Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation (review)

This is a provocative book about science and the state in Ireland during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Patrick Carroll argues that science is not simply an instrument of modern statecraft. Instead, science constitutes the state while the state constitutes science. This is a relationship that Sheila Jasanoff calls the "idiom of co-production" (States of Knowledge, 2004), a concept that Carroll connects to the work of historical sociologists ranging from Karl Marx to Benedict Anderson and James Scott. Carroll succeeds in this project by examining surveying, mapmaking, census taking, public health, land reclamation, and road building. Each is worth a book in its own right, but Carroll covers all in 174 clearly written pages. The remaining 101 pages consist of detailed notes followed by an excellent bibliography and an index. This is a satisfying roadmap for scholars who wish to know more.

Carroll develops his book by persistent engagement with STS scholarship, together with a persistent focus on the activities of William Petty, an Englishman granted an Irish estate after Cromwell expropriated and disenfranchised Irish Catholics in the mid-seventeenth century. Petty used his estate as the site of agronomical experiments, while in Dublin he advocated the new experimental science that Robert Boyle—another beneficiary of colonialism in Ireland—was advocating in England. Citing Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's famous 1985 study of experimentalism, Leviathan and the Air-Pump, Carroll reminds us that the new experimentalism was characterized by Hobbes as "engine philosophy"—in other words, as knowledge made impure by its dependency on scientific instruments. Yet, as Carroll points out, it was through the use of instruments such as the surveyor's theodolites and sextants and the census taker's statistical methods that the new experimentalism abetted the development of the colonial state.

Carroll identifies Petty as the visionary who saw the potential of experimental methods to improve and transform Ireland. Petty helped to institute experimentalism in Ireland by becoming one of the key organizers of the Dublin Society in 1684. While the society barely met after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, its re-founding in 1731 as the Royal Dublin Society carried forward Petty's belief that experimentalism could benefit economic development, particularly in agriculture. Landholding itself, together with the state's ability to regulate it, depended heavily on surveying. It was Petty who received the contract to produce Ireland's first scientific survey map, the Down Survey. Not only did he stabilize landholding and statecraft through mapping, he also made official the process of Anglicizing Irish place-names. These efforts at scientific statecraft were carried forward in the 1820s by the Ordnance Survey. Petty was also an early advocate of public-health measures, ranging from hospital construction and sanitary engineering to the regulation of healers and the removal of drunkards and prostitutes from the streets. All these were later advocated by scientific reformers and taken up by colonial officials. Such measures enhanced the lives of subjects while they expanded the role of the state.

Historians have written about these measures previously. Carroll's contribution is to link them to the philosophy and politics of seventeenth-century experimentalism. This is a significant contribution to Irish and imperial historiography that I hope will be followed up in research on other colonies.