A Social History of Knowledge II: From the Encyclopaedia to Wikipedia [1 ed.] 0745650422, 9780745650425

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A

Social History of

Knowledge

II

To Emmanuel College in gratitude

for supporting

my

research for

more than

thirty years

A

Social History of

Knowledge

II

From the Encyclopedie to Wikipedia

Peter Burke

polity

Copyright

©

Peter Burke 2012

right of Peter Burke to be identified as Author of this Work has been Copyright, Designs and Patents Act L988. asserted in accordance with the

The

UK

First

published in 2012 by Polity Press

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Contents

List of Figures

vi

Acknowledgements Introduction Part I

viii

1

Knowledge Practices

9

1

Gathering Knowledges

11

2

Analysing Knowledges

50

3

Disseminating Knowledges

85

4

Employing Knowledges

Part II

The

Price of Progress

109 137

5

Losing Knowledges

139

6

Dividing Knowledges

160

Part III

A Social History in Three Dimensions

7

Geographies of Knowledge

8

Sociologies of

9

Chronologies of Knowledge

Knowledge

185

187

218 247

Notes

276

References

300

Index

335

Figures

List of

1

2 3

Alexander von Humboldt, statue in Berlin by R. Begas (1883), Wikimedia Commons HMS Challenger (1858), Wikimedia Commons British officers of the 1897 Benin expedition with bronzes and ivories taken from the royal compound, British

Museum

4

Malinowski Archive

5

Portrait of

in the

Trobriand Islands (1918),

LSE 32

Edward Lane with turban

(1829), National

33

Portrait Gallery

Mount Wilson

Hooker

7

Interior of the reading

telescope,

room,

40

(1917)

at the Bibliotheque

nationale, rue de Richelieu, Paris (1868),

Wikimedia

Commons 9

punched card (1895), Library of Congress Double helix model (1953), Science Museum (slide SCM/BIO/C1000271), reproduced in Chadarevian, Designs for Life, Cambridge University Press, 2002, Hollerith

p.

Playfair, pie chart, Turkish

11

Minard's flow

Empire

(1801),

Wikimedia

Commons

12 13

103

map

of losses on the retreat from

Moscow

Wikimedia Commons August Wilhelm von Hofmann, molecular model of methane (c.1860) Russian Academy of Sciences, St Petersburg, Wikimedia

Commons

48 68

83

239

10

(1869),

19

28

6

8

14

105

106

224

List

14

University of Sussex, Falmer

House

(1962),

17

241

Nordiska Museet, Stockholm (1873), Wikimedia

Commons 16

vii

Wikimedia

Commons 15

of Figures

Hubble Space Telescope, Wikipedia CERN Large Hadron Collider (2008)

260 269 270

Acknowledgements

My greatest debts this time

are institutional: especially to

College Cambridge, where

I

do most of

my

Emmanuel

work, and to Birkbeck

College, London, where I was a visiting fellow at the Institute for the Humanities in autumn 2010, allowing me to present some of this book's ideas in advance of publication. I am also grateful for invitations to lecture on aspects of this vast topic in Brussels, Groningen, Montreal, New York, Sheffield, Sussex and Trondheim, and to the

organizers oftheCRASSH workshop 'The Organization of Knowledge in Victorian Britain', held in

Cambridge

in 2002.

My thanks too go to a number of individuals: to Asa Briggs and to my wife Maria Lucia, with both of whom I worked on projects that included the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, easing my way out of the early modern period. Maria Lucia and my old friend Chris Stray both read the printout and made a number of valuable sugges-

For ideas, encouragement and references I should also like to thank Filippo De Vivo, Axel Korner, Jenny Piatt and Hannu Salmi.

tions.

Introduction

1

no history of knowledge declared the management theorist and futurologist Peter Drucker in 1993, predicting that it would 'There

is

,

become an important area

1

For once he was a little slow, for the rise of interest in the history of knowledge was already under way - witness books by historians with titles

of study 'within the next decades'.

is Power (1989), Fields of Knowledge (1992) Forms of Knowledge (1996). 2 Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to

such as Knowledge

or Colonialism and

its

When I wrote A Diderot (2000) I still thought of myself as taking an individual initiative that drew upon a long-standing interest in the Hungarian Karl Mannheim, a pioneer in the 'sociology of knowledge'. 3 However, it is retrospectively obvious that I was one among a number of scholars stimulated, consciously or unconsciously, by the current debates about the 'knowledge society' which had provoked Drucker's prediction (below, p. 218). In 1998, two writers on the subject already 4 referred to a 'knowledge boom'. Since the year 2000, the trend has become still stronger, reflected not only in publications but also in research programmes, especially though not exclusively in the German-speaking world. This book can be read either by itself or as a continuation of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot (I hope before long to produce a revised version of both volumes under the title From Gutenberg to Google). Its origins were in personal curiosity, in an attempt to answer the question, 'by what paths did we reach our present state of collective knowledge?' At a time when retirement liberated me from professional 'periods' and 'fields', it was easier than before to indulge this curiosity.

2

Introduction

Continuing Gutenberg to Diderot, this volume offers a general view of changes in the world of learning from the Encyclopedic (1751-66) to Wikipedia (2001). Its main themes are processes, among

them

quantification, secularization, professionalization, specializa-

democratization, globalization and technologization. However, countervailing trends should not be forgotten. Indeed,

tion,

has a single thesis, it is the importance of the coexistence in opposite directions, an equilibrium of antagonisms that tips over into disequilibrium from time to time (below, pp. 176, 211, 250). The nationalization of knowledge coexists if

this essay

and interaction of trends

with

its

internationalization, secularization with counter-seculariza-

tion, professionalization

with amateurization, standardization with

custom-made products, specialization with interdisciplinary projects and democratization with moves to counter or restrict it. Even the accumulation of knowledge is offset to some degree by its loss (below, ch. 5). Only technologization seems to march onwards without encountering serious opposition. Histories of aspects of knowledge, like histories of are generally written within a national

framework

much

else,

that often gives

readers an exaggerated impression of the achievements of citizens of that country. Take the case of polar exploration: in this context, the British think of Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton, the Americans of Robert Peary, the Russians of Otto Shmidt, the Norwegians of Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen, the Swedes of Alfred Nathorst, the Finns of Adolf Nordenskiold and the Danes and Greenlanders of Knud Rasmussen. 5 In an attempt to compensate for national biases, this study adopts an explicitly comparative

approach.

The book focuses on the West, trying not to confine itself to the Germany, Russia and the USA - but to bring the rest of Europe and also Latin America into the story, at 'Big Five' - Britain, France,

from time to time. For example, a small country such as the Netherlands has produced a considerable number of studies about the history of its own knowledges - colonial knowledge, the history least

museums, and so on. 6 Many excellent monographs have been published on aspects of the

of science, the history of

vast topic surveyed here, especially in the case of the history of science.

Most of these monographs are confined

to the history of a

academic discipline. Here, however, I adopt a comparative approach in order to escape disciplinary biases as well as the national biases mentioned above. What follows is an attempt at a general synthesis, a work of distillation or, more exactly, of what a historian of science called 'raiding, rearranging and sometimes revising the single

Introduction

works of

my

fellow historians'.

7

Plugging holes

is

3

another aspect of

some topics have received much less scholarly attenthan others. So is making connections between developments in

the task, since tion

different places or in different fields.

The point

is

to present a big picture of a kind that

is

often invisible

to specialists, a picture that includes a general description of special-

ization

by

itself.

This big picture of the period c. 1750-2000 will be defined modern period, c. 1450-1750, on which I have

contrast to the early

worked for most of my academic life. However, continuities between early and late modern will not be forgotten, among them contemporary awareness of the problem of what is now known as 'information 8 overload'. My hope is to encourage dialogue between two kinds of scholar who do not often speak to each other: historians of the early modern and late modern periods. 9 The book's title raises two questions that require a preliminary discussion. What is social history? What is knowledge?

Social Histories first place, the term employed here primarily

obviously a problematic one. It what follows from a general intellectual history of the period 1750-2000. In the

'social' is

is

to distinguish

The individual thinkers that loom large in intellectual histories will not be left out - they did indeed make a difference, and nearly eight hundred of them will be mentioned in the following pages possibly too many for some readers, but a counterpoise to the faceless abstraction of general trends. All the same, the protagonists of this study are what sociologists call 'knowledge-bearing groups', espe-

but not exclusively small, face-to-face groups, and 'knowledgegenerating institutions', understood as groups of people who meet cially

regularly in pursuit of different social roles,

common

aims, following rules that produce

from bishop

to professor

and from prime min-

CEO. 10 Where the Polish sociologist Florian Znaniecki wrote of 'the social role of the man of knowledge', this essay will be concerned with the many social roles of knowledgeable people, roles produced ister to

by such knowledge organizations as universities, archives, libraries, museums, think tanks, learned societies and scientific journals. The processes by which knowledge is institutionalized will also be discussed.

11

Ideas will not be omitted from this study - institutions cannot be understood without them - but their external rather than their

4

Introduction

internal history will be privileged, intellectual environments rather

than intellectual problems. The emphasis will fall on the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton, for example, of which Albert Einstein was once a member, rather than on his theories of relativity, and on critique of the University of Warwick rather than on his study of the making of the English working class. Attention will also be paid to small face-to-face groups, whether as teams or as competitors, since these groups often do the work for which a single individual receives the credit. Despite the myth of the heroic explorer, for instance, by the late nineteenth century, if not

Edward Thompson's

before, 'the agents of exploration

Again,

in the

were groups, not

individuals'.

12

course of the period, laboratory research was increasby teams.

ingly carried out

In short,

what follows

is

a social history in the

manner of

earlier

social histories of archaeology, for instance, of anthropology, cartog-

raphy or medicine. 13 Alternatively, the book may be described as a historical sociology of knowledge. Like the sociologists, it emphasizes the fact that knowledge is situated, in contrast to the traditional view of scholars as remote from the world, in laboratories, observatories, libraries and other ivory towers. Scholars do need 'a space of their own' in order to work without distraction, but this remoteness is only

They take the world, including politics, into the lab with them, while their results are often used, as chapter 4 describes, for worldly purposes. The book might therefore have been entitled, like one of its sections, 'a political history of knowledge', were it not for the fact that its aim is wider, with the term 'social' acting as an umbrella covering economic and political history as well as social history in a narrower sense. Another possibility was to call the book 'a historical ecology of knowledge', given its concern with competition for resources, with differentiation and with favourable environments or niches for particular institutions, disciplines, or kinds of scholar such as the polyrelative.

math (below,

A

pp. 161ff.). third possible title

14

was 'a cultural history of knowledge'. The phrase 'cultures of knowledge' (or 'epistemic cultures', in German Wissenskulturen) is increasingly current and it is surely useful, does the idea of knowledges in the plural. 15 What follows is often concerned with practices such as observing, mapping or taking notes, practices that may equally well be described as cultural or social. All the same, the emphasis on institutions seems to require the term 'social', which has the additional advantage of evoking the tradition of the sociology of knowledge, now nearly a

reinforcing as

century old.

it

Introduction

5

Knowledges The second question, 'what

is

knowledge?' sounds uncomfortably

close to the question asked by 'jesting Pilate', who, according to

Francis Bacon, 'would not stay for an answer': what

is

truth?

A

first

knowledge from what the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski called 'the brute material of informalh tion'. 'We are drowning in information', we are told, but 'starved of knowledge'. We may become 'information giants', but risk becoming step might be to distinguish

17

'knowledge dwarfs'. Borrowing a famous metaphor from another anthropologist, Claude Levi-Strauss, it may be useful to think of information as raw, while knowledge has been cooked. Of course, information is only relatively raw, since the 'data' are not objectively 'given' at

but perceived by human minds that are full of assumptions and prejudices. However, knowledge is 'cooked' in the sense of all,

being processed. The processes, discussed at length in chapter 2,

include

verification,

criticism,

measurement, comparison and

systematization.

Knowledges or knowledge traditions should be imagined in the were by the philosopher Michel Foucault in

plural, as they already

the 1970s, although they are

still

often regarded as singular, a familiar

To quote Drucker again, 'We have moved from knowledge to knowledges'. 18 London taxi-drivers who speak of 'the knowledge' when they mean the topography of the part being taken for the whole.

from the only people to share the assumption maliBenjamin Jowett (Master of Balliol College Oxford) that 'what I don't know isn't knowledge'. 19 Knowledges may be divided into explicit and implicit (or tacit), pure and applied, local and universal. Although histories of skills are rarely written, 'Knowing how' clearly deserves a place alongside 'knowing that'. 20 In similar fashion, dominated or subjugated knowledges (savoirs assujettis) deserve a place alongside rather than underneath dominant ones. 21 There is a political aspect to the question, 'what is knowledge?' Who has the authority to decide what is knowledge? This book is concerned mainly with academic knowledge, as it is with knowledge in the West. A more exact title would therefore be 'a social history of western academic knowledge'. The problem is that, besides being rather cumbrous, such a title gives the false impression that this kind of knowledge will be treated in isolation. In fact, interaction between different knowledges is a central theme of this study. Hence the recurrent references to detectives and capital are far

ciously attributed to

6

Introduction

spies, for instance,

or to governments and corporations, as well as the

discussion of the links between new academic disciplines such as chemistry, economics or geology and the practical knowledge of

apothecaries, merchants, miners, and so on. For example, Adam Smith

was a member of the Political Economy Club in Glasgow, and his famous Wealth of Nations (1776) benefited from the author's conversations with its merchant members. Indeed, it has been argued that the development of economics in Britain happened 'largely without 22 benefit of academic or other forms of official recognition'. Again, the frontier between academic and intelligence work was often crossed, especially though not exclusively in wartime. In the USA, the wartime Office of Strategic Services recruited a number of professors (below,

p. 119).

In Britain, Peter Russell, best

known

for

Spanish studies, joined the secret services in the 1930s, while the art historian Anthony Blunt worked for both MI5 and its Soviet equivalent, the NKVD. Turning to geography, despite its focus on Europe and the Americas, the book discusses other parts of the world, such as nineteenth-century Egypt, China and Japan. Such a discussion is necessary because western knowledge spread outside the West in this period - although the term 'spread', implying that what moves does not change, is not the most appropriate one. It is more realistic to think in terms of an active reception in which individuals and groups beyond the West appropriated and adapted western knowledge for their own purposes. In the second place, the world beyond the West needs to be discussed because there was traffic in the opposite direction, the importance of which has been recognized - in the West only relatively recently. Explorers, for example, in this period as in early modern times, depended on indigenous guides and maps. So did botanists, linguists and other scholars, even if they presented the 23 resulting 'discoveries' as their own. It is obvious that the subject is a vast one, difficult to confine in a volume of some hundred thousand words, and I can only hope that readers will not feel that I have contributed to information overload his distinguished contribution to

as well as discussing

it.

A

brief outline of a vast topic,

it

privileges

sudden discoveries at the expense of the slow and patient accumulation of knowledge that leads gradually to major shifts of interpretation. It is equally clear that this book is written from a personal point of view. My own knowledge of knowledge is, to say the least, uneven, and I have often been torn between a desire to do justice to the natural sciences and an attraction to case studies in fields that I know better, from art history to anthropology. The approach is all the more personal because I have lived through and relatively

Introduction

been involved

in

changes

in

knowledge regimes over the

7

last half

century, 20 per cent of the period covered by the book, viewing these

changes from the perspective of one discipline - history - and three sites: the universities of Oxford, Sussex and Cambridge. In other words, what follows, despite its length, should be regarded as an essay, impressionistic in its methods and provisional in its conclusions, making no pretence to cover the ground of its vast subject but rather to offer a bird's-eye view. In a sense it is a sequence of four chapters focus on the processes of gathering, analysing, disseminating and employing knowledges, emphasizing the historicity of activities that are often assumed to be unchanging.

essays.

The

first

Chapters 5 and 6 attempt to counter the common assumption of the continuous progress of knowledge, or 'advancement of learning', recognizing the problematic aspect of accumulation. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the history of knowledge from geographical, economic, political and sociological points of view, while the final chapter makes more explicit the book's essential concern with change over time. Specialization has affected the historiography of knowledge as well as its history. The history of science, for instance, is an autonomous department in many universities. Again, an International Intelligence History Association has been founded (1993), together with a Journal of Intelligence History (2001). The secondary literature on the history of knowledge is itself organized for the most part either by nations or by disciplines. By contrast, the aim and indeed the jus-

- national, social and disciplinary bearing in mind E. M. Forster's advice 'Only connect', and trying to evade what Aby Warburg called the intellectual 'border police' in the hope of producing a polyphonic history of knowledges, a history viewed from multiple perspectives. Although this book is not concerned with recommending a particular attitude to knowledge, let alone a policy, readers should be warned that its author is a pluralist in the sense of believing that knowledges in the plural, like opinions, are desirable, since understanding emerges from intellectual dialogue and even conflict. tification for this essay is to cross frontiers

Part

I

Knowledge

Practices

1

Gathering Knowledges

A

social history of

knowledge obviously needs

to

be concerned

with the ways in which different groups of people acquire, process,

spread and employ knowledge, a sequence that in the world of intelligence - in other words, spying - is sometimes divided into four main stages: collection, analysis, dissemination and action (or, for short, CADA). It is of course impossible to separate these stages com2 pletely. Collecting or observing is not done with an empty head. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz put it, 'In the study of culture, analysis penetrates into the very body of the object', a point that has been reiterated if not exaggerated by scholars who speak of the 'cul3 tural construction' of almost everything. Dissemination often 4 involves analysis. The stages may seem to be timeless: each of them is situated in time as well as space. These four stages will be discussed in order in part I of this book, introducing further distinctions along the way. This chapter focuses on the first stage, the process of collecting or gathering knowledge. 1

Gathering Knowledge Vivid metaphors such as 'collecting' or 'gathering' knowledge conjure up an obviously oversimplified picture, as if knowledge could be picked up like shells from the seashore or pulled from bushes and trees like fruit or netted like butterflies.

