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Engineering Empires
Engineers are empire-builders. Watt, Brunel, and others worked to build and expand personal and business empires of material technology and in so doing these engineers also became active agents of political and economic empire. This book provides a fascinating exploration of the cultural construction of the large-scale technologies of empire.
362 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2004
32 people want to read
About the author
Ben Marsden
6 booksBen Marsden is Senior Lecturer in The School of Divinity, History, Philosophy & Art History at the University of Aberdeen. Marsden's research focuses are: science and technology in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century culture, especially the cultural history of engineering and technology in Britain; the historical relationship between science and music; engineers as authors and readers; cultural history of food.
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May 19, 2023
An enjoyable and interesting read for my comps exam, centering on five technologies that engineers laboured on and developed, and in doing so contributed to the construction of empire also. The approach of the book emphasizes the contingency involved in technological development:
“It is rare for such approaches to admit that the new technologies were not simply ‘givens’ but rather were historically highly problematic and culturally contingent. A central aim of our book, then, is to highlight the cultural contingencies which shaped the varied technologies of empire in the long nineteenth century.”
And they stake out their claim not as economic historians who ask questions like:
“how many steam engines produced, by what companies, with what royalty payments – and with what measurable impacts on industry and society? How many tons of shipping constructed, for what cargoes? How many miles of track laid down and at what cost to the canal interests?”
But as contextualists:
“Our interest in this ‘shaping’ of technologies implies a wish to move beyond what is, perhaps unfairly, dismissed as the ‘antiquarian’ in the history of technology. Works in this genre, although often valuable as sources of reference and of the suggestive example, dwell on detail for its own sake;3 they attend primarily to the ‘internal’ dynamics, material construction and design particularity rather than to the broader, ‘external’ meanings or patterns of use associated with a technological artefact: the precise dimensions of a steam cylinder; the pitch of a screw propeller; the gaudy livery of a railway locomotive; the distinctive tap of the telegraph key and so on. In this study our concern will be to relate such local particularities to larger events and trends: the shorthand for this is ‘context’ and especially ‘social context’.”
The five technologies/chapters of the book are as follows
Chapter 1: Mapping and Measurement - The opening epigraph alludes to the vast imperial project of mapping of the earth’s magnetism, in which Canada played an important role. This is not mentioned in the book but there was an important magnetic observatory station which Humboldt drew on significantly in the writing of Cosmos which was housed in what is now a student union building at the University of Toronto (12 Hart House Circle). I randomly encountered this after reading a book for RA research about Humboldt’s visit to the pyramid at Cholula, which I had just visited after a conference in the area in December. The rest of the chapter details the various geological survey projects that were undertaken by colonial surveyors. This was an interesting passage on the discovery of the Silurian System, which I want to learn more about since getting into Dr. Who recently:
“In the 1830s Murchison identified along the Welsh borders the oldest known fossil- bearing rocks which he named ‘Silurian’ after the Silures, an ancient and war-like tribe of Britons who had once inhabited the region. With remark- able energy, the new ‘King of Siluria’ rapidly extended this classification to other parts of the country and around the globe, resulting in his monumental The Silurian System (1839).89 The recognition of Silurian strata containing mainly marine invertebrates and devoid of terrestrial vegetation offered Murchison a powerful tool in the form of a baseline below which it was pointless to search for coal. He and fellow geologists could therefore market their expertise: for example, to advise against extravagant and speculative mining ventures in regions where coal might be needed but could not, according to the geologists, exist. Equally, geologists pronounced these ancient sedimentary rocks to be rich in metallic ores.”
The chapter ends on an important surveying project that was being undertaken with respect to coal deposits, a good transition to the second chapter on the steam engine.
