The Story of N: A Social History of the Nitrogen Cycle and the Challenge of Sustainability by Hugh Gorman, and: The Knowledge of Nature and the Nature of Knowledge in Early Modern Japan by Federico Marcon, and: Agricultural Enlightenment: Knowledge, Technology and Nature, 1750–1840 by Peter M. Jones (review)

Nutrients and ideas are motive. The speed of their motion determines to what extent they impact their surroundings and are themselves transfigured. The books discussed in this review are concerned with specific speeds of transformation, using a key nutrient or ways of thinking to trace social and intellectual alterations at national, regional, and global scales, as well as their identifiable environmental impacts. Individually, they offer significant contributions to their respective subdisciplines and are worthy of attention. Read in connection with each other, they emphasize the nestled relationships knowledge production, market economy, and institutionalization play in the making of the modern world. They are also indicative of analytical motivations that align across subdisciplines.

Hugh Gorman’s The Story of N is a social history of the nitrogen cycle that seeks to depict not only changing relationships between societies and their environmental limits but the present-day global divergence in nitrogen use and the challenges we face in conceptualizing and regulating it. The first of three sections introduces the concept of the nitrogen cycle and explains it clearly, even for those who are not scientifically inclined. The second examines specific, worldwide human interactions with the nitrogen cycle and provides a brief outline of human history from the advent of agriculture to the contemporary world. The final section scrutinizes outcomes of the increasing use of industrially derived nitrogen through the experiences of the United States in the twentieth century, with particular attention to the 1960s onward. It is in this final section that Gorman turns to the challenges of sustainability, focusing on approaches and policies that are compatible with our present socioeconomic system.

That system is what harmonizes Gorman’s history with his commentary on sustainability. Its three constituent elements, the adaptive rule of law, market capitalism, and the processes of science, explain how industrial societies succeeded in breaking away from biologically available nitrogen levels, as well as how we might address that divergence. In the first instance, all three combine to create the socioeconomic and institutional context for the discovery of nitrogen synthesis as well as the means to consume that nitrogen. Alternatively, Gorman shows that when these constituent elements do not emphasize ecological limits, they enable destructive decisionmaking, such as the discarding of human wastes rather than their integration into the agricultural systems of nineteenth-century Europe. This is why Gorman emphasizes that “harnessing market capitalism to work within an ethical system that recognizes ecological limits is central to the notion of sustain-ability” (p. 164). Accompanying that discussion is a consideration of whether or not clear limits should be placed on private properties, determining what can or cannot be done with them. Those looking for a text that raises debate-worthy ethical issues will find in this work a notable option for undergraduate courses.

In the first sections of his work, Gorman aims to locate the moment when synthesized nitrogen exceeded biologically imposed limitations, allowing for unprecedented, global economic and demographic growth. For Gorman, this occurred after the Second World War, when not only did the allocation of synthetic nitrogen shift from the war effort to agriculture, but output also continued to expand. Such a perspective, however, predisposes him to dismiss earlier moments of increased nitrogen availability without emphasizing how they contributed to the development of divergence. Scholars of these individual moments, such as the cultivation of alluvial soils, the utilization of nitrogen...