A

similar point might be

made about the metaphor of 'hunting' or 'capturing' (a favourite in 5 today's management studies). These terms are used here as no more than shorthand for a series of processes that include exploring,

12

Knowledge Practices

observing, surveying and experimenting, not to mention buying, looting and, not least, asking questions and listening to local

informants. In academic language, these processes are described as doing 'research'. Employed on occasion before 1750, the term became increasingly

onwards

common

in a

number

in

book titles from the mid-eighteenth century European languages - recherches, ricerche,

of

Forschung, and so on - to describe investigations in a variety of intellectual fields, among them anatomy, astronomy, political economy, demography, geography, physics, chemistry, palaeontology, medicine, history and oriental studies. To cite only a few famous examples: 1768 17881794 1799 1812 1838

de Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les americains the journal Asiatic Researches Lamarck, Recherches sur les principaux faits physiques Davy, Researches, Chemical and Philosophical Cuvier, Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles Cournot, Recherches sur les principes mathematiques de

la

theorie des richesses

The examples mentioned above concern research carried out in archives, museums and laboratories, but others involved what we now call 'fieldwork', as in

the obvious case of exploration. John Barrow,

secretary to the British Admiralty,

who was

sion expeditions, published an account of

in a position to

some

of

commis-

them under the

title Voyages of Discovery and Research in the Arctic Regions (1846). Explorers offer memorable examples of knowledge-gathering that have prompted reflections on the process by which knowledge is 6 produced.

The Second Age

of Discovery

The amount of new knowledge gathered or collected in the first century of our period, 1750-1850, was staggering, especially the knowledge collected by Europeans about the fauna, flora, geography and history of other parts of the world. No wonder then that some historians speak of a 'second great age of discovery' in this period.

7

The first age of discovery, from Vasco da Gama and Columbus onwards, had been marked by the extensive exploration of coasts. The second age extended the exploration of coasts to the South Seas and elsewhere, but it also involved the intensive exploration of the inte-

Gathering Knowledges

13

North and South America, Australia, Siberia, Central filling in what Joseph Conrad famously called the 'blank spaces' on the map. One of these explorers, Alexander von Humboldt (figure 1), whose name will recur in these pages, has been described as 'the German Columbus'. An explorer has been defined by one of them, John Hemming, as 'someone who penetrates beyond the world known to his own society, 8 discovers what lies there, and returns to describe it to his own people'. rior of Africa,

Asia and elsewhere,

definition excludes some women (below, p. 238) as well many explorers who failed to return, but his emphasis on bring-

Hemming's as the

ing back

The

knowledge

is

in

tune with the aims of

this

book.

and the tragedies of the explorers lend themselves to heroic narratives, and they have been told again and again. Among the most famous names are James Cook and Louis-Antoine de Bougainville in the South Seas, Mungo Park and David Livingstone in Africa, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark in the western United States, Alexander von Humboldt in South America, Robert Burke and William Wills in Australia, Alexander von Middendorff in Siberia and Nikolai Przhevalsky in Central Asia. Today, the contributions to knowledge by these explorstories of the difficulties, the successes

ers are receiving increasing emphasis.

9

Humboldt, for example, together with his friend the botanist Aime Bonpland, spent five years exploring Spanish America (1799-1804), climbing mountains (including the volcano Mount Chimborazo) and travelling along rivers (the Orinoco and the Amazon). Out of this expedition came contributions to geology, botany, zoology (the study of electric eels, for instance), meteorology and a number of other disciplines (more exactly, as chapter 6 will explain, contributions to what would later become disciplines). 10 However, there were many more explorers of the period who achieved less fame. Frenchmen and Germans as well as Britons investigated the interior of Africa: Rene Caillie, for instance, who responded to the challenge of the Societe geographique de Paris and reached Timbuktu in 1828; Pierre de Brazza, after whom Brazzaville is named; Henri Duveyrier, who explored the Sahara desert at the age of nineteen; Duveyrier's friend the German geographer Heinrich Barth, another explorer of the Sahara; and the German botanist Georg Schweinfurth, who discovered the Azande of Central Africa. 11 In the South Seas, alongside famous figures such as Cook and Bougainville, Jean-Francois de La Perouse, Nicolas Baudin and

Matthew Flinders all led voyages of discovery. Baudin, for instance, embarked on his voyage round the world from 1800 onwards, among other things to

map the coast of Australia, with the support of a major

Figure

1:

Photo by

Alexander von Humboldt, statue Carr (2006).

Adam

in Berlin

by R. Begas (1883)

(Withering

Knowledges

15

learned society, the Institut de France, and the help of some savants aboard, including astronomers, botanists, mineralogists, zoologists and a medical man who also functioned as what we would call an

ethnographer. Russian and North American explorations of the interior of these vast countries ran in parallel, with the Russians moving eastwards and the Americans westwards. Between 1803 and 1806, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, chosen by President Jefferson to lead the Corps of Discovery', travelled from Pittsburgh to the Pacific Coast and back, exploring two-thirds of North America. Lewis described the planned expedition as 'about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width, on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden'. Clark did the surveying and mapping, while Lewis was responsible for natural history.

The explorers found animals unknown to western science, such as horned toad and the eastern woodrat, and they sent back botanical, zoological and mineral specimens. Lewis and Clark were also instructed to learn the names of the Indian tribes that they encountered, their languages, occupations, tools and customs. They described the Sioux, the Shoshones and the Nez Perce, and 12 returned with some vocabularies of Indian languages. Descriptions of their achievement have not always done justice prairie dogs, the plains

to the role of indigenous informants such as

Sacajawea (below,

p. 205) in orienting their expedition, as well as 'the Native American geographic knowledge encoded into the various maps that informed

and guided their journey'. 13 All the same, the achievement of Lewis and Clark, like that of many other explorers, was considerable and allowed scholars to see the big picture - in this case the whole American West - that locals lacked. In Russia, the Geographical Society, the Academy of Sciences, the Russian Ethnographic Museum and other institutions organized expeditions to map and explore distant parts of the empire, including Siberia and the Arctic. The German scholar Peter Pallas was sent to Siberia by Catherine the Great to investigate its natural resources (1768-74); the Russian botanist Mikhail Adams conducted research there (1806); the Norwegian Christopher Hansteen went to Siberia to study the magnetism of the earth (1828-30), while Alexander von

Humboldt

also paid a visit (1829).

However, the first major scientific expedition to Siberia was that of the zoologist Alexander von Middendorff (1842-5), funded by the Russian government and supported by the Russian Academy of Sciences in order to study organic life in an Arctic environment. In fact, Middendorff did much more than this, leading what has

1

Knowledge

6

Practices

been called 'the most outstanding Russian scientific expedition of the nineteenth century', and throwing his net as widely as Lewis and Clark had done in the American West. Middendorff and his small team mapped the region, studied the climate, measured the soil temperature, and collected not only specimens of flora and fauna but also

the tools, songs, stories and vocabularies of the indigenous peoples,

among them

the Ostyaks, the Yakut and the Tungus.

14

Russian expan-

sion into Turkestan resulted in a series of geographical, archaeological

and ethnographic expeditions

to Central Asia led

by Nikolai

Przhevalsky (1872), Samuil Dudin (1900-2), and others. 15 Central Asia was finally mapped by the Swedish geographer Sven Hedin following a series of expeditions between 1894 and 1908.

Scientific Expeditions

On land and at sea, major contributions to knowledge, especially the knowledge of geography, were made by individuals with no claim to be scholars, the explorers themselves, with the aid - often unacknowledged - of some of the indigenous inhabitants of the region they were exploring.

However, there was an important difference between the first and second ages of discovery. The ships of the first age had carried soldiers, merchants, missionaries and administrators. Those of the second age, an age of increasing specialization (discussed below, pp. 160ff.), also carried astronomers, naturalists and other scholars. There was an increasing number of what we would call 'scientific' expeditions, organized partly or even primarily to gather knowledge not only of sea routes of strategic, political or economic significance but of the natural world in general and (less frequently) of different cultures. It has sometimes been suggested that the scientific expedition was 16 invented at the end of the eighteenth century. This suggestion passes over early modern parallels such as the case of Francisco Hernandez, II of Spain, who was sent on a seven-year mission (1571-8) to Mexico and the Philippines in order to study medicinal herbs. All the same, it is surely correct to date to the late eighteenth century the rise of the scientific or knowledge-gathering

physician to King Philip

expedition as an organized and recurrent words, an institution.

phenomenon -

In the case of voyages of exploration, the

in other

names of some of the

ships suggest the importance of scientific concerns, at least at the level

Cook sailed in the Descubierta, La Perouse in

of self-presentation. James

Discovery, Alessandro

Malaspina

the Astrolabe, Baudin

in the

Gathering Knowledges in the Naturaliste

and the Geography and Flinders

in

17

the Investigator,

while the French expeditions to the Pacific (1792) and the Arctic (1835) sailed in the Recherche.

Knowledge-gathering was included in the instructions to the capand a team of scholars might be taken on board. For example, an astronomer travelled with Captain Cook on his first voyage, when the Royal Society commissioned him to observe the transit of Venus across the sun, due in 1769. The ship also carried the botanists Joseph Banks and his Swedish colleague Daniel Solander (hence the name Botany Bay\ given by Cook to what is now part of the city of Sydney). In similar fashion. La Perouse received detailed instructions from the Geographer Royal and the Academy of Sciences about what knowledge to gather. He took ten scholars with him, among them astronomers, geologists, botanists and zoologists - not counting artists, who were commissioned to record the landscapes, fauna, flora and tains,

indigenous inhabitants of the places visited. In the tradition of Philip II

17

and Hernandez, Spain launched over

mainly botanical expediWorld, while France launched even more. They include the expedition to the Orinoco (1754-61); the Franco-Spanish expedition to Peru (1777-88); the expedition to New Granada, now sixty expeditions in the eighteenth century,

tions to the

New

Colombia (1783-1808); and the expedition to New Spain, now Mexico 18 In other words, although Humboldt's expedition to (1787-1803). Spanish America attracted more international attention and produced discoveries in a wider variety of fields, it was far from the first or even the most protracted.

A

Third

Age

of Discovery?

A concentration on the century that runs from the 1760s to the 1860s, Cook

some of the most epic narbetween explorers and harsh environments, in the Arctic and Antarctic (though Captain Constantine Phipps had made an expedition to the North Pole as early as 1773). Here too the search for knowledge is an important part of the story. In 1895, the Sixth International Geographical Congress declared that 'the greatest piece of geographical exploration still to be undertaken' was in the Antarctic, and that it would result in 'additions to knowledge in almost every branch of science'. 19 The famous chemist Dmitri Mendeleev urged the Russian prime minister to support the 'conquest' of the North and South Poles for the sake of the 'triumph of knowledge'. 20 Nansen was a zoologist and an oceanographer. Nathorst or from

to Livingstone, leaves out

ratives of the battle

1

8

Knowledge Practices

was a geologist and a paleobotanist.

On Amundsen's

Arctic expedi-

was erected on the ice. Poles were reached South at last, there seemed and North the As no part of the world left to conquer or at least to explore, and in 1904 the British geographer Halford Mackinder announced with regret what he called the end of the 'Columbian' era and the coming of tion of 1918-25, a geophysical observatory

'closed space'.

However, another

frontier

was opening: the world under the

sea.

Deep sea exploration began with the expedition of the British ship the Challenger (1872-6; figure 2), which made a geological map of the floor, measured the temperature of the water at different depths and discovered some 4,700 previously unknown forms of marine life. From the 1930s onwards, deep sea exploration was undertaken by scientists in specially designed submersibles with large windows for observation - the bathysphere (lowered from a ship on 21 a cable) and the bathyscaphe (which was self-propelled). After land and sea came the exploration of space, the 'third great 22 age' of discovery. The launch of the artificial satellite Sputnik by the Russians (1957), closely followed by the foundation of the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA, 1958), was

ocean

supposed

'to

advance fundamental

scientific

knowledge' as well as

name of the American space shuttle Challenger paid homage to the nineteenth-century ship.

national prestige. The (in service

As

1983-6)

in the case of polar exploration, the epic quality of the exploits

Armstrong (not

mention the tragedy of the astronauts who died in accidents) has overshadowed the knowledge acquired in the course of the many missions carried out by manned and unmanned spacecraft: the collection of geological samples from the moon, for instance, the study of oceanography by means of instruments in space, the transmission of data to earth from Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and, recently, the analysis of soil from Mars, collected by the Phoenix space probe of Yuri Gagarin and Neil

(2008).

In

to

23

Search of Past Cultures

A few expeditions in search of knowledge were concerned less with nature than with culture, past and present. An early example was the Niebuhr expedition to Arabia (taking in modern Egypt and Syria) between 1761 and 1767. Suggested by the German biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis, in order to throw light on the peoples described in the Old Testament by studying them in their own envi-

-.:*&,:»,,,

s CO

s —

Knowledge

20

Practices

ronment, the expedition was financed by the king of Denmark and included the German surveyor Carsten Niebuhr and a Swedish botanist, Peter Forsskal, as well as a philologist and an artist. The fate of the majority of the participants was as tragic as that of many explorers in Africa or the Antarctic, though Niebuhr himself survived to publish a famous description of Arabia, offering new information about local customs and languages and the sculptures remaining

in the ruins of Persepolis.

philologist

Rasmus Rask, who

and India in Danish king.

A

24

The one-man expedition of the

Sweden, Finland, Russia, Persia search of manuscripts (1816-23), was also financed by a

generation

later,

visited

the Niebuhr expedition was dwarfed by the

who accompanied Napoleon's army when the French invaded Egypt in 1798. 25 Following this model, a Mission scientifique de Moree (1828-33), appointed by the Institut de France, accompanied the French army when it intervened in the Greek War of Independence. Again, what was officially known as the 'scientific exploration' of Algeria was carried out between 1841 and 1843 on behalf of the French government. Some scholars also accompanied the French army that intervened in Mexico in 1862 in support 26 of the emperor Maximilian. The uses of knowledge in the construction and maintenance of empires will be discussed further in more than 150

chapter

scholars

4.

Some

of the scholars accompanying the Egyptian, Greek, Algerian and Mexican expeditions were archaeologists. A number of remarkable discoveries of the material remains of past civilizations had already been made in the eighteenth century, including the ruins of the ancient Roman cities of Herculaneum (1738) and Pompeii (1748) and the Mayan city of Palenque in Mexico (1773). However, many of the most famous archaeological expeditions and excavations date from the middle and late nineteenth century. The ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh was excavated by the English diplomat Austin Layard (1845 onwards), the city of Troy (near Hisarlik in Anatolia) by the German Heinrich Schliemann (1870-). Sumerian civilization was discovered by the French archaeologist

A

Ernest de Sarzec at Telloh in Iraq (1877-). number of ancient sites in Egypt were excavated by the Englishman Flinders Petrie (1880-). The city of Babylon was excavated by the German Robert Koldewey and the palace complex of Knossos in Crete by Arthur Evans (both from 1899 onwards). Spectacular discoveries remained to be made in the early twentieth century. The civilization of the from 1906 onwards in excavations

began to be uncovered Boghazkoi in Anatolia. The

Hittites at

Gathering Knowledges

21

Tangut city of Khara-Khoto in western China was excavated by the Russian Pyotr Kozlov in 1907-9. The Inca city of Machu Picchu was discovered in 1911 by the American historian Hiram Bingham (with the help of a local farmer), while systematic excavations of the

Mayan

remains at Palenque began in 1934. Anthropological expeditions were also made at this time. Among the best known are the Jesup North Pacific Expedition (1897-1902), in which Franz Boas participated; the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits (1898), actually an interdisciplinary enterprise; and the French Mission Dakar-Djibouti (1931-3), which included a leading anthropologist, Marcel Griaule. Like the folklorists nearer home, the curiosity of the anthropologists was intensified by their belief that they were witnessing the last days of traditional or 'primitive' cultures that were

doomed

to extinction in the

modern

As Adolf

Bastian declared in 1880, 'What can be done must it is not, the possibility of ethnology is forever 27 annulled.' According to Malinowski, the tragedy of ethnology is that, at the very moment that it is 'ready for work', 'the material of 28 its study melts away with hopeless rapidity'. world.

be done now.

If

The Discovery

of

Time

Archaeologists were only one of the groups who contributed to what 29 has been described as the 'discovery of time', especially 'deep time'. These groups might be called 'time explorers', and for this reason they are discussed in this chapter alongside explorers of space, even though the discovery of deeper and deeper layers of time was the result of painstaking analysis rather than simple observation. In 1750, many educated Europeans still held the traditional view that the world was 6,000 years old. Since that time the idea of a 6,000year world was challenged again and again by archaeologists, palae-

geologists and astronomers. In the middle of the nineteenth century the term 'prehistory' came into use in English among archaeologists and others to describe the human past before the invention of writing (in French, prehistoire appeared a little later, in 1876, but the term antehistorique went back to the 1830s). The period known as 'prehistory' gradually expanded. The Stone ontologists,

Age was

divided into old and new, Paleolithic and Neolithic. Then a middle period known as Mesolithic was introduced, while the Palaeolithic was sub-divided into Lower, Middle and Upper periods, to distinguish the changes over what was now seen to be a longer and longer period of time.

Knowledge

22

Practices

last hundred and fifty years or so, thanks to archaeoloand palaeontologists, the date for humans emerging as toolusing mammals has been pushed further and further back. In 1942 Louis and Mary Leakey discovered a site of human occupation in Kenya, Olorgesailie, including stone hand axes and the remains of animals that they dated between 700,000 and 900,000 years ago. The Leakeys also worked on Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania, where toolmaking has been shown to have begun around 2.5 million years ago. Even this discovery has been trumped by the discovery of 'Lucy a human skeleton 3 million years old found in Ethiopia, showing that walking on two legs came before tool-making. Even 3 million years of human time seems short when compared to animal time, as revealed by palaeontologists from the beginning

Over the

gists

1

,

of the nineteenth century onwards. In his Recherches (1812) the French palaeontologist Georges Cuvier argued that fossil sequences

revealed a succession of organisms, with reptiles coming before mammals. He discovered the mammoth and the mastodon and in 1809 identified and named the pterodactyl, discovered half a century earlier.