Chapter 2: The Steam Engine - This was interesting because there’s some brief mention of watermills and Smeaton’s study of overshot and undershot waterwheels that I’ve encountered in other readings including Jennifer Alexander’s Mantra of Efficiency and Terry Reynolds’ Stronger Than a Hundred Men. And also some interesting stuff on thermodynamics which I got a very comprehensive treatment when reading chapters from Wise and Smith’s Energy and Empire (Smith is a co-author here in this book). Some excerpts of note:
“In the eighteenth century, and especially in the Scottish Enlightenment, ‘labour’ or ‘work’ divided into useful or productive labour and useless or unproductive work. For a political economist such as Adam Smith, the production of marketable commodities and the manufacture of marketable goods belonged to the former class; the labour of servants working for aristocratic gentlemen fell under the latter category. Thus the former equated with the production of wealth while the latter was conducive to idleness. In Calvinist Scotland, these divisions reflected traditional Presbyterian beliefs in the moral value of work and in the sinful nature of idleness and waste.”
“The engineer John Smeaton, a man well known to Watt, undertook one of the most famous analyses of types of watermill. Smeaton’s concern was to establish whether the overshot wheel or the undershot wheel was most efficient. An ideal, or perfect, waterwheel could pump the same amount of water as that used to drive it; although no actual engine could do this, the ratio of water pumped (multiplied by height pumped) to water used up gave a simple measure of efficiency. Engineering measures of ‘work done’, understood as weight raised to a height, became part of the practice of such engineers in the eighteenth century.
While a very high proportion of non-human and non-animal power to drive the mills and factories of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century Britain was sourced from water and harnessed through waterwheels, promoters of heat engines quickly seized upon their superior versatility. Waterwheels were always fixed in space and limited in purpose. Steam engines pumped water from mines, hoisted goods at ports, and, in the new factories, provided the power for tools to pummel and reshape. Steam power applied to specialist tools added speed, dexterity or simply strength to human capacity. By the 1820s a foreign observer like Sadi Carnot, concerned with what he and his circle of political radicals perceived as a backwardness in French industry in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, identified the special properties of such steam engines:
They seem destined to bring about a great revolution in the civilized world. The heat engine is already at work in the exploitation of our mines, for driving our ships, digging out our ports and rivers, forging steel, fashioning wood, milling grain, spinning and weaving cloth, transporting the heaviest loads . . . It seems that one day it must become a universal source of power and in this respect supplant animals, water and wind.”
Chapter 3: The Steam Ship - This is the other main chapter of note for me because I am interested in the British Naval vessels and their transition from wooden sailing vessels to iron steam ships:
“In 1850 the UK possessed 3.3 million tons of sailing ships and 167,398 tons of steamships. By 1860 the total of sailing ships had risen to 4.1 million tons and steamers to 452,352 tons. In 1870 the figures were 4.5 million tons for sail and 1.1 million tons for steam, the former reaching a peak in that year and the latter rising to 1.9 million tons by 1874.4 Although the figures show that investment in steamers between 1850 and 1874 had increased markedly, the continuing rise in total tonnage of sailing ships demonstrates the persistence of this technology. In this period, projectors of steamships, especially over long-distance ocean routes, could not assume an inevitable triumph of steam over sail. Indeed, during the closing decades of the nineteenth century the construction of much larger, steel-hulled sailing ships – known as ‘windjammers’ and well-adapted to the carriage of bulky, low-value commodities such as coal, grain or nitrates – ensured that sail would continue as a serious rival in these trades until the Great War.”
This chapter is also interesting because it investigates a number of failures that ship development faced, against the common Whig narratives that one might expect.
Chapter 4: The Railway - This chapter is of interest to me because a section of it focuses a lot on the Canadian Pacific Railway and mentions justifications for its completion such as shipping troops out to suppress the Indigenous revolt in the Northwest. Beyond interesting commentary on Brunel, there is a lot of cultural focuses in this chapter, that is, the production of a culture around the railroad (grand central stations, hotels, tourism). There is also pushback on notions that the Liverpool & Manchester Railway served as the template that was exported to the rest of the empire in building continental-wide rail networks. Rather the focus is on various contestations between alternatives. It also mentions India in the opening chapter epigraph, which is something Mike Davis describes well in Late Victorian Holocausts, where British-built railways in India were facilitating a net export of food out of regions in India suffering from famine.
