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  • Enlightenment, Modernity and Science: Geographies of Scientific Culture and Improvement in Georgian England
  • Steven Shapin
Enlightenment, Modernity and Science: Geographies of Scientific Culture and Improvement in Georgian England. By Paul A. Elliott (London, I. B. Tauris, 2010) 358 pp. $99.00

The so-called “local turn” in the study of science that began in the 1970s had two major impulses. One came from the social history of science, specifically Thackray’s influential writing about the uses of scientific culture [End Page 96] in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Manchester.1 The animating questions in that work concerned the symbolic, more than the utilitarian, relations between science and industrializing society and the roles of scientific culture, broadly construed, in shifting schemes of social identity. The second source of localism was the sociology of scientific knowledge, in which the questions were mainly philosophical. Scholars were skeptical about the “universality” of scientific knowledge and about formal method and self-evident validity as sufficient explanations for its credibility and authority. This skepticism inspired microsociological research about the contemporary laboratory and the arts of persuasion and credibility management that allowed certain scientific claims—not all of them—to transcend their local origins.

Later, Bruno Latour developed an ontological vocabulary for understanding the conditions on which science traveled—“immutable mobiles,” “centers of calculation,” and “stronger and weaker heterogeneous networks.” Historians of science began to attend to spatial dimensions in understanding not just local “contexts of discovery” but also the “contexts of justification” that had been regarded as impersonal and transparently rational. Eventually, historical and cultural geographers joined forces. Some of the most focused historical work about the spaces and places of science has now come from scholars in geography departments, including Withers at Edinburgh and Livingstone at Queen’s, Belfast.2

Although Elliott makes introductory gestures toward sociological-philosophical genres, the work collected in his book belongs almost exclusively to the social-historical frame for studying provincial English science pioneered almost forty years ago by Thackray and then continued by such historians as Inkster, Morrell, and Porter.3 Elliott writes, for example, about the improving impulse behind provincial botanic gardens, science and spiritual improvement in the eighteenth-century Dissenting Academies, natural history and regional identity in English county towns, the social and political uses of science in Nottingham, and the meteorological and electrical work of the neglected eighteenth-century Derbyshire practitioner Abraham Bennet—a discussion that follows from outstanding studies of the history of British weather science by Jankovic and Golinski.4 [End Page 97]

Elliott’s chapters do not link tightly to each other, and his general findings about the social and cultural uses of provincial science are not clearly articulated: “Scientific culture,” he writes, “contributed towards the development of multiple overlapping religio-political and spatial identities shaped by diverse local factors as well as national and international cultures”(3). Intermittent gestures to major theoreticians of space and place—Jürgen Habermas and Latour—are mainly ornamental, and engagement with what Elliott occasionally calls “epistemological” questions is only marginal. But Elliott has done a genuine service in making this scholarship accessible. His book should find an appreciative readership among social historians of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain.

Steven Shapin
Harvard University

Footnotes

1. Arnold Thackray, “Natural Knowledge in Cultural Context: The Manchester Model,”American Historical Review, LXXIX (1974), 672–709.

2. See, for example, David N. Livingstone and Charles W. J. Withers (eds.), Geography and Revolution (Chicago, 2005); Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago, 2003); Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago, 2007).

3. See, for example, Ian Inkster and Jack Morrell (eds.), Metropolis and Province: Science in British Culture, 1780–1850 (London, 1983); Inkster, Scientific Culture and Urbanisation in Industrialising Britain (Aldershot, 2007); Roy Porter, “Science, Provincial Culture and Public Opinion in Enlightenment England,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, III (1980), 20–46.

4. Vladimir Jankovic, Reading the Skies: A Cultural History of English Weather, 1650–1820) (Chicago, 2001); Jan Golinski, British Weather and the Climate of Enlightenment (Chicago, 2007).

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