Since Cuvier, fossils have been pushed

much

further back in

now

dated to the period from 66 to 245 million years ago. The earliest fossils are now dated around 3.5 thousand million years ago. Life on earth is now believed to have begun around 3.8 thousand million years ago. Palaeontology was in its turn trumped by geology. In his Epoques de nature (1779) the comte de Buffon distinguished six epochs that added up to about 75,000 years, which seems a modest figure now but was enough to shock many people at the time. Later, studying the process of sedimentation, Buffon extended the age of the earth to 3 million years, but did not publish this finding. Basing his estimates, like Buffon, on calculations of heat loss, the British physicist William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) suggested in 1862 that the earth was from 20 to 400 million years old. However, that figure was not enough for younger men such as the physicist Robert Strutt, who dated a rock to 2,000 million years, or the geologist Arthur Holmes, who claimed that some rocks from Mozambique were 1,500 million years old. A committee on the age of the earth was set up in which Holmes argued time. Dinosaurs are

for a date of 1,500 to 3,000 million.

4,500 million.

The current estimate

is

around

30

Geology was

trumped by astronomy, presenting us with a not mere millions but billions of years old. In the 1920s, the American astronomer Edwin P. Hubble launched the idea of the universe starting with a 'big bang' - as an opponent of the theory, the British astronomer Fred Hoyle, memorably called it.

universe that

is

finally

Gathering Knowledges

When?

23

Estimates vary, but some are as high as 10 thousand million

years ago.

Surveys something from a commanding position. Land making measurements in order to determine the distance between different points, goes back at least as far as ancient Egypt, and some of the instruments used were invented by Arabs in the Middle Ages, but the practice was becoming more exact in our period, and it was also extended to many more parts of the earth. Explorers were often surveyors in this technical sense. Captain Cook, for instance, owed his commission to undertake voyages in the Pacific to the skill he had shown as a surveyor for the Royal Navy. The surveying of coasts was particularly important as an aid to navigation in an age of European and American expansion. Spain and Britain were both interested in the northwest coast of the Pacific (nearly coming to blows over the possession of Nootka Sound), and in the 1790s both countries mounted expeditions to survey the area. The United States Survey of the Coast (1808) offers an early instance of government support for research. Imperial governments were particularly concerned to survey their territories. India, for instance, was surveyed from 1764 onwards by a team led by Major James Rennell, soon to be appointed surveyor-general. Many other kinds of survey (or, as the French called them, enquetes, 'enquiries') were undertaken in this period: geological, ethnographic, archaeological, botanical, and so on. Early examples include the geological survey of Canada (1842); the ethnographic survey conducted by the Russian Geographical Society (1848); and the Pacific Railroad Surveys of the American West in the mid-nineteenth century. The British Ordnance Survey began in 1791, the Archaeological Survey of India in 1861, and the US Lake Survey in 1882. Among social surveys (the term goes back only to 1927), the most famous is surely the census. The census has a long history - the

To survey

is

to view

surveying, in the sense of

parents of Jesus travelled to Bethlehem to take part in a census that is now dated to 6 ce - but it was in our period that regular censustaking by governments, every five or ten years, became an established

Sweden

led the way (in 1749), followed by Spain (1768), the and France and Britain (both 1801). 31 Whether or not inspired by the census, more specialized social surveys soon followed. In France, for instance, enquiries into the economic state of the nation began in 1806 and surveys of working

practice.

USA

(1790),

24

Knowledge

Practices

conditions in 1830, while an official enquete into popular poetry took 32 In Britain, one of the most famous surveys was the place in 1852. investigation of public health leading to

Edwin Chad wick's Report

the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population (1842), soon followed by Friedrich Engels on The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. In Norway, pioneering surveys of fishermen and foresters were carried out by the sociologist Eilert Sundt in the middle of the nineteenth century. 33 In Germany, surveys of factories and agricultural workers go back

on

to the 1870s and 1890s, soon after the unification of the country. However, the country most closely associated with the social survey is surely the USA. American surveys included The Philadelphia Negro (1899), a study of the social and economic situation of blacks in the city conducted by W. E. B. Du Bois, who later became the head of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People; the Pittsburgh Survey (1909-14); the Springfield Survey (1918-20); and, best known of all, Alfred Kinsey's surveys of the Sexual Behaviour of the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behaviour of the Human Female (1953).

The Accumulation The

participants in

of

Specimens

many

of the expeditions mentioned above

be described as gathering knowledge

may

was from the late eighteenth century onwards, to be instructed to bring back local artefacts and scientific specimens. Libraries and museums, in Europe and the USA in particular, came to be filled with growing numbers of 'acquisitions': fossils, animal and human skeletons, skulls, shells, insects, weapons, tools, paintings, masks, totem poles, statues of Buddha or Shiva, architectural fragments such as the Ishtar Gate (from Babylon), and on occasion entire buildings. Works of art should be included here not only because they were objects of knowledge for 'connoisseurs' but also because works outside the occidental tradition were collected in the West until relatively recently less for aesthetic reasons than for the light they were believed to shed on the 'exotic' cultures in which they were made. Thanks to Banks and Solander, over a thousand plants and hundreds of specimens of minerals, animals, birds and fish were brought back from Cook's first voyage. Living specimens of plants were sent to botanical gardens such as Kew, while dried plants were kept in a not

uncommon

museum

in a near-literal sense. It

for the leaders of expeditions,

or herbarium.

From

the scholars involved in Napoleon's

Gathering Knowledges

25

Geoffroy where St-Hilaire was a professor, received thousands of specimens, filling from forty 4 to fifty cases when they were transported from Marseilles to Paris. The US Exploring Expedition to the South Seas (1838-42), overshadowing its predecessors, brought back over 160,000 specimens; 50,000 specimens were sent back from Rio, early in the expedition, while 'over the next three years, boxes both wood and tin, whiskey barrels and kegs, and canvas bags and baskets arrived by the hun35 The naturalist Alfred Wallace brought back over 125,000 dreds'. specimens from his eight years in Borneo studying the fauna and flora, perhaps a record haul for an individual scientist. Another spectacular haul came from the British deep sea expedition on HMS Challenger (1872-6). During the course of the voyage, material was sent back from Bermuda, Halifax, the Cape, Sydney, Hong Kong and Japan. In his introduction to the scientific reports, the chief scientist on the expedition wrote: expedition

to

Egypt,

notably

the

naturalist

Etienne

St-Hilaire, the Mitscc d'histoire naturelle in Paris,

after the contents of the ship

we

had been

finally cleared

out at Sheerness,

found, on mustering our stores, that they consisted of 563 cases,

containing 2,270 large glass jars with specimens in

spirit

of wine, 1,749

smaller stoppered bottles, 1,860 glass tubes, and 176 tin cases,

all

with

specimens in spirit; 180 tin cases with dried specimens; and 22 casks 36 with specimens in brine.

These acquisitions ended up in the Natural History Museum. Among the specimens collected were not only the bones of species of animal that were still alive but also the fossil bones of species that had long been extinct, including the famous dinosaurs, discovered at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Fossils of extinct animals

were found in many parts of the world - glyptodons in South America, iguanadons in Belgium, the allosaurus in North America, the rhoetosaurus in Australia, and so on - and their bones were carefully reconstructed by palaeontologists. The idea of the specimen was extended to human artefacts. A British mail order catalogue of 1896 offered for sale a

list of so-called Ethnological Specimens. Human skeletons and skulls, especially those of non-western peoples, were treated as specimens and removed from graves without permission. The Museum fiir Naturkunde in Berlin still houses over 6,000 skulls, collected in the later nineteenth

century in the heyday of 'craniology' (below, pp. 65, 154). 37 The most remarkable 'specimens', however, are surely the whole human bodies preserved in bogs or ice, including Tollund Man, a corpse from the

26

Knowledge Practices

fourth century bc discovered in Denmark in 1950, and the Iceman, a corpse from around 3300 bc, discovered in the Alps in 1991, offering archaeologists information about the clothing, tools and even the diet of those times.

Even

38

humans might be

treated as specimens on occasion, order to demonstrate racial features or brought to Europe or the USA to be shown in exhibitions of exotic cultures, 39 sometimes in reconstructed villages. In the sixteenth century, individuals from the Tupinamba people had been taken from Brazil to France, to be displayed as curiosities or trophies rather than to gain knowledge (though Montaigne took the opportunity to question them through an interpreter). In 1893, on the other hand, Franz Boas brought a group of Kwakiutl from Northwest Canada to Chicago 'to show whatever is asked of them in relation to their customs and mode living

photographed

of

in

40

life'.

Archaeological and ethnographic collections grew at a dizzy rate, The Egyptian and Assyrian halls in major European museums and galleries bear testimony to the amount of material that was taken from the Middle East, beginning with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798. The huge Assyrian sculpespecially in the nineteenth century.

tures in the British

Museum, for

instance,

were sent from Nineveh by

Layard, arriving in 1852. Some famous treasures, from the mask of Agamemnon (discovered by Schliemann at Mycenae in 1876) or the portrait bust of the pharaoh's wife Nefertiti (discovered in 1912) are best remembered for their aesthetic qualities, but they too made contributions to knowledge. There is an obvious contrast between specimens taken from the world of nature and human artefacts. 'Gathering' is not such an inappropriate term for collecting shells or picking flowers. On the other hand, although some artefacts were gathered in the sense of being dug out of the ground in which they had rested for thousands of years, others were someone's property, only to be acquired either by trade or plunder. Cook found that the inhabitants of Nootka Sound were only too willing to sell masks, spears and even canoes, but other 41 peoples were more reluctant. As for looting, Napoleon's enrichment of the Louvre with works of art taken from cities in Italy, Spain and other countries that his armies invaded is a notorious but far from an isolated example. In the Second World War, this precedent was followed by the Germans, the Russians and the Americans. The process of confiscation, 'annexation' or 'scientific conquest' was extended to archives, libraries and museums. The papal archives, 42 for example, were taken to Paris as part of Napoleon's booty. Following the French invasion of the Austrian Netherlands in 1794, five wagon-loads of manuscripts, plants, fossils and minerals were sent

Gathering Knowledges to Paris. Following the

27

French invasion of Holland, books from the

Dutch Royal Library were taken to Paris and a elephants from The Hague was sent to the Musee

collection of fossil d'histoire naturelle.

When the French occupied Verona, a collection of 600 fossils was botanist and a mineralogist dispatched to the same destination. accompanied the army to advise what should be taken. It is difficult to imagine any period, before or since, when armies took fossils so 43 seriously. Even within states redistributions took place that might

A

well be viewed as plundering: the confiscation of monastic libraries,

what has been described from gardens in Paris took place for

for instance. In similar fashion, after 1789, as the 'stripping of plant assets'

Musee

the benefit of the

d'histoire naturelle.

44

The discovery of the ancient world offers some of the most notorious examples of the process of plundering. Napoleon's army brought back obelisks and mummies from Egypt and would have brought the famous Rosetta Stone as well had the British not captured it first. Lord Elgin, British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (which at that time included Greece), obtained official permission to remove classical sculptures found on or below the ground near the Parthenon in Athens (though not to strip the temple itself, as actually happened). The 'Elgin Marbles', as they are still known, were purchased by the British government in 1816 and displayed in the British Museum, where they remain, despite the efforts of successive Greek governments to repatriate them. 'Plunder' was a term not infrequently used at the time to describe the collection of antiquities, most famously by Lord Byron, whose poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-18) described the Elgin Marbles as 'the last poor plunder from a bleeding land'. The term was even used by collectors, usually about their rivals, though one of them, a French ambassador to the sultan, advised his agent not to neglect any opportunity for plunder in Athens and its territory (We negligez aucune occasion de piller dans Athenes et dans son territoire') 45 Many artefacts from other cultures were acquired by western museums by questionable means, especially in the nineteenth century. For example, some important examples of pre-Columbian art from Mexico reached museums in France and elsewhere following the invasion of Mexico by Napoleon III. The army was accompanied not only by archaeologists but also by a dealer in antiquities. Again, the famous bronze sculptures of the city of Benin in West Africa began to reach museums in Britain after the 'punitive expedition' of 1897 in which the city was burned (figure 3). Some of the 'spoils of Benin', as the Illustrated

London News

ited at the British

Museum

called

that

same

them year.

at the time, 46

were exhib-

In similar fashion, the

forces of the eight-nation alliance that intervened in

China

in

1900

28

Knowledge

Practices

f

m^m^c: Figure

3:

m.-'-m

Benin expedition with bronzes and from the royal compound

British officers of the 1897

ivories taken

© The Trustees

of the British

Museum

Boxer uprising looted Beijing, taking away and pieces of porcelain and jade that ended up in western museums. Soon afterwards, a British expedition to Tibet to suppress the so-called

many

statues

(1903-4) resulted in the looting of a number of monasteries to enrich western collections. 47 As the German anthropologist Adolf Bastian complacently remarked, 'military campaigns can bear fruit for scien48 tific fields of research and can be exploited for this purpose'. Rival archaeological expeditions mounted by different nations bore similar fruit. For example, 16,000 kilos of manuscripts, statues and murals (hacked off the walls) were shipped to Berlin fromTurfan, in Chinese Turkestan, following four German expeditions that took 49 place between 1902 and 1914. In the later nineteenth century, German ethnographic museums in particular were increasing their holdings at a remarkable rate, driven by the desire both to compete with other museums and to rescue traditional artefacts before the cultures that produced them disappeared entirely. By 1886 there were

Gathering Knowledges already

some

29

15,000 items in the sections for Africa and Oceania in

the Ethnological

Museum

in Berlin,

and the number had quadrupled

by 1899. Around 16,000 items were acquired for the Berlin museum by a single professional collector on his expeditions to North America, Siberia and Indonesia, but even this haul

was overshadowed by the

Machu Picchu by Bingham. Like other kinds of artefact, many texts were discovered and acquired by libraries and museums in this period. The collection of manuscripts is a long tradition in the West, associated with the humanists of the Renaissance in particular but continuing ever since. Manuscripts of ancient Greek and Roman writers were still eagerly sought. Napoleon's army carried off around 1,500 manuscripts from the Austrian Netherlands and another 1,500 from Italy, mainly from Bologna and the Vatican. 50 Efforts were made to locate and catalogue manuscript sources for national histories. It was for this reason, for instance, that the Historical Manuscripts Commission was founded 40,000 objects, from skeletons to ceramics, taken from

in Britain in 1869.

What was new

period was the increasing interest in other cultural traditions and the acquisition of books and manuscripts in Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese and other non-European languages. Among the most famous texts discovered was the Rosetta Stone in Egypt, found in 1799, and the law-code of the Babylonian ruler Hammurabi, found in Iran in 1901. In the case of Assyria, half a million tablets with cuneiform inscriptions were unearthed, enough 51 to keep specialists busy for centuries. Manuscripts on parchment, paper and papyrus continued to flow into museums, libraries and archives. By 1886 the library of the University of Berlin contained around 2,000 manuscripts in Sanskrit, most of them recently acquired. 52 The Russian archaeologist Kozlov brought back 2,000 texts from his excavation of the city of KharaKhoto in 1908. The British Museum received some 2,000 Tibetan books and manuscripts collected for the museum by the chief medical 53 officer on the British military expedition of 1903. In 1907, the archaeologist Aurel Stein discovered and carried off some 40,000 scrolls, including the famous Diamond Sutra, from the Dunhuang Caves, a complex of Buddhist temples on the western frontier of China. Stein paid only £220 for the scrolls, which went, once again, to the British

in this

Museum. domain

of 'knowledge management' the metaphor knowledge is sometimes employed. Occasionally, however, the term needs to be used in a literal sense. After Warsaw was invaded by Russian troops in 1794, around 400,000 volumes were In the growing

of 'capturing'

30

Knowledge

Practices

taken to the newly founded Imperial Library in St Petersburg. Again, during the Second World War, the Russian army took away many

books from German libraries, including the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin: some of the volumes remain in Moscow. A famous cache of documents that was captured in the course of military operations was the Communist Party archive of the city of Smolensk, taken by the Germans in 1941 and again by the Americans in 1945, and then passed to the Federal Records Center, to be used by a Sovietologist in a study called Smolensk under Soviet Rule (1958), allowing the author what he called 'an unparalleled opportunity to view the processes of regional and local government in the Soviet Union from the inside'.

More and more manuscripts were gathered time.

The

into archives at this

history of archives goes back a long way, but there were

important innovations in

documents

this period.

One was

in quarters built for the purpose.

the practice of housing

Another was the profes-

A third innovation - only gradually put - was making documents accessible to scholars and, still later, to the general public. In the 1780s, for instance, Juan Bautista Munoz, a historian extremely conscious of the importance of primary sources, persuaded the Council of the Indies to create an archive for 54 scholarly use. In 1794, a decree of the French Convention threw open the archives of the government, known from 1800 onwards as the Archives nationales. Elsewhere, the establishment and opening of government archives was, in part at least, an unintended consequence of Napoleon's conquests, which ended traditional regimes, from the Holy Roman Empire to the Venetian republic, thus making their documents obsolete. Once archives were established, documents came flooding in. The sionalization of archivists. into practice

Italian state archives, established after the unification of the country

by earlier regimes) already 55 contained 3,736,892 items by 1905. Today, the British National Archives at Kew advertises that fact that 11 million descriptions of

in 1861 (but including material collected

documents are to be found in its catalogue. Large public libraries became larger and larger, often by swallow-

Even

might be swallowed in this way. When the Jesuits were suppressed in 1773, for instance, the libraries of their colleges in different parts of the world were often transferred to other institutions, among them the universities of Freiburg and Olmiitz (Olomouc). Again, when German monasteries were dissolved in 1802-3, their books and manuscripts were often sent to secular libraries, such as the Bavarian Staatsbibliothek in Munich. What librarians call 'acquisitions' are often transfers. ing smaller private ones.

institutional libraries

Gathering Knowledges

31

No wonder

then that major libraries were rapidly increasing With 200,000 books, the library of the University of Gottingen was considered one of the best in Europe around the year 1800. The British Museum contained 235,000 books in 1837, but by 1856 the number had more than doubled, to 540,000. By 1914 the their holdings.

Bavarian Staatsbibliothek contained nearly 700,000 books, while the Bodleian Library at Oxford had reached a million. Today, the Widener Library at Harvard contains nearly 5 million books; the Bibliotheque nationale de France in Paris, 13 million; the British Library, 14 million; and the Library of Congress, 30 million books and the mind-boggling number of 100 million items, including manuscripts and images 56 photographs, drawings, prints, and so on.