Chapter 5: The Telegraph - This final chapter contained a lot of stuff I had also largely encountered before, when reading an excellent book called Imperial Science by Bruce Hunt last year on the laying of the first successful trans-Atlantic cable.
The final conclusion has some good material for those interested in public history. It deals with questions of ‘technological tourism’ where engineers would travel to different parts of the empire to see and inspect new imperial technologies and learn about them, as well as ‘technological exhibitions’. There is also some interesting commentary on the changing practice of engineering in more contemporary contexts.
“It is rare for such approaches to admit that the new technologies were not simply ‘givens’ but rather were historically highly problematic and culturally contingent. A central aim of our book, then, is to highlight the cultural contingencies which shaped the varied technologies of empire in the long nineteenth century.”
And they stake out their claim not as economic historians who ask questions like:
“how many steam engines produced, by what companies, with what royalty payments – and with what measurable impacts on industry and society? How many tons of shipping constructed, for what cargoes? How many miles of track laid down and at what cost to the canal interests?”
But as contextualists:
“Our interest in this ‘shaping’ of technologies implies a wish to move beyond what is, perhaps unfairly, dismissed as the ‘antiquarian’ in the history of technology. Works in this genre, although often valuable as sources of reference and of the suggestive example, dwell on detail for its own sake;3 they attend primarily to the ‘internal’ dynamics, material construction and design particularity rather than to the broader, ‘external’ meanings or patterns of use associated with a technological artefact: the precise dimensions of a steam cylinder; the pitch of a screw propeller; the gaudy livery of a railway locomotive; the distinctive tap of the telegraph key and so on. In this study our concern will be to relate such local particularities to larger events and trends: the shorthand for this is ‘context’ and especially ‘social context’.”
The five technologies/chapters of the book are as follows
Chapter 1: Mapping and Measurement - The opening epigraph alludes to the vast imperial project of mapping of the earth’s magnetism, in which Canada played an important role. This is not mentioned in the book but there was an important magnetic observatory station which Humboldt drew on significantly in the writing of Cosmos which was housed in what is now a student union building at the University of Toronto (12 Hart House Circle). I randomly encountered this after reading a book for RA research about Humboldt’s visit to the pyramid at Cholula, which I had just visited after a conference in the area in December. The rest of the chapter details the various geological survey projects that were undertaken by colonial surveyors. This was an interesting passage on the discovery of the Silurian System, which I want to learn more about since getting into Dr. Who recently:
“In the 1830s Murchison identified along the Welsh borders the oldest known fossil- bearing rocks which he named ‘Silurian’ after the Silures, an ancient and war-like tribe of Britons who had once inhabited the region. With remark- able energy, the new ‘King of Siluria’ rapidly extended this classification to other parts of the country and around the globe, resulting in his monumental The Silurian System (1839).89 The recognition of Silurian strata containing mainly marine invertebrates and devoid of terrestrial vegetation offered Murchison a powerful tool in the form of a baseline below which it was pointless to search for coal. He and fellow geologists could therefore market their expertise: for example, to advise against extravagant and speculative mining ventures in regions where coal might be needed but could not, according to the geologists, exist. Equally, geologists pronounced these ancient sedimentary rocks to be rich in metallic ores.”
The chapter ends on an important surveying project that was being undertaken with respect to coal deposits, a good transition to the second chapter on the steam engine.
Chapter 2: The Steam Engine - This was interesting because there’s some brief mention of watermills and Smeaton’s study of overshot and undershot waterwheels that I’ve encountered in other readings including Jennifer Alexander’s Mantra of Efficiency and Terry Reynolds’ Stronger Than a Hundred Men. And also some interesting stuff on thermodynamics which I got a very comprehensive treatment when reading chapters from Wise and Smith’s Energy and Empire (Smith is a co-author here in this book). Some excerpts of note:
“In the eighteenth century, and especially in the Scottish Enlightenment, ‘labour’ or ‘work’ divided into useful or productive labour and useless or unproductive work. For a political economist such as Adam Smith, the production of marketable commodities and the manufacture of marketable goods belonged to the former class; the labour of servants working for aristocratic gentlemen fell under the latter category. Thus the former equated with the production of wealth while the latter was conducive to idleness. In Calvinist Scotland, these divisions reflected traditional Presbyterian beliefs in the moral value of work and in the sinful nature of idleness and waste.”
