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10. Trading Spaces: Transferring Energy and Organizing Power in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Grain Trade
- University of Pittsburgh Press
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151 Trading Spaces Transferring Energy and Organizing Power in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Grain Trade Thomas D. Finger A shared commitment to uncovering the complicated process of recursive feedback is the best place to look for overlap between science and technology studies (STS) and environmental history.1 This chapter centers the process of nature-human feedback on the concepts of energy and power. As certain individuals harness and organize energy from nature, their ability to apply that energy to realize a modicum of power is increased. Often, that power is then redirected simultaneously toward other humans and the natural world. Energy is often harnessed to create power, and that power tends to accelerate the flows of energy on which it draws. This chapter seeks to discuss the relationship between energy and power by following the career of Liverpool’s Rathbone family within the Anglo-American grain trade between 1830 and 1890. I will describe how energy is structured to achieve power, how human networks and technological systems arrange energy and power, and how energy and power are moved around human societies and the natural world.2 I begin my analysis from two central concepts of STS: actor-network theory (ANT) and technological systems thinking. I suggest that ANT and systems thinking describe two different ways of organizing energy. ANT is interested in how networks are formed, why they are held together, and Chapter 10 152 Thomas D. Finger the reasons why they break apart.3 Technological systems thinking helps explain the evolution of complex bundles of human values, institutions, and technology that gain increased coherence over time.4 Unlike actor networks, technological systems tend to become more stable over time as they develop internal dynamic and logic. This is because while actor networks account for the power of material objects to influence human decisions, their internal logic remains in place only as long as the actors accept their enrollment in the network. Technological systems, as Thomas Hughes notes, can achieve a high degree of stability from the “mass” of material goods, the “velocity” of relevant skills and institutions, and the “direction” shaped by generally agreed-upon cultural goals. The “mass” and “velocity” can stabilize technical systems even after a breakdown of “direction.” This process Hughes terms momentum.5 No such force exists to keep actor networks stable over long periods. ANT and systems thinking are analytical categories that both may be applied to describe the same constellation of humans, artifacts, and nature. But there is some utility to establishing a difference based on the internal consistency of the network and their differing reliance on social mechanisms (networks) and technology (systems). Systems thinking assumes a modicum of human control over energy and therefore a greater amount of power over a particular arrangement. Actor networks also represent a way of organizing energy to achieve power, but this way of thinking describes an arrangement that is less stable over time. Both actor networks and technological systems need a steady input of energy.6 Power is the extent to which that energy is applied within particular arrangements by one individual or group to limit the action or decision-making ability of another.7 It is no coincidence that both ANT and technical systems thinking employ concepts from physics—momentum in the case of technical systems, entropy in the case of ANT—to explain their evolution and internal distribution.8 Actor networks break up because they are social arrangements subject to considerable entropy; power is held only when all participants agree to the terms of involvement. In technological systems, power tends to increase over time because human groups organize their activity around technologies that stabilize the flow of energy, thus reducing the energy lost to the system through entropy. Environmental historians can apply the energy-power continuum to explain why certain individuals have greater power than others to initiate environmental change at particular places and times. In this chapter, I use ANT and systems thinking to help explain why environmental changes in the American prairies and grasslands (well documented by environmental historians) accelerated in the 1870s. Beyond explaining accelerated environ- [18.209.209.28] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:47 GMT) Trading Spaces 153 mental change in the American Midwest, this chapter also outlines the ways in which energy and power can tie together nature and social organization. In 1853, William Rathbone, scion of a Liverpool merchant dynasty, steered his family from the profitable cotton trade into the grain trade. In 1884, William’s...