Varieties of Fieldwork

The world outside museums and universities was viewed not only as a storehouse from which to appropriate objects but also as a field in which to study and to observe. 57 Outdoor fieldwork became an increasingly well-established practice in the later eighteenth century,

between 'field' (terrain) and study (cabinet) between nomadic and sedentary scholars, workers on the periphery and workers at the centre. Fieldworkers often expressed contempt for the 'armchair' scholar, seeing themselves as closer to reality, whether natural or cultural. On the other hand, in the domain of natural history, Cuvier - despite the geological fieldwork he had carried out - asserted the superiority of giving rise to conflicts

and

rivalries

the scholar in his study, able to see the whole, over the naturaliste-

voyageur,

who saw

58

only a part of reality. Anthropologists sometimes think of fieldwork, defined by the Englishman Alfred Haddon in 1910 as 'the intensive study of limited areas', as their monopoly, and I shall focus on their discipline as a 59 case study. In fact Haddon, who had spent time at the zoological station in Naples, borrowed the term 'fieldwork' from natural history and, when taking part in the Cambridge expedition to the Torres Straits, he had intended to examine fauna and coral reefs as well as local customs. The practice, or family of practices, is common to

workers in a variety of 'field sciences': naturalists with field-glasses and butterfly-nets, archaeologists digging up the past with spades, geologists with their hammers, ecologists, ethologists, geographers, sociologists and even hydrographers - whose 'field' is water - and astronomers (those who travel to the tropics or into space as distinct from those who observe from home).

32

Knowledge Practices

Outside the academic world, a similar opposition between field and study can be found in journalism, between investigative reporters or foreign correspondents on one side and their editors on the other, and also in spying, between 'field agents and their headquarters in 1

Whitehall or Langley, Virginia (the site of the Executive Office of the CIA). The film Body of Lies (2008) dramatized a clash between a field agent (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his chief in the office (Russell

Crowe). For a long time a story was current that might be called 'the Malinowski myth', claiming that Malinowski's work in the Trobriand Islands (1914-18) originated the method that made anthropology 60 Malinowski produced a manifesto for this distinctive (figure 4). method in the introduction to his Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922), in which he suggested that 'the secret of effective fieldwork' was to come down from the verandah and 'live without other white men, right among the natives', in order to observe, to question, and to collect 'concrete data' about the rules of the culture, remoulding 'the older crude information of travellers, missionaries, etc.'. The

method was defined

famous anthroJames Frazer, a man of the study. Like the many origin myths studied by anthropologists, this one has symbolic importance, but it should not be taken literally. Change was actually gradual rather than sudden. Malinowski did not always pitch his tent 'among the natives'. Conversely, some missionaries had against the practice of the most

pologist of the time, Sir

Figure

©

4:

Malinowski

London School

in the

Trobriand Islands (1918)

of Economics Archive

Gathering Knowledges

33

lived for years in a particular region, learned the language, and observed the inhabitants with care, like later anthropologists. A few missionaries became academic anthropologists, among them the Frenchman Maurice Leenhardt, who worked among the Kanak of

New

Caledonia.

61

Recent historical research suggests that it is impossible to 62 sharp distinctions between earlier travel and later 'fieldwork'.

Edward Lane

(figure 5) lived in

Egypt

make

When

in the 1820s, for instance,

he

described himself as 'speaking the language of the country and conforming with the manners of my Moos'lim neighbours', including 63

'renouncing knives and forks'. Again, when Frank Cushing lived among the Zurii (from 1879 onwards), he was initiated into the Priesthood of the Bow and claimed to study the Zuni 'from the inside'. Franz Boas studied the local cultures with care when he spent relatively short periods among the Eskimo in 1883 and on Vancouver Island in 1886.

Even

the explicit distinction

between

field

anthropologists and

armchair scholars goes back before Malinowski, to Alfred Haddon's

Figure

©

5:

Portrait of

Edward William Lane with turban London

National Portrait Gallery,

(1829)

Knowledge

34

Practices

History of Anthropology (1910). The report to the Carnegie Institute by W. H. Rivers in 1911 recommended 'intensive work', defined as 'a 64

1

Indeed, Malinowski's own year or more among a community analysis in Malinowskian terms as a story about account cries out for the past which functions as the 'charter' of institutions in the present and maintains the boundary between anthropology and other .

disciplines.

65

Returning to the tion

between

example, ical

it

field

field sciences in general,

it is

clear that the opposi-

and study has often been drawn too

sharply. For

omits intermediate spaces such as the museum, the botan-

or zoological garden, and the laboratory, a controlled environ-

ment

for experiments. Experiments did not begin in this period: they played a crucial role in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, especially experiments in physics, from Galileo to Newton. All the same, many more experiments were conducted in our period and in a much greater variety of domains of knowledge. Experiments are often conducted to test hypotheses (below, p. 75) or to display results in public (p. 90), but they also make possible a special kind of observation and so contribute to the gathering of knowledge. What has been described as 'mimetic experimentation', for instance, attempts to reproduce natural phenomena in the laboratory, as in the case of the creation of a cloud in the so-called cloudchamber constructed in 1895. 66 The antithesis between field and study was important for many actors on the stage of knowledge, but it requires nuances to allow for dialogue and interaction. Alongside competition between two species of scholars we also find complementarity, a division of labour. For example, the same scholars may do fieldwork early in their career and 'study work' when they are older. Joseph Banks travelled when young but was later 'tied', as he put it, to his armchair. 67 The young Linnaeus carried out fieldwork in Lapland in the 1730s, but later retired to his botanical garden, a kind of open-air study, relying on his disciples to travel for him (literally from China to Peru) and on local correspondents to send him information and specimens. Again, Alexander von Humboldt made his famous expedition to South America in his early thirties before retiring to his study, first in Paris and later in Berlin. The American sociologist William F. Whyte carried out fieldwork in a Boston slum for his book Street Corner Society (1943) but left the streets for the study after he devel-

oped

polio.

Questionnaires allowed scholars in their studies to influence researchers in the field, as in the case of the questions to travellers drawn up by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus and by the Victorian

Gathering Knowledges anthropologist field led to 'art

Edward

refinements

Tyior. in

68

Conversely, discoveries

questionnaires, to a

more

made

35

in the

self-conscious

of asking questions'.^ Again, one might and surely ought to

make

a relative rather than an absolute distinction between formal field-

work and informal observation and conversation. 'Fieldwork' implies more rigour, more system and more time spent with the locals. Over the long term it seems possible to detect a change in the balance between field and study, with the field becoming increasingly important from the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. More recently, though, the movement seems to have gone into reverse, at least in some domains. Changes in communication have weakened the old contrast. Where Cook spent years without contact with his home base, Armstrong, walking on the moon, was in constant contact with mission control in Houston. The film cited earlier. Body of Lies, showed very clearly how modern technology, using satellites, allows people thousands of miles away to observe action on the ground in real time and at apparently close quarters and so to intervene, taking at least some of the initiative away from local agents.

Varieties of Observation

One

of the main arguments for the superiority of the field over the

study has been that the field offers a closer standpoint for observation. 'As I went on my morning walk through the village', Malinowski wrote of his time in the Trobriand Islands, 'I could see intimate details of family life, of toilet, cooking, taking of meals; I could see the

arrangements for the day's work, people starting on their errands, or groups of men and women busy on some manufacturing tasks.' 70 The term 'observation' seems unproblematic - just another word for 'looking' - and the practice may seem timeless, whether we think of travellers, healers or stargazers. In what follows, however, I should

draw attention to the historicity of observation, including not only the increasingly rapid rise of aids to observation but also a growing awareness of the problems raised by the practice. 71 From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, it is possible to like to

discern a growing interest in precise, systematic or disciplined obser-

whether it was regarded as an art or a science. In 1740, the famous German encyclopaedia organized by the publisher Johann Heinrich Zedler incorporated an article on observation. In 1770, a learned society based in Haarlem (the Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen) offered a prize for the best essay on the art of

vation,

Knowledge

36

Practices

observation. There seems to have been increasing emphasis on

clini-

72 observation in the eighteenth century in France and elsewhere. In 1799, the Societe des observateurs de Vhomme was founded in Paris, and its members came to include Cuvier, the abbe Sicard (a pioneer in the observation of deaf-mutes) and the philosopher

cal

Joseph-Marie Degerando. In 1800, Degerando wrote his remarks on the observation of savage peoples' {Considerations generates sur les diverses methodes a suivre dans {'observation des peuples sauvages) to assist Captain Baudin and his companions on their expedition to k

Australia. Criticizing the majority of earlier travellers for their superficiality,

Degerando - like later anthropologists - stressed the need more than a short time in unfamiliar territory and to learn

to stay for

the language of the inhabitants (above all to ascertain whether or not the 'savages' had abstract ideas, a question that particularly inter-

ested the philosopher).

73

In the early nineteenth century, the astronomer William Herschel described observation as an art that needed to be learned and practised. composer and performer himself, Herschel compared looking through a telescope to playing a musical instrument. 74 The polymath

A

Alexander von Humboldt, himself no mean observer, wrote about what he called 'observational understanding' (der beobachtende Verstand).

At

the end of the nineteenth century, an emphasis on the signifi-

cance of apparently

trivial details

could be found in intellectual

as far apart as art criticism, psychoanalysis

and detection. The

fields

Italian

connoisseur Giovanni Morelli's method for identifying painters focused on the way in which they represented details such as ears. Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) discussed minor events such as slips of the tongue as indicators of psychological states. Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, who made his appearance in print in 1887, complained to his friend Watson that T can never bring you to realize the importance of sleeves, the suggestiveness of thumb75 nails, or the great issues that may hang from a bootlace'. We might add another striking example from the field of palaeography, dominated in this period by the German scholar Ludwig Traube. By paying close attention to an early medieval manuscript of the ancient historian

Ammianus

Marcellinus, including the scribe's

show in 1903 'that it was copied from an exemplar written probably at Fulda by an English or Irish scribe, and that the scribe had before him a codex written in capi76 tals'. All these examples might be described as varieties of diagnosis, and it is surely no accident that Doyle, Freud and Morelli had all undergone medical training, while Ludwig Traube was the son of a slips

of the pen, Traube was able to

Gathering Knowledges

37

well-known physician. The distinction between observers of nature and observers of culture does not exclude borrowing. Despite analogies such as these, the varieties of observation require emphasis. Observers of culture generally depend on the 'naked eye', but emphasis was increasingly placed on both the need to observe and the difficulty of observing correctly. How-to-do-it books on the subject were published in the early nineteenth century, among them How to Observe (1838) by the English reformer Harriet Martineau and What to Observe (1841) by the geographer Colonel Julian Jackson. In his studies of the family, published in the middle of the nineteenth century, the French sociologist Frederic Le Play noted the need for the 'direct observation of facts', while his German colleague Ferdinand Tonnies argued later in the century for the foundation of what he 77 called 'sonographic observatories, financed by the government'. The unit Mass-Observation, founded in Britain in 1937 and employing a team of investigators to record everyday life, is a reminder of the 78 persistence of this tradition. As observers of society tried to become more precise and systematic,

problems became increasingly

clear.

There was the old problem

of 'standpoint' or 'point of view', discussed the 'gaze'

(le

more

recently in terms of

regard, der Blick, etc.). Different individuals with differ-

ent interests, knowledge and prejudices and different kinds of people

observe differently. In a study of comparative politics, the German August von Schlozer wrote about the 'statistical gaze'. 79 More recently, scholars have distinguished the medical gaze (described by Foucault), male and female gazes, the tourist gaze, the colonial gaze, the scientific gaze, the gaze of the connoisseur, the military gaze all

historian

(summing up the tactical and so on. 80

possibility in a glance,

known

as the

coup

d'oeil),

In the case of sociology, debate about the problems of observation

has been particularly acute. At the end of the nineteenth century, the English sociologist Beatrice Webb noted that observation is 'vitiated 81 if the persons observed know that they are being observed'. It was in response to this problem that anthropologists turned to fieldwork,

was taken for granted. As Malinowski explained, 'as the natives saw me constantly every day, they ceased to be interested or alarmed, or made self-conscious by my presence, and I ceased to be a disturbing element in the tribal life which I was to study, altering it by my very approach.' 82 Meanwhile sociologists practised 'participant observation', as it came to be called by the mid-twentieth century. 83 Beatrice Webb herself studied the Jewish clothing trade in East London in the 1880s, joining the work84 force and passing for Jewish. staying so long that their presence

38

Knowledge

Practices

German

theology student, Paul Gohre, took months in 1891 in order to study social conditions there. Gohre's aim was 'to hear with my own ears and see with my own eyes', going 'incognito', as he put it, 'with roughened hair and beard, to all appearance a genuine journeyman workman', spending evenings and Sundays with his comrades and 85 asking them about their political and religious views. Examples of the participation of an observer in the activity observed were not limited to anthropology or sociology. One thinks of orientalists such as Edward Lane, who dressed as an Arab, or Christiaan Snouck Hurgronje, the Dutch scholar who visited Mecca in 1884 disguised as a Muslim pilgrim. Spies too practise participant observation, not to mention disguise. Over the last century, technical aids to observation have multiplied. Aircraft were used for military reconnaissance in the First World War, which gave Griaule, a former aviator, the idea in the 86 1930s of using them for anthropological research. However, it is spying, or more generally surveillance, that offers the most striking examples of technical aids to observing people, especially in the last few decades. Spy planes were used by the USA and the USSR during the Cold War, leading to an international incident when an American U-2 was shot down over the USSR in 1960. They were followed by UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles). In the jargon of spies, HUMINT (human intelligence) is increasingly replaced by TECHINT (techniIn similar fashion, a

a job in a factory in

Chemnitz

for three

cal intelligence).

Down on

the ground, video surveillance systems or

CCTV devel-

and 1970s, beginning with railway stations and political demonstrations and spreading to shops and shopping malls. The development of communications satellites in the 1950s and 1960s has facilitated observation from the air for intelligence agencies and geographers alike - Google Earth (launched in 2005) is simply the most visible part of what are known as Geographical Information Systems (GIS). At the micro-level, there is 'spyware', a term that goes back to 1995 and has been defined as 'software that transmits personal information to a third party without the user's knowledge or consent'. Installed on personal computers, this software relays information about the owner that may be used for political or economic

oped

in the 1960s

purposes.

Turning back to nature, precise and systematic observation goes back a long way, to Hippocratic medicine in ancient Greece, for instance, or to the tradition of astronomical observatories in the

As for aids to the 'naked microscopes had come into regular use in Islamic world.

both telescopes and the seventeenth century.

eye',

Gathering Knowledges

39

All the same, the observation of nature changed as more and more powerful instruments were invented. Telescopes became larger: William HerscheFs famous reflecting telescope, completed in 1789, was the largest telescope in the world for half a century, only to be overtaken by a succession of more powerful instruments, such as the 60-inch inaugurated at Mount Wilson Observatory in California (1908), once again the largest in the world in its day; the 100-inch, again at Mount Wilson (1917; figure 6); and the 200-inch at Mount Palomar, also in California (1949). Telescopes became more sophisticated in other ways, allowing the observation of infrared radiation, for instance, while the mirrors varied between convex or concave, spherical or elliptical, metal or pyrex, solid or liquid. Today, some telescopes are mounted in space, like the Hubble Space Telescope (launched in 1990) and the Herschel Space Telescope (launched in 2009). Space stations allow astronauts to observe the

on

its

surprising emptiness:

Unmanned tists

them to comment 'We don't occupy much of our world.' 87

the sun, and even the earth, leading one of

stars,

on

spacecraft transmit data that can be observed by scien-

earth, such as the dust devils

and

falling

snow on Mars

trans-

mitted by Phoenix. Medicine is another domain in which

human observation has been by a rapidly increasing arsenal of sophisticated methods and machines, notably in the last century and especially in the last few decades. X-rays were discovered in 1895, followed by spectacles that allowed doctors to see x-ray images in real time. Dyes made it easier for doctors to observe internal organs. Radionuclide scanning began in the 1950s, ultrasound scanning (translating sounds into images) in the 1960s, and computed tomography, producing images of sections assisted

of the body, in the 1970s.

Listening and Interrogating It is

obvious enough

that, in the gathering of information, ears are

One might

distinguish two main types of listenand interrogation - not so much closed categories as opposite ends of a spectrum of possibilities. Although eavesdropping must be as old as speech itself, changes may be discerned in our period. Participant observation included listening. The investigators who worked for Mass-Observation in the 1930s were instructed to try to overhear everyday conversations, while the bugging devices developed by the secret services of different nations have become notorious - they go back as far as 1912 and

useful as well as eyes. ing - eavesdropping

40

Knowledge

Figure

©

6:

Practices

Hooker Telescope, Mount Wilson

(1917)\

Ian H. Merritt

the invention of the 'dictograph', a hidden microphone used in the course of divorce proceedings as well as by spies and secret police. Again, much of the work of sociolinguists consists of listening to every-

day conversations, noting when, where and in what situations speakfrom one language or one variety of language to another.

ers switch

Gathering Knowledges

41

For an example of the middle ground between eavesdropping and we might return to Malinowskfs conception of fieldwork, which encompassed letting the locals "tell you items of folkinterrogation

lore',

discussing their customs, and so

slipped into questioning.

From

on - discussions

that often

the early nineteenth century onwards, 1

an army of coldescended on European villages in search of popular rural traditions, which were coming to be known in English and some other 88 languages as 'folklore (there was less interest in urban traditions). Dictionaries of regional dialects were compiled at this time. The collectors included musicologists, among them Bela Bartok, better known internationally as a composer. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Bartok and his friend Zoltan Kodaly began to travel through rural Hungary in search of the local folk music. A relatively late but unusually thorough example of an enterprise for the collection of oral traditions was the Irish Folklore Commission, founded in 1935, with its hundreds of full-time or part-time collectors and its 40,000 informants, including schoolchildren and their the age of the middle-class 'discovery of the people

,

lectors

1

teachers.

89

Interrogation also has a long history, as the example of medieval

and early modern inquisitors may be

sufficient to

remind

us.