“The engineer John Smeaton, a man well known to Watt, undertook one of the most famous analyses of types of watermill. Smeaton’s concern was to establish whether the overshot wheel or the undershot wheel was most efficient. An ideal, or perfect, waterwheel could pump the same amount of water as that used to drive it; although no actual engine could do this, the ratio of water pumped (multiplied by height pumped) to water used up gave a simple measure of efficiency. Engineering measures of ‘work done’, understood as weight raised to a height, became part of the practice of such engineers in the eighteenth century.
While a very high proportion of non-human and non-animal power to drive the mills and factories of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century Britain was sourced from water and harnessed through waterwheels, promoters of heat engines quickly seized upon their superior versatility. Waterwheels were always fixed in space and limited in purpose. Steam engines pumped water from mines, hoisted goods at ports, and, in the new factories, provided the power for tools to pummel and reshape. Steam power applied to specialist tools added speed, dexterity or simply strength to human capacity. By the 1820s a foreign observer like Sadi Carnot, concerned with what he and his circle of political radicals perceived as a backwardness in French industry in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, identified the special properties of such steam engines:
They seem destined to bring about a great revolution in the civilized world. The heat engine is already at work in the exploitation of our mines, for driving our ships, digging out our ports and rivers, forging steel, fashioning wood, milling grain, spinning and weaving cloth, transporting the heaviest loads . . . It seems that one day it must become a universal source of power and in this respect supplant animals, water and wind.”
Chapter 3: The Steam Ship - This is the other main chapter of note for me because I am interested in the British Naval vessels and their transition from wooden sailing vessels to iron steam ships:
“In 1850 the UK possessed 3.3 million tons of sailing ships and 167,398 tons of steamships. By 1860 the total of sailing ships had risen to 4.1 million tons and steamers to 452,352 tons. In 1870 the figures were 4.5 million tons for sail and 1.1 million tons for steam, the former reaching a peak in that year and the latter rising to 1.9 million tons by 1874.4 Although the figures show that investment in steamers between 1850 and 1874 had increased markedly, the continuing rise in total tonnage of sailing ships demonstrates the persistence of this technology. In this period, projectors of steamships, especially over long-distance ocean routes, could not assume an inevitable triumph of steam over sail. Indeed, during the closing decades of the nineteenth century the construction of much larger, steel-hulled sailing ships – known as ‘windjammers’ and well-adapted to the carriage of bulky, low-value commodities such as coal, grain or nitrates – ensured that sail would continue as a serious rival in these trades until the Great War.”
This chapter is also interesting because it investigates a number of failures that ship development faced, against the common Whig narratives that one might expect.
Chapter 4: The Railway - This chapter is of interest to me because a section of it focuses a lot on the Canadian Pacific Railway and mentions justifications for its completion such as shipping troops out to suppress the Indigenous revolt in the Northwest. Beyond interesting commentary on Brunel, there is a lot of cultural focuses in this chapter, that is, the production of a culture around the railroad (grand central stations, hotels, tourism). There is also pushback on notions that the Liverpool & Manchester Railway served as the template that was exported to the rest of the empire in building continental-wide rail networks. Rather the focus is on various contestations between alternatives. It also mentions India in the opening chapter epigraph, which is something Mike Davis describes well in Late Victorian Holocausts, where British-built railways in India were facilitating a net export of food out of regions in India suffering from famine.
Chapter 5: The Telegraph - This final chapter contained a lot of stuff I had also largely encountered before, when reading an excellent book called Imperial Science by Bruce Hunt last year on the laying of the first successful trans-Atlantic cable.
The final conclusion has some good material for those interested in public history. It deals with questions of ‘technological tourism’ where engineers would travel to different parts of the empire to see and inspect new imperial technologies and learn about them, as well as ‘technological exhibitions’. There is also some interesting commentary on the changing practice of engineering in more contemporary contexts.
Displaying 1 of 1 review