Anglosphere

[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Jacob, Margaret C. and Larry Stewart, Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire 1687-1851, Harvard University Press, 2004. 201pp.

This book is a small gem. Well-written, modest in size, and tightly focused for the general reader, it describes the deep ties between Anglosphere civic culture and the development of modern science and industry. I stumbled on the title, as occasionally happens, when browsing through the bibliographies of other books, looking for interesting titles.

Professor Larry Stewart (Univ. Saskatchewan) wrote a book in 1992 called “The Rise of Public Science: Rhetoric, Technology, and Natural Philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 1660-1750“. Regretably, even a second-hand copy is well nigh impossible to nab. Professor Margaret C. Jacob (UCLA) wrote “Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West” in 1997. Both books were referenced in Joel Mokyr’s Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (reviewed recently here) because they discussed the way that public interest in scientific concepts was influential in the initial development of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain.

And it is that public angle that intrigued me and suggested a good Anglosphere fit. As an alternative to hunting down those older books, I decided to buy a more recent book co-authored by Jacob and Stewart, and get a sense of the authors’ arguments. If “Practical Matter” is any gauge, these authors deserve addition to a “watch list.” This little book has a premise that is both fascinating yet powerfully straightforward.

What was the impact of Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica on the course of European social and economic history, from its publication in the late 1600s until the 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition in London?

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[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Pei, Minxin, China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy, Harvard Univ Press, 2006. 294pp.

As much as the end of the Cold War, the big story of the tail end of the 20th century was the movement toward economic liberalism in mainland China after 1979. After twenty-five years on a new compass heading, how are things going?

For the interested general reader, business, foreign policy, and military websites provide deeply contradictory news. On the one hand, China seems to have dramatically increased its per capita wealth and changed its peoples’ lifestyle faster than any other nation in history. On the other hand, the vast majority of Chinese are stuck in unproductive state-owned enterprises (SOEs) or subject to the whim of central authorities when it comes to the pricing of agricultural goods. That translates into hundreds of millions of people with little hope of climbing the Chinese ladder of prosperity in their lifetimes. China, according to the demographers and “best-case” economists, will still grow old before it grows rich.

On the military front, China appears as the most likely candidate for super-power status with a central autocratic government, a growing economic engine to fund military purchases, a massive population, a compliant diaspora funneling international secrets homeward (Time article [subscription] from early 2005), and a chip on its shoulder lovingly nurtured for centuries as a substitute for an effective political theory. The naysayers, in contrast, claim that China is fortress with no one manning the walls … an army, navy, and air force more effective on paper than in reality, and a billion people dangerously dependent on potential enemies for the raw materials and consumer markets that would subsidize any military modernization.

Which is it?

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[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

Instapundit has a post up on a book about the Medici and Italian banking:

SO I’VE BEEN READING TIM PARKS’ Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence. It’s a pretty interesting book, with a juxtaposition of prejudices against sodomy and usury (both seen as “against nature”) as a background for the Renaissance.

It’s mostly a history of the Medici banking empire, though, and it’s interesting to see how the bank declined. The problem was the passing of a generation of bankers who loved the work — Cosimo Medici said that he’d remain a banker even if he could make money by waving a wand — and its replacement by those who weren’t terribly interested in the actual work, but rather in the opportunity their jobs provided to hang around with kings, queens, and cardinals. Not surprisingly, things went downhill fast once that happened.

I think that’s a metaphor for politics and journalism today — and a cautionary example for the blogosphere.

Economic historian Joel Mokyr believes that these periods of innovation in technology (hard and soft) can be spotted repeatedly back to the Greeks (see his Gifts of Athena: Origins of the Knowledge Economy reviewed here, and the The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress). The distinction, finally, with the Scientific/Industrial Revolution was that the inevitable rent-seekers couldn’t get an adequate grip and the Malthusian caps were breached. The widening of the “epistemic base” (which Mokyr represents with the symbol omega) was creating usable knowledge (symbol lambda) faster than it could be controlled or stamped out by antagonistic parties. To quote Mokyr: “The broader the epistemic base, the more likely it is that technological progress can be sustained for extended periods before it starts to run into diminishing returns.” A virtuous cycle rather than a negative feedback loop gets established. He’s got a great article on Why was the Industrial Revolution A European Phenomena? available in .PDF format.

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[cross-posted on Albion’s Seedlings]

• Bourne, Kenneth, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, 1815-1908 (1967)
• Campbell, Charles, From Revolution to Rapprochement: The Unites States and Great Britain: 1783-1900 (1974)
• Campbell, A.E., Great Britain and the United States: 1895-1903 (1960)

The history of relations between the US and Great Britain/Canada during the 19th century is complex and fascinating. It is also the subject of a very large body of historical research. In this post, I’d like to briefly introduce three titles that cover portions of the period in slightly different ways.

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