In the

nineteenth century, British royal commissions, such as the Commission on Child Employment (1842), not only called witnesses and listened to their testimony but cross-examined the witnesses as well, as if they in court. Marcel Griaule practised a method of interrogation was closer to the style of an examining magistrate than to that of an ethnographer in the Anglo-American tradition, since he assumed that informants were hiding important knowledge from him and tried to catch them in contradictions so that they would be forced to 90 reveal what they knew. Griaule's British colleague Edward EvansPritchard claimed to have obtained information from a Zande sorcerer by telling him that his rival knew more than he did. Sociolinguists too practise interrogation, as in a famous study of the language of employees in New York department stores, in which researchers asked questions to which the answer would be 'fourth floor' in order to discover whether or not the sales assistants used the final or pre-

were that

consonantal

The

91

(r).

interview, as practised

by

may be regarded

journalists, sociologists, doctors or

- generally - milder form of and one that gradually became more systematic during our period, especially so far as the selection of interviewees was concerned. Journalists already employed this method of eliciting information in the eighteenth century: Lunardo the balloonist, for instance, gave an interview to the Morning Post in 1784. When the journalist

psychologists,

interrogation,

as a

42

Knowledge Practices

Henry Mayhew investigated the working and living conditions of the London poor for the Morning Chronicle in the middle of the nineteenth century, his vivid account was based on a kind of 'field work' in the street and reproducing 92 answers to his questions in direct speech. Emile Zola, a journalist turned novelist, gathered material for his fiction by interviewing ordinary people - peasants, miners, prostitutes and shop assistants.

in the city, talking to ordinary

people

their

Some

of the notes he

made have been

published.

93

The spread of the term 'interview' marks increasing self-consciousness of this method of eliciting information. In 1884, an article in the British Pall Mall Gazette referred to 'the acclimatization of the "interview" in English journalism'. It was a sign of the rise of 'investigative journalism', a new genre in which the reporter did not wait for events to happen but set out to discover how things were. In the 1880s, for instance, W. T. Stead published articles in the Pall Mall Gazette about the London slums and juvenile prostitution, which he labelled 'white slavery'. His equivalent in the USA was Lincoln Steffens, famous for his investigations of political corruption

Shame of the Cities. From the newspaper,

and

for a

book

entitled

The

the interview naturally spread to other

media - radio and television - and to other domains, commercial, political and academic. In the later nineteenth century, during the rise p. 23), it became increasingly common for armed with a list of questions, to visit informants in their place of work or in their homes. In the early twentieth century, market

of the social survey (above,

interviewers,

USA sometimes conducted interviews, and sociologists followed their example. In the course of interviewing, the problems of the method became increasingly clear. When someone of higher status interviews someone of lower status, they may be told what the informant believes that the interviewer wants to hear. Flaunting his cynicism, a leading sociologist of the early twentieth century, the American William I. Thomas, described interviews as 'a body of error to be used for purposes of comparison in future observations'. 94 researchers and public opinion pollsters in the

Questionnaires

An alternative to interviewing as well as an

aid to interviewers

is

the

questionnaire, a series of identical questions put to different people,

allowing the responses to be compared or even counted. Today, the its printed form, has become part of eve-

questionnaire, especially in

ryday

life in

the West, but this literary genre has a

much

longer

Gathering Knowledges history.

Medieval and early modern bishops,

dioceses, personally or by proxy, with a

list

43

for instance, visited their

of questions in hand con-

cerning the state of the churches and the morals of the pastors and their flocks. In our period, questionnaires became longer and more frequent, and they were used to investigate - if not invade - more aspects of people's

lives.

may

be useful to distinguish two phases in the history of the questionnaire between 1750 and the present. In the earlier phase, the questions were addressed to members of elites, among them the clergy, members of scientific expeditions, travellers, school board inspectors and anthropologists, in order to guide them in their observations or interrogations. In 1762, for instance, the German orientalist Johann David Michaelis made a list of questions for the use of members of the Niebuhr expedition to Arabia (above, p. 18). In 1789, the Bohemian Count Leopold von Berchtold compiled 2,500 quesIt

French abbe Henri Gregoire drew up a questionnaire about the use of patois in different parts of France, and in 1805 the Academie Celtique formulated a list 95 of fifty-one questions about popular customs. Like the use of enquete in German, the employment of the term questionnaire in English suggests French inspiration. In the course of the nineteenth century, questionnaires become innumerable, devised by civil servants and scholars from Ireland to Russia to elicit information concerning folklore, working conditions, religious affiliation, and so on. In a later phase in the history of the questionnaire, as literacy spread, questions were addressed directly to the people being investigated: factory workers, soldiers, consumers of different products or, in the case of the census, the heads of all households in a given country. As in the history of interviewing, problems became more visible over time - the problem of misunderstanding, for instance. The head of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics of Labour (founded in 1869) declared his preference for interviews by agents of the bureau over questionnaires because - in his view - misunderstandings would thus be avoided. In similar fashion, in 1872 the German Verein fiir Sozialpolitik criticized the questionnaires issued by the government, suggesting that experts travel the country instead and tions for the 'patriotic traveller'. In 1790, the

listen to local opinion.

96

Recording In practice, distinctions between field and study, gathering and analysis

cannot be

made

too sharp because the processing of information

44

Knowledge

Practices

starts as early as the

time of collection. Writing often begins

in

the

Sea captains such as James Cook kept their logbooks, anthropologists and naturalists made their 'field notes', archaeologists wrote reports on the day-to-day progress of excavations. In so doing they were already translating what they had seen into words as well as recording their experiences for others to interpret and use. Written words were not of course the only means of recording what was found in the field; think of the importance of maps and charts, for instance. The explorers and the participants in the knowlfield.

edge-gathering expeditions described in the previous chapter came back from the field with more or less rough sketches that were later elaborated into maps in offices and studies. The French carte topographique of Egypt, published in 1825, is a famous example. Maps of the earth were joined by maps of the sea and maps of the sky, such as Uranographia (1801), published by the director of the Berlin Observatory, Johann Bode. Another major development in the nineteenth century was the rise of thematic maps: maps of the distribution of language, for instance, maps of literacy, maps of crime, geological maps, demographic maps, ethnographic maps, maps of disease, maps 97 of poverty, and so on. By the end of the nineteenth century photography was being used to map the stars. 98 The importance of images was recognized by the organizers of knowledge-gathering expeditions, who included artists (and, later, photographers) as part of the team. Artists, notably William Hodges and John Webber, sailed with Cook on his three famous voyages, painting the landscapes of the South Seas and making drawings of 99 the indigenous peoples. In the 1830s, George Catlin made expeditions of his own to record the appearance of the Indian tribes of the American West. In the 1840s, the French artist Eugene Flandin participated in an archaeological expedition, recording ancient Persian and Assyrian monuments. In similar fashion, newspapers and governments regularly sent artists as well as writers to report events abroad, especially wars - the Crimean War, for instance, the First World War and even the Second (in which Edward Ardizzone and Edward Bawden, among others, served as official war artists). 100 By this time, of course, photographers had long been recording events.

Mathew Brady, an early example

of what

would

later

be called

became famous for his images of the American War, as did Dorothea Lange for her images of the American Depression. Anthropologists too made use of film. Franz Boas was using a camera in the field in the 1890s - and a movie camera in the 1930s - while the Russian ethnographer Samuil Dudin is probably best known for his photographs of everyday life in Central Asia, a 'photojournalist', Civil

Gathering Knowledges

45

taken at the beginning of the twentieth century. Visual archives may have entered the limelight relatively recently, but they go back much further.

Increasingly sophisticated photographic equipment allowed

more information

to be collected. Scientists took

much

photographs of

atoms and even of electrons, while video cameras constantly record everyday life. Aerial photography, developed in the First World War to provide information on enemy positions, turned out to have peacetime uses. As we have seen, Griaule used it in his fleldwork in Africa, while the Danish geologist Lauge Koch did the same thing in the 101 The archaeologist Kenneth course of his fieldwork in Greenland. St Joseph, an officer in the RAF who had analysed aerial photographs during the Second World War, adapted the method to the study of Roman remains and medieval monastic sites. Sound recordings are more recent than photographs, but from 1904 onwards Bartok was recording Hungarian folk music on wax cylinders, while the Irish Folklore Commission used the 'Ediphone' (an improvement dating from the 1920s). ity

of tape recorders in the 1950s was a

102

boon

The increasing

availabil-

to musicologists, folklor-

and also historians, facilitating the rise of the 'oral history' movement. Sound archives now contain thousands of tapes of interviews, for example those made during the American 'Veterans History Project' and lodged in the Library of Congress. Some records of eavesdropping have also survived: the Stasi archive includes tapes of a number of conversations with former Bundeskanzler Helmut Kohl, though these are not yet available to historians. ists

Notes and

As some

Files

modern Europe have recently pointed everyday practice of students and scholars, collecting information by taking notes on books, is subject to change over time. A popular early modern system of note-taking, encouraged in some schools, employed what were known as 'commonplace books', in which anecdotes and other information were recorded under a number of headings, often those of virtues and vices, arranged in alphabetical order for ease of reference when the owner needed to historians of early

out, the

make

a speech.

103

For most of our period the world of scholarship, especially in the humanities, was based on handwritten notes - field notes, library

- written in notebooks, on loose-leaf pads, on index cards and even on the backs of envelopes or the starched cuffs notes, lecture notes

46

Knowledge

Practices

shirts. Darwin, for instance, brought back nearly 1,400 pages of notes from his voyage on the Beagle. This may not have been a huge haul from a five-year expedition (approximately a page a day), but it

of

was enough

to

make

it

quite difficult to find information on a particu-

lar topic.

was made of paper slips, famous case of the Oxford English Dictionary, on which work began in 1858. The first editor arranged 100,000 slips with illustrative quotations in fifty-four pigeonholes. Later on, two tons of quotations were collected. For the Dialect Dictionary (1896-1905), 104 also produced in Oxford, over a million slips were required. Slips were also pasted onto the pages of the heavy folio volumes of catalogues that until a generation ago formed a central part of the furniture of major libraries. The paper slip was all too easy to tear, so information began to be recorded on cards, not only for the use of scholars but also to provide information about clients, patients and suspects for business, medical and police records. Whether they knew this or not, all these users were following in the steps of librarians. In 1790, the French Assembly had ordered officials to make inventories of local libraries on the backs of playing cards in order to produce a unified catalogue. 105 The first major university library to introduce a card catalogue was Harvard (1861). Cards were produced specifically for the purpose of recording and filing information, and standardized on the initiative of Melvil Dewey, an American librarian with entrepreneurial ambitions (he founded a company to sell the cards). The cards measured 5 by 3 inches, or more exactly 7.5 by 12.5 cm (Dewey was an enthusiast for the metric system). There followed a long period of relative continuity in note-taking and filing systems, interrupted in the 1980s by the rise of the personal computer and the database. In the nineteenth century, increasing use

as in the

Storage

The gathering

of knowledge raises obvious and ever-increasing problems of storage, as the case of museums makes obvious. The Science Museum in London contains 200,000 objects and the Louvre twice as many. The British Museum contains 13 million objects and the Natural History Museum some 70 million specimens. What we see on display in many museums is only the tip of an iceberg, the rest of the collection being submerged in basements and other store-

rooms. The Louvre, for instance, displays collection.

less

than 10 per cent of

its

Gathering Knowledges

47

Again, take the case of encyclopaedias, which may be described knowledge. The German philosopher Bernard Groethuysen once described the Encyclopidie as an expression of the bourgeois desire to accumulate goods. 'The Encyclopaedists take man around the estate .There is what learned men have acquired 106 Consider it henceforth as something which is yours/ for you These storehouses needed to grow larger and larger in order to accommodate new information. The great Encyclopedie already consisted of 71,818 articles in thirty-five volumes and took more than twenty years to publish. Its successor, the Encyclopedie methodique, eventually reached 2 10 volumes, while the Okonomische Encyklopadie comprised 242 volumes spread over a period of eighty-five years (1773-1858). The Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana now runs to 118 volumes, published over more than a century (19052009). Storing these storehouses has become a problem in itself, solved in some cases by going online, as the Encyclopaedia Britannica as storehouses of

.

.

.

.

.

did in 1994. If the continually expanding Wikipedia were printed, it would take over a whole house. Archivists faced and still face problems of storage and sometimes measure their holdings in kilometres. The website of the Dutch

National Archive, for instance, refers to '93 kilometres of documents, maps, drawings and photographs'. The late eighteenth century saw the rise of archives in the sense of buildings designed for the purpose of storing documents. An early example is Register House, Edinburgh, designed by the brothers Adam and opened in 1789. However, space soon began to run out. In the Italian state archives, there were already about 127,000 square metres of shelving in 1882, but by 1906 the number had already increased to about 164,000 square metres. 107 Today, as we have seen, the catalogue of the British National Archives (formerly the Public Record Office) has 11 million descriptions of 'documents', which have come to include photographs, tapes and videos. From the point of view of archivists, storage online may be said to have arrived in the nick of time, first on mainframe computers, in the 1970s, and then, in the 1990s, on the Internet. Librarians face similar problems to archivists. The shelves of the British Library stretch for 625 kilometres (388 miles) and those of the Library of Congress for 850 kilometres (530 miles). What is more, the flow of books is rapidly increasing: 332,000 titles were published 108 in 1960, but 842,000 in 1990. The need for more space for storage as well as national prestige inspired the replacement of the old Bibliotheque nationale in rue de Richelieu (figure 7) with the new Bibliotheque nationale de France.

—

T3

.0

a s -5!

oq 7

they expressed were considered subversive. Writing remained and remains essential for clandestine communication, especially still

under authoritarian regimes, even if clandestinity is difficult to 8 The distinction between public and clandestine communication should perhaps be viewed as a difference in degree rather than as a difference in kind, with a grey area in between the extremes (indeed, the term 'grey literature' is sometimes used to refer to noncommercial publications). A well-known example of the clandestine or semi-clandestine circulation of information is the rise of samizdat ('self-published') literature in the last decades of communist rule in the USSR and its satellites. Between 1968 and 1972 there was even a samizdat newspaper in Russian, the Chronicle of Current Events, which provided information about the persecution of dissidents. As in the case of dissemination by copying in the Middle Ages, the scribes often made changes in the texts that they copied, adding some 9 things and omitting others/ The example of samizdat is also a reminder of the ways in which manuscript or typescript might be reproduced, using carbon paper or a variety of machines, from the Gestetner to the Xerox (produced by companies that were both founded in 1906). define/

The

Periodical Press

Samizdat

literature

presses, but print

is

was sometimes printed on small clandestine rightly associated with the public sphere. If the

printing revolution in the West took place in the mid-fifteenth century with the work of Gutenberg and his colleagues, a second revolution occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth century when the steam press - invented by another German, Friedrich Koenig first

began operations. The steam press made printing much more rapid. Together with the rise of cheap paper (made from wood pulp rather than rags), it made possible an era of 'mass communication' by means of newspapers, periodicals and books. It was in 1814 that The Times installed one of the new steam presses. In the nineteenth century, cheap newspapers became a central

means of communicating new information. Newspapers had performed this function ever since they came into existence in the early seventeenth century, especially during the French Revolution (130 new political newspapers were founded in France in 1789 alone), but

98

Knowledge

Practices

they reached more people on a regular basis in the nineteenth century than ever before. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the dissemination of

news became more rapid, thanks to the telegraph, allowing reports to be sold to the newspapers by specialized brokers such as CharlesLouis Havas, whose Paris office, originally a bureau of translation, was founded in 1835, and his ex-employee the German Paul Reuter, whose news agency, based in London, dates from 1865. Another major development at this time was the rise of the popular press in the USA and in Europe. Earlier newspapers had been too expensive for ordinary people, but in 1883 Joseph Pulitzer began selling the New York World for 1 cent a copy at a rate of half a million copies a day. Soon after 1900, the British Daily Mail and Daily Mirror and the French Le Journal and Le Matin were each selling over a million copies a day.

Daily newspapers might be said to disseminate 'information' rather than 'knowledge', or even 'disinformation', because their printing deadlines leave little opportunity for verifying the stories they print. Periodicals, from weeklies to quarterlies, have the opportunity to offer more reliable knowledge as well as the space to comment on the news. The periodical press, including learned journals such as the Transactions of the Royal Society or the Nouvelles de la republique des lettres, had already emerged in the seventeenth century, but it grew and diversified in a remarkable way in the nineteenth. It may be useful to distinguish three main groups of periodical at this time: the professional journal, the review aimed at general educated readers, and the more popular magazine. In step with the growing professionalization of learning (below, pp. 160ff.), professional journals multiplied from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, with the Germans leading the way: the Zeitschrift fiir wissenschaftliche Zoologie (1848), the Historische Zeitschrift (1859), the Zeitschrift fur Volkerpsychologie (1860), the Zeitschrift fiir agyptische Sprache und Altertumskunde (1863), and so on. In the case of history, the German example of 1859 was followed by the French Revue historique (1876), the Rivista storica italiana (1884), the English

Review (1886) and many others. The system, together with many of the journals themselves, survived with little modification (though the numbers of specialized journals increased) until the end of the twentieth century. Since the year 2000 a growing number of journals, especially scientific journals, have been published online, even if printed versions of many of them Historical

continue to be available.

Some

scientific articles circulate online

Disseminating Knowledges

99

before their formal publication, reflecting the need for the increasingly rapid circulation of information in the natural sciences.

For the better-educated and better-off members of the general public, a range of journals developed in this period, especially the nineteenth century. In France, for instance, there was the long-lived weekly the Journal des debuts (1789-1944), which combined reports of debates in the Assembly with a literary magazine to which famous writers contributed, and the Revue des deux mondes (1829), a monthly that still exists, liberal till 1879 and more conservative thereafter. In Britain, a constellation of important quarterlies made their appearance in the early nineteenth century, discussing new books and new ideas and appealing to readers of different political persuasions, among them the Edinburgh Review (1802), for the Whigs; the Quarterly Review (1809), for the Tories; and the Westminster Review (1823), for the Radicals.

The place of

60

the natural sciences in these journals

is

worth noting.

In France, for instance, the physicist-astronomer Jacques Babinet

wrote regularly on scientific topics for both the Journal des debats and the Revue des deux mondes. 61 In Britain, scientists of the calibre of John Herschel, Charles Lyell and Thomas Huxley wrote respectively for the Edinburgh, Quarterly and Westminster Review Knowledge was disseminated still more widely by a range of cheap publications such as the British Penny Magazine (1832), which reached a peak of 200,000 copies, or more specialized magazines aimed at groups of amateur enthusiasts, from the National Geographic (1888), for instance, to History Today (1951). In the natural sciences, these intermediate magazines have played a particularly important role. In the USA, for example, there was the Scientific American (1845) - originally directed at artisans - and .

