Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History (review)

Often when teaching the Industrial Revolution, we discuss a transition from the use of animal power to machinery powered by fossil fuel to reshape the economy, society, and the environment, a transition in full force prior to the twentieth century. This remarkable collection of essays compels us to reexamine our assumptions by exploring several ways in which industrial activity has shaped and been shaped by living creatures over the past two centuries. By doing so, it not only examines important contemporary issues in biotechnology, but also provides valuable possibilities for synthesizing environmental history, industrial history, and the history of technology. This volume is varied, but by no means exhaustive in its scope, making it an accessible and provocative read.

The impetus for this book was a question Edmund Russell asked on the Envirotech e-mail list: "Are animals technology?" The query produced the most contentious and inspired debate seen on that list, raising both historical and contemporary concerns about how the topic blurs generally accepted boundaries in our conceptions of technology, biology and the environment, as well as issues of morality regarding how to treat the application of animals (as well as plants) as technology. The debate led to a Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis conference in 2002 that produced a range of papers on the industrialization of plants and animals. Industrializing Organisms, a Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture volume culled from several of the papers from that conference, provides a range of approaches to the theme of what the editors call evolutionary history. A few papers concentrate on European examples or subjects—such as the use of horses as technology in the Civil War—from the nineteenth century. Most, however, involve examples from the United States in the twentieth century, reflecting the development of modern research and development programs in American industry after the turn of the century.

Perhaps of greatest interest to business historians are the essays that focus on the transformation of organisms to be (or produce) suitable products for consumption. For these readers, Roger Horowitz's paper examining scientific, economic, and cultural forces that increased the amount of chicken in the American diet after World War II, and Susan Warren Lanman's paper on the commercialization of horticulture in nineteenth-century America are especially recommended. Scholars familiar with previous volumes in the Hagley Perspectives series will find that these two essays develop valuable and interesting cultural interpretations of business history.

This volume impressively manages to convey dialogues among several strands of history. One of the major tensions explored involves the discourse between environmental historians and industrial historians concerning industry's intended and unintended effects on ecology. The first question in many readers' minds when picking up a book about biotechnology involves the ethical implications of using living creatures in industry. Stephen Pemberton's essay on the breeding of hemophiliac dogs also uses the idea of industrializing organisms to address issues of using animals to produce new medical research, and his model should generate further opportunities for study and debate; Susan Schrepfer's afterward highlighting the environmental implications of biotechnology is perhaps more explicit than any of the essays in raising concerns about organisms as technology. The volume would benefit from the inclusion of an essay on the changing ethical and practical considerations of developing biological weapons; such an essay might also address the changing process of research in the military-industrial-university complex more explicitly than any present here.

My criticisms do not diminish my appreciation of the book. The editors bill it as an introduction to evolutionary history and the volume serves that purpose superbly. I expect the issues raised here will be addressed by one of the many historians who should read these essays and explore the possibilities they raise. I look forward to the arguments this text should provoke in my history of technology and the environment seminar this semester (I cannot wait to ask my students one of Schrepfer...