States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States (review)

While historians of print mainly study the commercial book economy, States of Inquiry turns its attention to an unfamiliar publishing monopoly—the modern state—in a comparative study of British and American government knowledge-production. Oz Frankel focuses on the innumerable investigations, panels of inquiry, and other instruments that mid-nineteenth-century Parliament and Congress used to study populations posing challenges to continuing national order, especially the British poor, freed slaves in the United States, and Native Americans. Frankel compares British and American modes of state publication to investigate the kinds of documents that modern historians still use to reconstruct political and cultural history.

Three of his eight case studies focus on the British state publication of "Blue Books" produced by Parliamentary investigations. Five chapters are devoted to American knowledge-gathering and government reporting, especially on its internally colonized populations. Frankel emphasizes that such print governmentality was by no means panoptical in Michel Foucault's sense. He is alert to the ways the state's intentions could often misfire as the information it produced could be used very differently by readers than Parliament or Congress intended.

Interestingly, Congress began such government fact-finding and publishing far earlier than the British—Frankel dates it to the 1780s and 1790s, a time when the British government was increasingly trying to suppress the circulation of print about social conditions and was imposing Stamp Taxes and other curbs on news as knowledge of the social and political order took dangerous turns in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Only around 1830, he argues, did Parliament become a major source of information for a reading public (although this claim overlooks the statistical research published since 1806 or so by organized utilitarian methods, which were certainly aligned with forces in government). Overall, it was the state's massive investment in publishing social information that stimulated the well-known Victorian transformation in which "the concept of information gradually replaced the term knowledge" (60).

In place of the usual characters who figure in print history—authors, editors, booksellers, reviewers, or readers—the agents of state publication were officials, senators, or other investigators who recruited nameless armies of statisticians, gray writers of official prose, and the occasional maverick student of the social and political motion who might, on the odd occasion, slyly use a device like statistics against the state's own interests. One of Frankel's more interesting cases of governmental intentions going astray is what he calls the defamiliarizing effect that a statistical table could have in certain hands. Robert Dale Owen—son of the utopian reformer Robert Owen of New Lanark fame—was instrumental in producing the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission report on the state of the "colored population" after the American Civil War. For his part, Owen estimated in the Commission's report that about three million slaves had died crossing the Atlantic, a statistic vivified by his reminder that this was also the population of the thirteen colonies at the beginning of the American Revolution. Frankel notes that "he also computes—rather speculates—that the number of Africans who were taken as slaves were thirty-one million, which happened to be the size of the U.S. population in the mid 1860s" (216). This and other indications of "contingent similarity (or identity) of size" (216) could turn statistics-in-print into a rhetoric of empathic imagination and thus bridge the gulf between government numbers and a public too bewildered to grasp their human import. Still, Frankel does not overstate the modesty of such adroit subversions of the state's will to control populations. At one point, he differentiates these subtle push-backs in the governmental literature from the bolder acts projected by Michel de Certeau in "Reading as Poaching" (a chapter of The Practice of Everyday Life [1985]). Unlike de Certeau's free-style, nomadic...