Popular Science (1872), both of which still exist. In Germany, there was Die Natur (1852), 'for readers of all classes', as the sub-title put it, imitated by the French with the publication of La Nature (1873), which was printing 15,000 copies a time by 1885. 62 Victorian Britain followed the same model with Nature (1869), a weekly published by Macmillan at Ad., and Knowledge (1881), a weekly published at 2d. and calling itself 'an illustrated magazine of science' that was 'plainly worded - exactly described'. 63

The function of mediation or translation became more important than ever before as more and more specialized disciplines developed after 1850. The language of specialists became increasingly technical, more remote from that of the general public, especially in the natural sciences. Concern with this remoteness on the part of American

Knowledge

ioo

Practices

scientists led to the establishment of 'Science Service

dicate in which scientists

1

(1920), a syn-

and journalists collaborated, and two gen-

erations later to the British

movement

for the 'public understanding

name as London and Oxford.

of science', including the foundation of a journal with that well as the establishment of special chairs in

There are now university courses in 'science communication'. 64 To bridge the gap between scientists and other citizens, science journalism became increasingly important in the twentieth century ironically enough, a specialization that was developed in order to

combat

The

appointment of a scientific Guardian (as it then was), in 1928, while an association of scientific journalists was founded in France in 1955. Reporting on scientific aspects of the news, the journalists, who usually had degrees in science, wrote in plain language specialization.

first

British

journalist goes back to the Manchester

who interviewed Albert Einstein for the New York Herald Tribune, or Ritchie Calder, who reported the discovery of the structure of in the News Chronicle in 1953. Like other journalists, science reporters were often 65 accused of sensationalism. Continuities should not be forgotten. Even in the age of television and the Internet, discussed below (p. 267), there remains a public for scientific magazines. The Scientific American reached a circulation of 1 million copies by 1986, and is now published in fifteen foreignlanguage editions. Nature continues to be published weekly, and has become a peer-reviewed journal, though not a specialized one, while La Nature has been merged with a monthly magazine La Recherche, which is aimed at a semi-academic public of science students. In the humanities too there is still room for monthly magazines for non-professional enthusiasts - History Today (1951) and Current for a non-scientific public: Earl Ubell, for example,

DNA

Archaeology (1967)

many

in Britain, for instance

- and

their equivalents in

other countries.

Books

An

one that it is virtually impossible to answer, concerns the relative importance of books and periodicals in the dissemination of knowledge. Considering the vast numbers of books produced in this period, any general statement about them that is not banal is probably unwise, whether it concerns monographs for specialists, books for the general educated public or different kinds of popularization. In 1960, 332,000 titles were published worldwide, 66 but by 1990 the number had risen to 842,000. In 2005, 206,000 titles intriguing question, though

Disseminating Knowledges

were published

in the

UK

alone, 172,000 in the

USA, and

101

123,000 in

the Russian Federation.

Shining a torch on a single section of this vast library without walls, let us return to the dissemination of the natural sciences. In the eighteenth century, Linnaeus was a popularizer who has been described as lowering the educational and financial entrance fee to the study of nature' by producing small books that were simply k

written and rapidly translated.

bl

Again, Buffon's Histoire de

la

nature

has been described as 'probably the most widely read scientific work 68 of the century', thanks to the literary style as well as the ideas.

some major scientific works attracted a wide public, notably Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830-3), which despite its length went through twelve editions by 1875; and Charles Darwin's Origin of Species (1859), which sold 56,000 copies before the end of the century. A 'Victorian sensation', the anonymously published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844), went through fourteen editions and sold 40,000 copies, as well 69 as becoming the object of lively discussions in public and in private. Some leading scientists themselves contributed to the popularization of science, among them the astronomer-physicist Louis Arago in France and, in Britain, Humphry Davy (as we have seen) and Thomas Huxley. In Germany, by contrast, no leading scientist followed the example of Humboldt in communicating with a broad audience, In the nineteenth century,

relatively

leaving popularization to journalists.

70

Despite these successes, the sales figures of books by professional scientists were easily surpassed by those of the leading full-time popularizers. The Rev. Ebenezer Brewer's Guide to the Scientific Knowledge of Things Familiar (1847) reached its forty-fourth edition in 1892, with 195,000 copies sold altogether, while the Rev. John George Wood's Common Objects of the Country (1858) reached 71 86,000 copies by 1889. In France, Camille Flammarion's Astronomie populaire (1879) sold 100,000 copies by 1900. 72 In the twentieth century some publishers continued to make efforts to bring academic knowledge to a wider public. In Britain, there was the 'Home University Library of Modern Knowledge' (1911). Specialists were asked to write short books in a simple style on a wide variety of subjects, to be printed in editions of 20,000 copies (a number beyond the dreams of many academics today). 73 In France, 'Que saisje?\ launched in 1941, is a similar series that now runs to thousands of titles. All the same, the second half of the nineteenth-century seems to have been a golden age for popular science, at least in book form, as literacy rates rose while the faith in science as an engine of progress was not yet challenged. 74

Knowledge

102

Practices

There was a revival of popular science at the end of the 1920s, led by scientists themselves like the physicist Arthur Eddington, whose Nature of the Physical World (1928) had sold 26,000 copies by 1943, and the cosmologist James Jeans with The Mysterious Universe (1930), which had sold around 140,000 copies by 1937. 75 A number of these scientists were on the political left, among them the physicist Jean Perrin, whose book on atoms, first published in 1913, went through many editions and translations; the geneticist J. B. S. Haldane, who at one time wrote a weekly column on scientific topics for the Daily Worker, the zoologist Lancelot Hogben, author of Science for the Citizen (1938); and the physical chemist J. D. Bernal, who wrote The Social Function of Science (1939). The popular appeal of Hogben's book was enhanced by its illustrations, drawn by the left-wing cartoonist J. F. Horrabin, who had already illustrated the best-selling Outline of History (1920) by H. G. Wells. Where many of their colleagues saw popularization as an unwelcome distraction from their real business - research - these scientists

saw so,

it

as consciousness raising, as a

Hogben delayed

means

to transform society.

Even

the publication of his best-selling Mathematics

for the Million (1936), originally presented in the form of lectures, because he feared that it might harm his professional reputation at 76 the moment when he hoped for election to the Royal Society. Since that time a number of books about science written by scientists have sold very well, among them Isaac Asimov's The Intelligent Man's Guide to Science (1960); Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time (1988) and a shelf of books on biology, such as Richard Dawkins's The Selfish Gene (1976) and Stephen J. Gould's The Panda's Thumb (1981). All the same, books of this kind now have to

compete not only with science journalism zines,

in

newspapers and maga-

but also with television documentaries.

Visual Aids

How many people read how much of this mass of material is another question impossible to answer, though one suspects that scanning or skimming was more common than reading. The presentation of books and articles, whether specialist or popular, encourages this verdict. Tables, graphs, maps, diagrams and pictures of different kinds not

made the printed message clearer but offered a substitute for Throughout the period we find a steady rise in visual aids to performance as well as to exposition in print - whether to communicate rapidly to specialists or to sugar the knowledge pill for a wider public. On the supply side, the rise was driven by new technologies only 77

it.

Disseminating Knowledges and, on the rial,

demand

side,

103

by the need to present new kinds of mate-

especially statistics.

Social surveys

and the reports of committees as well

as

books and

articles increasingly included statistics, an 'avalanche of printed 78 numbers' from the 1820s onwards. Hence the increasing importance

of tables, or 'tabular exhibitions', as the Statistical Society of called them, a

method of

display that

was adopted

in

London

the natural

sci-

ences too, for example by the German geologist Heinrich Bronn, who taught business studies as well as natural history and published his Tables of fossils in 1831.

79

Graphs were another means of visual display that spread from economic data to other kinds (although a graph showing the rise and fall of mercury in a barometer according to the weather had been 80 published as early as 1686). An economic atlas of Europe published in 1782 included graphs, while the Scottish economist William Playfair, who had been trained as an engineer, made use of them in his Commercial and Political Adas (1786). From economic geography the graph spread to sociology (Adolphe Quetelet), astronomy (William 81 Herschel) and epidemiology (William Farr). The rise of tables and graphs was accompanied by new kinds of chart. Joseph Priestley devised the time-line chart to summarize biographies. The Swiss mathematician Johann Heinrich Lambert included time-series charts in his treatise on heat, Pyrometrie (1779), while Playfair devised what are now known as pie charts (figure 10) and bar charts in his Statistical Breviary (1801). Apparently inspired by

TurkilYi Empire

Figure 10: Playfair, pie chart, Turkish Empire (1801)

104

Knowledge

Practices

Playfair, Humboldt used bar charts in his Essai politique sur la Royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne (1811). Geologists were among the first to make use of cross-sections, notably Brogniart and Cuvier

Essai sur la geographie mineralogique des environs de Paris (1811) and the surveyor William Smith in Delineation of the in

their

Strata in

England and Wales (1815), which won him the nickname

'Strata Smith'.

Geologists were also among the first to make use of specialized or thematic maps, concerned in their case with minerals and rock formations. There followed maps of illiteracy (1826), crime (1829), population (1841), and so on.Two famous thematic maps of nineteenth-century London were the map of the spread of cholera (1854) by the physician John Snow and the 'descriptive map' of poverty (1891) by the businessman-philanthropist Charles Booth. In his Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de Varmee francaise dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813 (1861), the French engineer Charles Joseph Minard showed that a map could be dynamic (figure 11). The shrinking of the French army on the way to Moscow and back during Napoleon's disastrous campaign could hardly be shown in a more 82 dramatic manner. Meanwhile, astronomers mapped the stars and oceanographers mapped the sea. Particularly elaborate were the wind and current charts produced for the US Navy in 1848 by Matthew Maury, who devised special symbols for the direction and strength of the winds. Natural scientists also made increasing use of diagrams. In his New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808), for instance, John Dalton represented atoms of nitric acid, sugar and other substances by means of simple circles or clusters, ranging from the binary to the septenary. The general public has become accustomed to diagrams such as the map of the London Underground (1933), which has been described as 'perhaps the most influential network diagram ever 83 produced'. Illustrations in books became more common as they became cheaper, thanks to changes in technology. Woodcuts gave way to steel engravings, since metal plates took longer to wear out. The invention of the lithograph at the beginning of the nineteenth century made illustrations even cheaper. Images added to the appeal of periodicals such as the Illustrated London News (1842), the first illustrated weekly, which was selling 200,000 copies by the 1850s, when it sent artists and a photographer to cover the Crimean War. The sending of a photographer to the Crimea marks the beginning of a new epoch in the dissemination as well as the gathering and analysis of knowledge: the rise of photojournalism. At a more academic level, photog-

0\ SO 00

c

o c

s S o

o en T3 c3

3 OX)

106

Knowledge

Practices

raphy assisted the

rise

of a

new

discipline, art history, bringing

scattered masterpieces within the reach of students in the form of

books and aids to lectures, even if the images were translated into black and white or unreliable colour. Visual aids to lectures are no new idea, as Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson reminds us. Geologists could show their audiences rocks, and palaeontologists could show bones. Chemistry was more problematic but the problem was soluble. In his lectures at the Royal College of Chemistry in London in the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, August Wilhelm von Hofmann used simple models of atoms and molecules, wooden balls joined by sticks (figure 12). Popularizers of science like John Henry Pepper, the 'ghost man' (above, p. 91), were sometimes pioneers of visual aids to lectures. The ex-Jesuit Francois Moigno, a popular lecturer on the natural sciillustrations to

ences in mid-nineteenth-century France, made regular use of the so-called magic lantern, the ancestor of the twentieth-century slide projector. Its successor the carousel came on the market in 1962, and

Figure 12: August Wilhelm von Hofmann, molecular model of methane (c.1860)

Disseminating Knowledges

107

for over thirty years it was difficult to imagine lectures on art history without it. By the middle of the twentieth century, some academics had already become television personalities, including the historians A. J. P. Taylor and Georges Duby on opposite sides of the Channel. We might say that television provides more powerful visual aids to the presentation of knowledge, or, alternatively, that it offers a powerful means for presenting knowledge in which words play an ancillary

two generations, programmes have moved from one alternative to the other. In the 1950s, viewers were offered televised lectures, with illustrations or even without, as in the case of Taylor's famous half-hour lectures for ITV on the First World War. By contrast, when Simon Schama presented a series on the history of Britain for the BBC (2000-1), the historian was transported from the studio into the places about which he was speaking, actors took part and the emphasis fell on image rather than text. One great advantage of images over words is that they can be broadcast the world over without translation. The new medium also suits some kinds of knowledge rather than others. It works well for archaeology, for instance. The fact that the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler was named British 'TV Personality of the Year' in 1954 after presenting a series on his discipline says something about the photogenic qualities of the subject as well as about Wheeler's personal charisma. Natural history is another branch of knowledge well suited to exposition on television - witness David Attenborough's wellknown programmes Life on Earth (1979), The Living Planet (1984) and The State of the Planet (2000). History too, especially the history of wars, appeals to both television producers and their publics: The Great War (1964) for the BBC, The World at War (1974) for ITV, The Civil War (1990) made by the American director Ken Burns for PBS and, most recently, La guerra filmada (2006) for TVE, focusing and commenting on the films made by both sides during the Spanish Civil War. Teaching at a distance by means of television, and more recently the Internet, has also made possible the remarkable expansion of adult education in the British Open University (1969), which had already catered for 2 million students by 1997, and the many other institutions on this model that have been established in the Netherlands, Spain and many other countries. By the year 2003, over 70,000 students were attending the 'online campus' of the University role.

Over the

of Phoenix.

last

84

This chapter has noted many individual attempts to disseminate knowledge over the last 250 years, as well as some collective

io8

Knowledge

Practices

campaigns. Information, both accurate and inaccurate, has been disseminated at an increasing rate. Enthusiasts would claim that knowledge has been spread more widely, while critics would say that it has been spread too thin. The following chapter will examine the communication of knowledge from the perspective of the receiver rather than the sender, looking at the diverse uses that were made of it by different kinds of people.

Employing Knowledges

concerned with the last of the four processes of coland action described in the first part of this book. Where the previous chapter examined the sending of information, this one will focus on its reception and utilization. In other words, what follows deals with the relations between knowledge and social policy or, as Michel Foucault used to say, knowledge and power, savoir and pouvoir} It includes the recycling of knowledge or, to use a concept central to the work of the French theorist Michel de Certeau, its 're-employment', re-emploi, for a variety of purposes (among them purposes that the original disseminators never imagined). 2 It might indeed be argued that most intellectual

This chapter

is

lection, analysis, dissemination

innovations, like technological innovations, are creative adaptations of earlier ideas or artefacts, so that

what we

call 'originality' is relative

rather than absolute.

Before knowledge can be acted on or employed, however, to be retrieved from the stores that were discussed earlier.

it

has

Retrieval

The most obvious and widespread form of information retrieval is human memory, but its limits and fallibility have provoked a long series of attempts to supplement it with artificial aids. The traditional 'art of memory', practised in antiquity, the Middle Ages and the early modern period, was designed to help orators and preachers and relied on associating whatever was to be remembered with vivid images arranged in imagined temples, palaces, churches or theatres. 3 This art

no

Knowledge

Practices

practised by the winners of some world memory competitions, was supplemented from about the year 1800 onwards by other methods of mnemonics for students of law, history, geography, astronis still

but

it

omy

or pharmacology: translating historical dates into sequences of 4 letters, for instance, writing verses or drawing punning cartoons.

The

memory brought money and fame

art or science of

to

some

nineteenth-century lecturers and writers on the topic, but in the long term other methods of what we now call 'information retrieval', such as the indexes of books - when they are provided - proved more successful. In the later nineteenth century the German scientist

Hermann von Helmholtz remarked on

the link between intellectual

progress and improvements in what he called 'appliances', such as 'catalogues, lexicons, registers, indexes, digests', that

'immediately accessible'.

In libraries, for instance, catalogues

and

analytic.

Antonio

made knowledge

5

became

increasingly elaborate

Panizzi, principal librarian at the

British

Museum -

not yet separated from the British Library - organized a new catalogue, based on ninety-one rules, formulated in 1841 and a model for many later catalogues, among them the widely used decimal classification system of Melvil Dewey and its main rival, the Library 6 of Congress classification system (above, p. 55). The retrieval of information from files in offices and archives posed its own problems: information on criminals, for instance. In Britain, a Habitual Criminals Register including the descriptions of individuals was established in 1869. The problem was that 'one needed a name to use it properly, which rather negated its use as a means of identification'.

7

amounts of paperwork in the later of storage and retrieval. The traditional method of filing letters, for instance, was to place them in boxes in chronological order with the most recent letter on top. Retrieval therefore took time, since 'all the correspondence on top 8 of the item sought had to be lifted up'. Responding to the demand for a new system, the first filing cabinet was made in the USA in 1875, with drawers and alphabetical dividers, while a cabinet was designed in 1898 to store folders of documents vertically in tall drawers, in Offices produced increasing

nineteenth century, requiring a

new system

alphabetical or thematic order.

However, the principal developments ances' took place after Helmholtz's time.

in

what he called

Herman

'appli-

Hollerith's 'electric

tabulating system' for retrieving information to analyse censuses and

other large collections of data was discussed in chapter 2. In the 1930s, the Belgian bibliographer Paul Otlet and the American engineer Vannevar Bush independently suggested the linking of information

Employing Know/edges

i

i

i

k

by association in order to facilitate retrieval, Bush with his Rapid Selector' and Otlet with his Traitc de documentation? After a hiatus of a generation, other inventors returned to this suggestion.

