Dover harbor in the south, and the reclamation of boggy fens in the east. These are exemplary models of historical detective work and Ash deserves a great deal of recognition for this. His chapter on Prussian miners in Cumbria, in particular, illustrates how the lack of an English expert led to mistrust, lies, intrigue, and death. This is all told convincingly and at times amusingly.

At another level, Ash's narrative is a cultural and philosophical story that reveals the movement away from reliance on murky experience and local practical skills towards one that conquers and mutates these to incorporate highbrow scholarly theory. This shift, he argues, made the self-fashioning expert socially acceptable to Elizabethan patrons. The private and lowly world of the practitioner's know-how had to be illuminated, systematized, and re-presented in an acceptable form to socially sensitive superiors. Ash's emphasis here is on the systematization of local, grimy, intellectual labor via an abstract method.

For the would-be expert mediator, the rendering of craft secrets meant a new ownership and control over such property and hence a chance to benefit from patronage. Ash writes that "[t]hey sought not merely to describe but to re-conceive craft practices in terms of abstracted theoretical principles, to organize and codify them textually, in order that they might be more effectively mastered, perfected, and controlled" (pp. 15–16). In this sense, the theme of his book is a familiar one, especially for labor historians who emphasize the elucidation of skill and its redeployment in new production processes or its actual replacement by a machine. Crucially for Ash's argument, the local nature of the craftsmen's skill was universalized.

Another area in which Ash documents the emergence of the expert mediator is in the realm of navigation. Here, the impetus came from ambitious merchants and hungry investors seeking to expand trading routes and snatch some of the growing global trade. He provides a stimulating overview of the experience a traditional pilot needed and the process by which navigational skills started to become increasingly mathematical and dependent on instruments. He charts the transition from the local nature of pilots' experience (practical skill) towards a universal form of navigational knowledge (theoretical skill) that drew strongly from the world's leading maritime country...