Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History (review)

This fascinating volume derives from the 2002 conference of the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, itself inspired by a scholarly online discussion of the question "are animals technology?" The initiator of this debate, Edmund Russell, opens the volume with a critique of the traditional dichotomy between nature and technology. He argues that as living organisms are molded by humans and integral to industrial processes, they are "biotechnologies" and should be analyzed as such. While admitting that this concept is hardly new to historians of plant and animal breeding, Russell proposes that its application be extended to consider "not just how humans shape organisms, but how organisms shape humans" (p. 13). He suggests the founding of a new field of academic inquiry, evolutionary history, to apply insights from environmental history and the history of technology to the human-induced processes of biological change.

The body of the book is made up of nine compelling and well-researched essays which vary in their choice of organisms, industrial contexts, and geographic and historical settings. While not explicitly situated within Russell's framework, they join in identifying factors that influenced the selection, production, and utilization of organisms, though not all assess the human impact of these processes.

The first section is devoted to plants. Susan Lanman reveals how a shrewd awareness of the potentialities of industrializing America shaped the activities of the nineteenth-century horticulturalist Peter Henderson, whose mass-production methods contributed to the symbiotic growth of horticulture and the urban population. Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode's essay challenges the hypothesis that, prior to 1940, mechanization rather than biological innovation was responsible for rising agricultural productivity. Rather, by selecting more resistant strains of wheat and adjusting their cultural practices, American farmers managed to combat pests, maintain yields, and extend production to more hostile climes.

Sugar production in Cuba is the subject of Mark Smith's article. He argues that sugar emerged as an "industrial plant" with the early-twentieth-century development of production methods encompassing field and factory. These methods were shaped by biological innovations in the field, the technical capacity of factory machinery, and the capitalist goals of industrial society. William Boyd and Scott Prudham explore the industrialization of tree-improvement programs, highlighting ways in which practical barriers to innovation were overcome by cooperative ventures between the state and industry that relied on regional, national, and international knowledge networks. This arrangement, they warn, is threatened by the growing tendency to patent genetic resources.

Other essays explore animal technologies. Ann Greene argues that the industrialization of warfare during the American Civil War enhanced the demand for military horses. The Union army responded by creating new networks and interest groups concerned with the acquisition, movement, and care of "standardized" horses, which became central components of war technology. Barbara Orland's essay on "turbo-cows" examines the culture and configurations of dairying in nineteenth-century Germany and Switzerland. Formerly defined by landscape and a close relationship to arable farming, dairying was transformed by market forces into a specialist enterprise that emphasized productivity and competitiveness. This new context enabled the rise of scientific technologies aimed at improving yields.

Drawing on the wealth of research into laboratory model organisms, Stephen Pemberton explores how in mid-twentieth-century America the pathologist Kenneth Brinkhous constructed hemophiliac dogs as both research technologies and clinical subjects. The final two articles analyze industrial farming. Roger Horowitz reveals how the initiatives of agricultural extension services and poultry processors created an integrated, mechanized broiler industry, which physically transformed both live bird and processed meat in response to market demand. And Mark Finlay discusses how government price supports, academic advice, and industrial involvement changed the landscape, structure, and practice of pig farming, such that the pig's life cycle became governed by the industrial values of efficiency, uniformity, and productivity. An afterword by Susan Schrepfer completes the volume.

This groundbreaking collection will appeal far beyond a history-of-technology audience. In demonstrating how human interest...