A

w

File

Retrieval and Editing System' (FRESS) was developed at Brown University in the 1960s. Since then we have seen the rise of 'data-

computers and later on the web, organizing information such a way that search 'engines' such as Google can retrieve items via keywords or 'tags'. Retrieving images has been more problematic than retrieving texts because of the difficulty of classifying them (above, p. 55) - fingerprints, for example. In the USA, the National Bureau of Criminal Identification had already accumulated over 1,700,000 records by 1929. It was for this reason that in 1895 Scotland Yard invited Francis Galton to be its scientific adviser. No wonder, then, that Vannevar Bush, who was working on what he called the Memex, a mechanical analogue to human memory, approached the FBI in the 1930s to offer help in the task of retrieving fingerprints from files by designing a machine that would examine 1,000 prints a minute. It was only in the 1990s that digitization made the problem manageable - just in time, since the FBI housed some 43 million fingerprint cards at the launch of its Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS). bases', first in

in

The Idea

of Useful

Knowledge

People retrieve information because they believe that it will be of use to them, but what counts as useful has varied a great deal from place to place and from one period or social group to another. Even the idea of useful knowledge (or applied, or practical, or technical knowledge) has its own history, defined against 'pure' or 'basic' or 'high' science or against knowledge for its own sake (on the model of the

famous nineteenth-century motto 'art for art's sake'). The phrase 'useful knowledge' can be found before the year 1750, but it became a slogan in English and other languages in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A number of societies used the phrase in their title, among them the Akademie gemeinnutziger Wissenschaften of Erfurt (1754). Titles of this kind were particularly common in North America: the American Philosophical Society for the Promotion of Useful Knowledge of Philadelphia (1766), the Trenton Society for Improvement in Useful Knowledge (1781), the New York Society for Promoting Useful Knowledge (1784), and so on. The Ohio Mechanics' Institute (1828) was founded for 'the more general diffusion of useful knowledge'. 10

ii2

Knowledge

Practices

London, where the president of the Royal Society, Joseph Banks, with what he called the 'ornamental' sciences, the Royal Institution (1799) was founded 'for diffusing the knowledge, and facilitating the general introduction, of useful mechanical inventions and improvements' and 'the application of In

liked to contrast the 'useful

common

science to the

London

(1807)

came

1

purposes of

life'.

The Geological Society of

into existence so that 'a fund of practical infor-

mation could be obtained applicable to processes of public improvement and utility'. 11 The United Service Institution (1831) was founded 'to foster the desire of useful knowledge' in the British Army and Navy. The British Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (1826) published many books, while in France the Journal des connaissances utiles was founded in 1832. Varieties of useful knowledge

were sometimes distinguished,

Company

in

as in a reference

by the East India

1810 to surveys as providing 'information useful for

and commercial purposes'. 12 The phrase 'useful knowledge' is still current, especially, perhaps, in the discourse of economists and economic historians, following a study by Simon Kuznets of the value of 'tested knowledge' for economic growth. 13 The slogan has not lost its power, especially in the revised form of 'useful and reliable knowledge' (URK). A conference of economic historians held at Leiden in 2004 focused on what was described as 'Regimes of the Production of Useful and Reliable Knowledge', and a collective research project on the global history 14 of URK is under way in Britain. A related slogan - especially current in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries - was the 'benefit of mankind'. When the inventor Alexander Bell relaunched the magazine Science (1883), its first editorial declared that 'Research is none the less genuine' when military, financial

'the truth

it

discovers

is

utilizable for the benefit of mankind.'

American millionaire-philanthropist Andrew

15

The

Carnegie described the

function of the Carnegie Institution of Washington (founded 1902) as to 'show the application of knowledge to the improvement of

mankind'. The aim of the Russell Sage Foundation of New York, founded in 1907, was 'the application of research to the solution of 16 Warren Weaver, who was appointed director of the social ills'. Division of Natural Sciences at the Rockefeller Foundation in 1932, 17 declared that 'the welfare of mankind' depends on science. For once the Bolsheviks agreed with capitalists such as Carnegie and Rockefeller. Nikolai Bukharin, for instance, a member of the Politburo, argued that science was 'determined by aims that are practical in the long run' and criticized 'the poverty of the idea that the "utility" of science means its degradation'. Left-wing British scientists

Employing Knowledges

113

expressed similar views. J. D. Bernal published a book entitled The Social Function of Science (1939), while Lancelot Hogben argued at around the same time that the adult education movement 'has no

need for elegant expositions of useless literature'. What it needed were 'courses on malnutrition, public health policy and the revolution of

techniques

agricultural

discoveries'.

made

possible

by present biological

1S

Despite the rhetoric of the benefit of humanity, useful knowledge has often been considered, at least by intellectuals, as inferior to the 'pure' product, untainted by association with commerce or politics. 'Applied' mathematics, for instance, has often been considered inferior to pure mathematics, and experimental physics to 'theoretical' physics. The tradition is an old one, reaching back to ancient Greece and to the prejudice against manual labour characteristic of a society

based at least in part on slavery. In our period, however, the rise of interest

knowledge on and other institutions has increasingly placed the supporters of pure knowledge on the defensive. In the United States, for instance, as early as 1883, the physicist Henry Rowland thought it necessary to publish what he called a 'Plea for Pure Science'. In Germany, the separation between pure research in universities and applied research in lower-status technical Hochschulen was challenged at the beginning of the twentieth century when the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes were founded. The theologian-cum-knowledge manager Adolf Harnack felt it necessary in useful

the part of associations, armies, corporations, governments

to write to the Kaiser, arguing that 'pure scientific research, not

aiming cance'.

at practical goals, 19

can also be of the greatest economic signifiBush formulated what

In similar fashion, in 1945, Vannevar

he called the 'perverse law' that 'applied research invariably drives out pure' and coined the term 'basic research' in order to emphasize the importance of research that was 'performed without thought of practical ends'.

20

Whether or not Bush's law (modelled on the Elizabethan

Thomas Gresham's law

that 'bad

money

drives out good')

financier is

univer-

worth noting that 'applied research' is a cultural hybrid. It represents not so much the defeat of academic knowledge by practical knowledge as the interpenetration of the two knowledges. Some research is both basic and 'use-inspired', as in the case of the French scientist Louis Pasteur's famous work in microbiology, which led to 'pasteurization'. 21 In any case, it might be more exact to speak of 'usable' rather than 'useful' knowledge, on the grounds that it is difficult to tell in advance what will be of use for what purpose. To clarify these points, let us look at the interaction between different sally valid,

it

is

ii4

Knowledge

Practices

kinds of knowledge in four domains: business, war, government (including the government of empires) and finally the universities.

Knowledge

Business and Industry

in

The uses of

technical knowledge to improve industrial performance were well known from the beginning of our period, on the part of civil servants and businessmen alike. It has been argued that the Industrial Revolution should really be described as the 'industrial enlightenment', on the grounds that late eighteenth-century Britain was both a time and a place where the interaction between pure and applied or basic and practical knowledge was particularly vigorous. Hence the foundation of technical and business schools, for instance

(below,

p. 219).

22

In nineteenth-century Britain, the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures (1835) was concerned with 'extending a knowledge of the arts and of the principles of design among the people (especially the manufacturing population)', in order that more British manufactures might be sold abroad. Following the success of the Great Exhibition of 1851, a 'Museum of Manufactures' was set up so that artisans in the Government Schools of Design could become familiar with craft traditions extending back to the Middle Ages. The museum was later transformed into the South Kensington and later still into the Victoria and Albert Museum. This initiative was followed in Vienna (1864), Hamburg (1869) and Frankfurt (1877). The facade of another monumental building, the US Department of Commerce in Washington (1903), bears an inscription publicizing the department's intention to advance the interests of industry and trade 'through experimental research and the dissemination of knowledge'. Competing with one another in an age of industrialization, from the later nineteenth century onwards, companies in Germany, the USA and elsewhere began to spend serious money on scientific research (later known as 'research and development' or R&D) and

open industrial laboratories. Denmark, for instance, the brewer J. C. Jacobsen (the owner of Carlsberg) founded Carlsberg Laboratory in 1875, the first important Danish research institute outside the university, a year before the inventor Thomas Edison opened his research laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, sometimes described as 'the first industrial research

to

In

laboratory

... in

the world'.

23

The uses of research by chemists

into synthetic dyes

and

were recognized by the foundation of German laboratories

fabrics at the

Employing Knowledges

i

is

Badische Anilin and Soda Fabrik and elsewhere. By the year 1900, an alliance between pharmacologists and the pharmaceutical 24 In the USA, General Electric, industry had already been made. Standard Oil, Eastman Kodak and Bell Telephone all established laboratories before 1914.~ In short, the uses of scientific knowledge in industry have long been recognized, and the commercial funding of scientific research is nothing new. What we see today in a number of domains, from software to biotechnology, is an acceleration of older processes.

One

main problems raised by the commercial funding of is also an old one. The Bureau federal de la propriete intellectuelle was founded in Bern in 1888. The Stockholm Convention set up the World Intellectual Property Organization (1967). The question of profits from patents arising from research in universities was also raised in the Kaiser Wilhelm of the

research, the ownership of knowledge,

Institutes in

Germany

in the early years of the twentieth century. It

was suggested that individual discoverers should give 25 or 33 per 26 cent of the profits to the institute in which they worked. The laws of intellectual property have been described as a kind of information feudalism', a transfer of knowledge assets from the intellectual commons into private hands', the hands of a 'corporate elite', leaving few rewards for knowledge creators - in other words, researchers and discoverers. For example, companies that operate research laboratories have often restricted the publication of scientific papers by their employees, so that competitors cannot use the information. The aim of this 'knowledge game', as it has been called, was and is to privatize as much knowledge as possible. In the case of western companies that patent indigenous knowledge from other 27 continents, the process has been described as 'biopiracy'. Where some industries depended on scientific knowledge acquired through research, others were in more need of practical, up-to-date information about raw materials, potential customers, and so on. Firms that dealt in perishable goods, for instance, like the meat packers of Chicago, required a flow of information about supply and demand, just as stock exchanges required information about the prices of commodities and the performance of companies. In both cases, the telegraph was a crucial resource from the middle of the nineteenth century. 28 The development of telegraphy transformed news in general, not just economic news, into a commodity handled, as we have seen (p. 98), by specialized agencies such as Havas and Reuters, who sold the news to the papers. The railways, like airlines later, offer another striking example of an enterprise that was unusually dependent on information - about the position of rolling stock, w

n6

Knowledge

Practices

and so on - so that it is no surprise to discover that USA were pioneers in the use of punched cards as part of what one of their superintendents described in 1855 29 as 'a system of daily reports and checks'. From the beginning of the nineteenth century, managers of firms began to realize the need for more knowledge about the firms themselves in order to run them efficiently, to coordinate, evaluate and cost their performance. General Motors was a pioneer in the collectravel conditions,

railway companies in the

tion of information, especially statistical information, in order to

monitor the performance of different parts of the corporation and to amount of equipment and labour needed in the coming month. Job cards came into general use, providing information on times and costs, and many more clerks were hired, as we have seen, predict the

to process the information.

30

was also the age of what was known management', following Frederick Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management (1911). Taylor, an engineer, argued in the 1880s that productivity could be raised by linking pay to output and by discovering, by means of the systematic observation and the timing of workers with a stopwatch, the most efficient and speedy methods 31 for carrying out particular tasks. Frank Gilbreth, the owner of a construction company, developed this method in a study of bricklaying. In his pioneering time and motion study, published as The Bricklaying System (1909), Gilbreth proposed the reduction of the movements involved in laying a brick from eighteen to four. He went on to make other experimental studies, using a camera to record movements. 32 The Psychology of Management (1914), written by Frank's wife, Lillian, was another pioneering study, like the psychological and sociological studies of a Western Electric factory near Chicago, the Hawthorne Works, in the 1920s and 1930s. American companies increasingly came to make use of psychology and psychologists in the processes of recruiting and appraising their workers. Scientific management in the Taylor style was also introduced in 33 France, in enterprises such as Renault and Michelin. The uses of knowledge in selling products as well as in making them were discovered at much the same place and time. Market research departments and independent organizations spread in the USA from the early twentieth century onwards. Charles Parlin, for instance, became the director of the research department in Curtis Publishing Company in 1911 and remained in post for thirty years. Archibald Crossley founded a market research firm, Crossley Inc., in 1926 and became a well-known radio pollster. George Gallup, famous for his polls of political attitudes, worked in market research before

The

early twentieth century

as 'scientific

Employing Knowledges founding

his Institute of Public

Opinion.

34

117

Today, market research,

together with the establishment and exchange of mailing lists and the collection of information about individual credit-worthiness, has k

developed to such an extent that it has been described as a network 3 of bureaucratic surveillance over consumer behaviour'. In business in the last generation, there has been a shift from knowledge in management to the management of knowledge. The older view of scientific management depended on trust in the judgement of managers, while the new approach places more emphasis on the team. A new emphasis on knowledge is noticeable in discussions of innovation, decision-making and competitiveness in business and more generally in economics in the age of the 'knowledge economy'. A new field or discipline of 'knowledge management' "

knowledge to increase the effectiveness grown of an enterprise, has up, with its own journals such as Knowledge Management Research and Practice (2002). 36 Other specialists speak of 'knowledge governance' and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of organization, more or less centralized or 37 hierarchical. Knowledge, defined as 'the sum of everything everybody in a company knows that gives it a competitive edge', is viewed

(KM), defined

as the use of

major asset. 38 The Center for Business Knowledge now advertises 'knowledge management services'. However, companies regularly appoint their own chief knowledge officers, or CKOs (beginning with Skandia's appointment of Leif Edvinsson in 1994), together with a staff of knowledge analysts, brokers and 'engineers'. 39 There is an emphasis on tapping local or tacit knowledges and sharing them - usually within the organization but sometimes with other firms as well. Japanese companies have been described as particularly effective in 40 this respect and particularly competitive for this reason. Belief in the economic value of knowledge is expressed by the term 'intellectual capital'. A Journal of Intellectual Capital was founded in 1999, while Edvinsson moved from Skandia in the same year to become Professor of Intellectual Capital at the University of Lund. as a

Knowledge

in

War

Commanders have made use of intelligence about the location and enemy forces for thousands of years, sending out their scouts on reconnaissance missions, just as they have made use of the specialized knowledge of smiths and other craftsmen who fabricated strength of

weapons.

1

Knowledge

18

Practices

has been argued, recently and forcefully, that the importance of is generally overestimated, since it has usually been difficult if not impossible for agents to communicate what they have discovered quickly enough for it to be useful. All the same, (here were a number of intelligence successes, or successes due to intelligence, in our period. To focus on naval examples, they range from Nelson's Battle of the Nile (1798), which followed his gathering and analysis of local knowledge, to the Battle of Midway (1942), in which the Americans had access to Japanese communications thanks to the 41 breaking of a cipher. What is new in our period is a trend to the 'scientification' of war, the growing use of and dependence on specialized forms of knowledge about surveying, navigation, artillery, engineering, and so on, as well as new technologies of communication (by telegraph, telephone, etc.) between the field and the headquarters and increasingly sophisticated methods for coding messages or breaking enemy codes (above, p. 57). It became progressively necessary for officers in armies, navies It

intelligence in warfare

which was becoming a profesby studying at military colleges. The relevance of ballistics to warfare had been recognized by the sixteenth century, if not before, but as guns became more complex and sophisticated, soldiers required more and more technical knowledge. Hence the foundation of the artillery academies of Barcelona and Cadiz (1750), the Vereinigte Artillerie und Ingenieur-Schule of Berlin (1816), and so on.

and

later air forces to learn their trade,

sion,

became professionalized. In Britain, for example, an Intelligence Corps was founded in 1914, disbanded and then refounded in 1940. The traditional need

The gathering of

military intelligence gradually

development of was confidential, maps were kept secret and the surveying was done by the soldiers themselves. In the age of Napoleon, for instance, a group of ingenieurs-geographes travelled with the armies and mapped Italy, Austria, Russia and elsewhere. 42 In the case of Britain, Major James Rennell learned his business as a naval surveyor before becoming surveyor-general of Bengal in 1764. In similar fashion, Major Thomas Mitchell, the future surveyor-general of New South Wales, began his career by surveying to study the terrain before doing battle led to the

surveying. Since this kind of information

Spain for the

USA,

Duke

of Wellington during the Peninsula War. In the

was established in 1838 and explored the West at the time of the war with Mexico. Commanders and their governments became increasingly cona Corps of Topographical Engineers

scious of the military uses of geographical knowledge. After their

defeat by Napoleon at the Battle of Jena in 1806, the Prussians

responded by teaching more geography

in schools.

The Franco-

Employing Knowledges

119

War of 1S70-1 was famously described (by the president of American Geographical Society) as 'a war fought as much by maps as by weapons', and the defeated French, following the example Prussian

the

of their opponents, gave geography a greater place in education.

43

In

work of surveyors was supplemented by radar and by aerial photography, while armies now make use of data from satellites (the Gulf War was the first war in which extensive use was the two world wars, the

made

of GIS, Geographical Information Systems). During the First World War, American scientists offered President Wilson their assistance in the war effort by 'the employment of scientific methods in strengthening the national defense'. In France, the minister of war placed the mathematician Emile Borel in charge of research for military purposes. The Russian Academy of Sciences established a 'commission for the study of natural productive forces' to meet war needs. Civilian scientists became involved in what came to be called Operational Research, 'structuring and measuring the problems presented by battle as if they were problems in natural 44 science'. The British government employed archaeologists, including Leonard Woolley, as spies in the Middle East (fieldwork making an excellent cover), and the US government employed anthropologists for the same purpose in Central America, raising a delicate ethical problem. In 1919 Franz Boas denounced four of these anthropologists, arguing that anyone 'who uses science as a cover for politi45 cal spying prostitutes science in an unpardonable way'. During the Second World War, scientists played a still more important role. German scientists developed the VI and the V2 rockets, while in the USA an international team worked on the Manhattan Project that led to the production of the atomic bomb. In the USA, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS, 1942), concerned with gathering information about the enemy, recruited so many academics, especially from Yale, for its Research and Analysis Division that it was nicknamed 'the campus'. The diplomatic historian William Langer became the head of this division, recruiting Conyers Read, already an authority on the Elizabethan spymaster Francis Walsingham, and a number of young scholars who would later become well-known .

historians.

.

.

46

Social scientists

Moore

in politics,

were also recruited to the OSS - Barrington Walt Rostow in economics and Edward Shils in

sociology - while the political scientist Gabriel Almond became director of the Enemy Information Section of the Office of War 47 Information. The idea of 'intelligence' expanded to include culture,

between American troops and the indigenous inhabitants of the many places in which they were stationed, to avoid misunderstandings

120

Knowledge

Practices

from Burma to Nigeria. Anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict and Clyde Kluckhohn worked in the 'Foreign Morale Analysis Division of the Office of War Information. It was the OWI that commissioned Benedict's celebrated study of Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946), which contrasted Japanese 'shame culture' with American 'guilt culture'. 48 1

As

in the case of

companies, the leaders of armies discovered the

knowledge of their own organization and workforce. In the United States, Frederick Taylor's methods of scientific management were adopted in some military and naval establishments before the First World War. During the war, the US Army used organizational psychologists in order to help decide which recruits to employ on which tasks. In the Second World War, a team led by the sociologist Samuel Stouffer surveyed over half a million American practical value of

soldiers. It

became common

practice in other armies too to subject

on every making promotions. the American Secretary of Defense Robert

recruits to psychological tests, as well as to maintain files

individual and to consult these before

In the early 1960s,

McNamara established the Office of Systems Analysis at the Pentagon, borrowing the idea of systems analysis, especially the Planning, Programming and Budgeting System, from the practice of corporations. Unwilling to be dominated by civilians, the generals sent some officers to university to learn the language of social science, the better 49 to be able to defend their autonomy.

Knowledge

in

Government

Like the armed forces, governments need intelligence - in other words, information - before they can act effectively in pursuit of their different aims, ranging from security to welfare. In this period, states gradually became concerned more with what eighteenth-century

Germans called Polizei, a rather general concept that extended from censorship to poor relief. It was for this reason that, in German states and in the Habsburg Empire in the later eighteenth century, future officials went to university to study what was known as Polizeiwissenschaft (in other words, the science of administration). As

Max Weber famously remarked, 'Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge. This is the feature of it which makes it specifically rational.' Already in the eighteenth century some states were attempting 'to make

a society legible' via 'processes as disparate as the creation of

permanent

last

names, the standardization of weights and measures,

Employing Knowledges the establishment of cadastral surveys

and population

registers',

121

and

so on, in order to facilitate taxation and conscription.' In 1793, for instance, the post-revolutionary French state forbade its citizens to the ones that had been registered at their Alongside the rise of statistical information, there has been a long trend towards the collection and use of information about

use

names other than

birth.

M

individuals.

As we have seen

(above,

p. 23),

mation by governments became eighteenth century onwards. official

surveys of

many

the systematic collection of infor-

increasingly important from the later

Much

of this information

came from

different kinds, including censuses, while

some was provided by secret agents, 'informers' or spies. Spying is an old activity, but it was in our period that it was professionalized in the sense of becoming a full-time occupation. The traditional method for governments to acquire information about foreign countries, from the aims of their rulers to troop movements, was via their ambassadors, who depended in their turn on a network of informers. In the nineteenth century, a few authoritarian regimes established a political police force with agents abroad as well as at home. In the Habsburg Empire in the early nineteenth century, for instance, the minister of police was responsible for espionage at home and abroad and was particularly concerned with the Italian

whose members hoped for independence. 52 Again, the Russian Department of State Police, the Okhrana, which has been described as 'unique in the Europe of its time in both the extent of its powers and the scope of its activities', opened an office in Paris in secret societies

1882 for the surveillance of Russian emigres threat to the regime.

who might

constitute a

53

It was only in the twentieth century, however, that most governments supplemented or replaced traditional methods of gathering foreign intelligence by establishing a specialized department of the secret service. In Britain, MI5 was founded in 1909, in Russia, the Cheka (later known successively as OGPU, NKVD, KGB and FSB) in 1917. The Cheka has been described as 'the biggest political police 54 force and the largest foreign intelligence service in the world'. In France, the SDECE (later DGSE) was founded in 1947, the same year as the USA's CIA - in other words, around the beginning of the Cold War. In East Germany, the APN (Aufienpolitischer Nachrichtendienst, or Foreign Intelligence Service) was established in 1951, disguised as an institute for economic research. This branch of the secret service, part of the Stasi, became notorious after it was

discovered in 1974 that Gtinther Guillaume, the personal assistant to 55 the West German Chancellor Willi Brandt, was one of its agents.

122

Knowledge

The

Practices

role of traitors in the passing of secret information to foreign

is notorious, especially in the case of the KGB. Its employees included the British diplomat Donald Maclean, who had access to valuable scientific as well as political information, and the German physicist Klaus Fuchs, who worked on the Manhattan Project during

powers

the Second World

War and

Research Establishment

at

later at the

British

Atomic Energy

Harwell, which placed him in a position

to reveal scientific secrets to the Russians.

56

All the same, the trend in the last half-century or so has been

away from human

intelligence

(known

in the trade as

the acquisition of information by technical

TECHINT ranges

from bugging foreign embassies

planes, like the CIA's U-2, shot

or

more

recently

down over

UAVs (unmanned

HUMINT)

to

means (TECHINT). to the use of spy

the Soviet

Union

in 1960,

aerial vehicles) or surveillance

satellites, which have the advantage that, if they are intercepted, they cannot confess. 57 This contrast in method has a geography as well as a history. During the Cold War, the USA preferred TECHINT while the USSR continued to rely on HUMINT. It has been argued that

HUMINT was

more

successful.

58

From the later eighteenth century onwards, if not before, however, governments have tended to spend a higher proportion of their security budgets on collecting information about their own people. The French were pioneers in this respect, followed by the Prussians, Austrians and Russians. In Austria, for instance, Graf Johann von Pergen became a kind of minister of police in the 1780s and established a network of agents known as the 'secret police' (Geheime Staatspolizei).

The concern with

internal security increased after the French

Revolution. In France, Joseph Fouche, of police in 1799, built

up an

who was appointed

intelligence

minister

network that was especially

concerned with discovering plots against the new revolutionary regime. In Austria, Pergen's police investigated plots against the

regime by 'Jacobins' Revolution. police

59

in other words,

sympathizers with the French

In Russia, the notorious 'Third Section' of political

was founded

in 1826, following the 'Decembrist' revolt of

some

army officers against the autocratic tsar Nicholas I. The Third Section was followed by the Okhrana, or Department for Protecting Order (1866), a response to an attempt to assassinate the tsar. The Okhrana was in turn replaced - following another attempted assassination - by 60

the Department of State Police (1880). In the twentieth century, police forces concerned with domestic security proliferated.

The FBI and the domestic

and the East German

Stasi

sections of the

KGB

were simply the best known of many

Employing Knowledges

123

became larger and larger and more and more expensive and stored more and more riles. The Stasi, lor instance,

similar organizations, which

as the world discovered alter 1989, ran a

million secret informers

(known

network of a quarter of a

after 1968 as Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter,

and accumulated some 6 million files. 61 The FBI, founded in 908, comprised 600 special agents in 920, over 4,000 62 Its budget increased in 1945, over 8,000 in 1976 and 27,000 in 2001. 63 from $294 million in 1971 to $4.3 billion in 2003. Its files included data on socialists, on black activists, on gays (330,000 pages in a section entitled 'Sex Deviates') and on 480,000 enemy aliens resident in the USA during the First World War. By the year 2003, 1 billion FBI files were available online to those authorized to view them. The FBI was concerned not only with internal security but with crime as well. The Ku Klux Klan and the American Mafia were among 'unofficial assistants')

1

1

its

targets.

The

rise of

organizations specializing in the detection of

crime was another nineteenth- and twentieth-century trend. In France, for instance, the Surete nationale

was founded

in 1813. In the

USA,

such organization was a private one, Pinkerton's National Detective Agency (1850). In Prussia, the 'criminal police (Kriminalpolizei) became a separate organization in 1872, while in England the CID was founded in 1878 (a London Detective Force, composed of twelve policemen, had existed since 1842). The importance of these organizations in the history of knowledge was their systematic gathering and analysis of information in order to fight crime. In the 1870s, as we have seen (p. 65), the French police officer Alphonse Bertillon invented a method for identifying indi64 viduals through a series of body measurements. In 1892, a police officer in Argentina, Juan Vucetich, established the first fingerprint bureau, and his example was followed by the CID (1901), the FBI and other forces. 65 Fingerprinting is a well-known example of the tendency to the 'scientification' of the fight against crime in the last 150 years or so, forming part of an increasing body of knowledge often described as 'forensic science'. The first forensic laboratory was opened in Lyon in 1910 by Edmond Locard, a pioneer of what we now call 'crime scene investigation', whose principle was that 'every contact leaves a trace' that could be followed by the investigator. The New York Times noted in 1934 that 'In recent years science has furnished many useful instruments to the detective; often a crime can be solved in the labo66 ratory.' By this time the FBI was using X-rays to check for bombs in parcels and ultraviolet light to find erasures in documents. Two major recent developments have transformed the investigation of crime: the use of evidence in court, from the 1980s onwards, characteristically, the

first

1

DNA

124

Knowledge

Practices

the establishment of crime databases, among them the Metropolitan Police's database at New Scotland Yard and Interpol's database on international infringements of intellectual property. Another traditional reason for states to collect information about individuals is their desire to control movements, both the entry of

and

foreigners and the exit of their in use in

Europe before

freedom of movement

own

citizens.

Passports were already

was a trend towards nineteenth century, followed by a

1789, though there

in the

67

gradual revival of control in the twentieth. The governments of countries attracting a major flow of immigrants, such as the USA in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sought information that would help them select whom to admit. Hence the anthropometric study of nearly 18,000 immigrants and their children, belonging to seven ethnic groups, carried out by the anthropologist Franz Boas and his assistants (1908-10) was supported by the US Immigration

Commission. it is sometimes called, became from the later nineteenth century onwards as states became more and more concerned with the welfare of their citizens (their health, education, leisure, and so on), responding to the social problems associated with industrial capitalism. Early sociology in the USA and elsewhere was connected with social reform, and social surveys were sometimes made for this purpose (above, p. 24). It has been argued that, between the 1850s and the 1920s, 'The modern social sciences took shape in close interaction with early attempts by

'Policy-relevant knowledge', as

increasingly necessary

national states to deal with the social consequences of capitalist industrialization.' It

is

surely

no accident

that the rise of the research

more or less together in the 68 nineteenth century. An obvious example to take here is that of Sweden, sometimes viewed as the welfare state par excellence as well as a pioneer in the collection of information for official purposes. In the nineteenth century, statistics on agriculture, trade, manufacture and shipping university

and the welfare

state occurred

late

was established in had vote and extension of the been a peasant society, combined with the the rise of large-scale political organizations, encouraged the state to play a more active role in society than before. To prepare the ground, the government made use of ad hoc investigating commissions, of which there were about 4,000 between 1855 and 1974, to collect information about the numbers of unemployed, old people, and so were

collected,

and a Central Bureau of

Statistics

1858. In the later nineteenth century, the industrialization of what

on.

69

Following the reports of these commissions, old-age pensions

Employing Knowledges

125

and insurance against sickness and unemployment were introduced. 70 To implement these measures required still more information. In some ways, a state may be viewed as a huge company with civil servants as the managers. The idea of 'knowledge management 1

(above,

p.

117) has

been extended from the private

to the public

now

described as specialists in 'records and information management' (RIM), while knowledge is officially shared among social workers or between secret services in attempts to idensector. Archivists are

tify terrorists.

Today, in the age of 'digital government', states have access to huge databases for a variety of purposes. In Britain, for instance, electronic records go back to the 1960s. In the 1980s, the Government Data Network began to link the records held in different departments. In 2004, an e-Government Unit was established as part of the Cabinet Office and, in 2006, a Government Chief Information Officer or CIO was appointed (the title is reminiscent of company CIOs, and the first holder did indeed move from the world of business to that of govern71 ment). Archives too are being redesigned in the digital age. These developments have been summed up in phrases such as the 'Knowledgeable State', the 'Archive State' or the 'Information State'. 72 More dramatic descriptions include 'Police State' (a late nineteenthcentury term), 'Surveillance State', or 'Totalitarian State'. One scholar writes of 'totalitarisme informationnel'.

73

We should beware of overdramatization, however. It is surely more illuminating to think in terms of states with qualities than of simple presence or

more and fewer

absence -

of these

in other words, to

view

becoming increasingly centralized and intrusive. In France, was more interventionist than its predecessors. For this reason officials needed to know more and 74 carried out more surveys. Again, in the 1860s, there was a 'proliferation of statistical investigations' in Italy to help solve the problems states as

for instance, after 1789, the regime

new

75

In our own time, new technology has enabled governments to oversee the lives of their citizens in much more detail than ever before, but the sheer mass of this information remains an obstacle to its effective use. There is of course a reasonable case for describing Russia in of the

unified state.

particular as a surveillance state, especially after the establishment

of the secret police (the Third Section) in 1826.

At

that point,

was made the object of surveillance', as a leading figure in the Third Section complained when he discovered that the ordinary police were keeping a close watch on their rivals. 76 'surveillance itself

Surveillance decreased after 1917 but returned in the 1930s,

when

126

Knowledge

Practices

Stalin reintroduced the traditional system of internal passports.

As

1935/ We need to create an atmosphere such that each citizen feels that without a 77 passport he is unable to travel anywhere.' In similar fashion, in Nazi Germany, some officials tried to combine statistics of the production and movement of goods and statistics about families and individuals 78 into 'a seamless system of surveillance'. Surveillance of some kind - by the human eye, the CCTV camera (first used in the 1960s), the satellite or the archive - has gradually spread from autocratic states, such as Prussia or Russia (including empires, such as the British Empire in India), to more democratic ones, which need, among other things, registers of voters. The issue of ration books was necessary to the planning of food distribution during the two world wars, for instance. welfare state would not work without a kind of surveillance - the maintenance of detailed records of individuals to ensure that benefits go to the people who have a right to them. Fingerprinting and other forms of body recognition have spread widely beyond the sphere of criminals, as visitors who enter the USA soon become aware. Assigning each citizen a number to assist identification, a suggestion that has been made more than once in the last century or so, sounds like a bureaucratic dream, but in Germany, in 1944, every individual was given a personal iden79 tification number. Prisoners in many countries have been numbered in this way and soldiers too: as a British national serviceman in the 1950s, my number was 23179445. the people's commissar for internal affairs declared

in

A

An

alternative description for the knowledgeable state

is

the

'Planning State', given the need for detailed statistical information

about the present

in

order to

make

projections into the future.

Centralized economic planning was a powerful twentieth-century trend until the neo-liberal reaction of the 1980s, with the Soviet

acknowledged or unacknowledged model. A series of five-year plans for the economy of the USSR between 1928 and 1991 were laid down by the State Planning Commission, known as Gosplan. Officials elsewhere have also become increasingly knowledge-conscious, witness the programme for 'Total Information Awareness' launched by the American Defense Department in 2001 in the wake

Union

as the

of 9/11.

However, the gathering of knowledge by the

state for the

purpose

of intervention was not in most cases the result of a plan, but rather a series of immediate responses to the threat of conspiracies and

above

all

of wars, leading to measures that have often outlived their

and became permanent. Passports, for instance, 80 a temporary wartime measure in many countries.

original raison d'etre

were

originally

Employing Knowledges

The law of unintended consequences edgeable

127

applies to the rise of the knowl-

state.

Knowledge

in

Empires

and disseminating knowledge even more obvious in the case of empires than in other forms of government, since European rulers and administrators in India, Africa and elsewhere lacked a knowledge of the territories and their resources, the inhabitants, their cultures and even

The need

for gathering, analysing

before taking action

their languages.

81

is

No wonder

then that Warren Hastings, governor-

general of Bengal from 1772 to 1785, once wrote that 'Every accumulation of knowledge, and especially such as is obtained by social

communication with people over whom we exercise a dominion founded on the right of conquest, is useful to the state.' 82 More effort was required to make empires 'legible' than was the 83 case for national states. Legible, one might say, in the literal as well as the metaphorical sense, since, from Ireland to Australia, the local names of places were often replaced by names spelled in English - as in the case of Ballybeg (in Irish Baile Beag) in Brian Friel's play Translations (1980), set in Ireland in 1833 at the time that the mapmakers of the Ordnance Survey, carried out by the British Army, were 84 at work. The need for legibility in the broader sense explains the interest shown by European governments in making detailed surveys of the territories they had conquered, sometimes earlier than the equivalent surveys in Europe itself. Military surveyors mapped Scotland between 1747 and 1755, for instance, as part of a project that included road-building and the 'pacification' of the Highlands after the great rebellion of 1745. There followed the mapping of Quebec (1760-1), Bengal (1765-77) and Ireland (1778-90). England itself, on the other hand, began to be surveyed only at the end of the century, partly in response to the threat of invasion at the time of the French

Revolution. 85 In the

USA, studies

of the cultures of the

American Indians under hand in hand

the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution went

with the subjugation of those peoples in the course of the settlement of the West. Before the development of anthropology, these studies as Henry number of geographical expeditions carried

were sometimes carried out by 'Indian agents' such Schoolcraft.

86

In Russia, a

out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were linked to the expansion of the empire eastwards: expeditions to Alaska (1764), to Siberia (1768-74, 1785-94, 1843-5, 1867), and to Central Asia (from

Knowledge

128

Practices

the 1860s onwards). Following the Russian conquest of Turkestan (1865), an expedition was sent to map the region, led by the naturalist Alexei Fedchenko. The Russian Geographical Society focused its attention on the Russian Empire, including the ethnography of indig87 enous peoples. In the Netherlands, the colonial ministry commissioned a survey of the Dutch colonies in the Indies (1857). Expeditions to Sumatra were organized by the Royal Dutch Geographical Society (Koninklijk Neder lands Aardrijkskundig Genootschap, or KNAG) between 1877 and 1879 and again in 1903, followed by an expedition 88 to the Celebes (1909-10). In North Africa, the gathering of information once again accompanied the spread of empire. In Morocco, a French Mission scientifique (1904) preceded the treaty which made the country a French protectorate. In Algeria, following the French conquest of the country in 1830, Bureaux arabes were established. The French Ministry of War supported the scientific exploration of Algeria, and the results were published in 1850. The colonial regime commissioned a number of ethnographies, of the Touareg for instance, of Muslim holy men and

of religious fraternities.

Some

of these descriptions were the

work of

89

others of army officers. The case of British India has been studied in particular detail. 'Upon the acquisition of each new territory, a survey was launched, which went far beyond mapping and bounding to describe and clasofficials,

sify

the territory's zoology, geology, botany, ethnography, economic

products, history and sociology.'

A survey of India was carried out in

the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in order to produce reliable maps.

From

90

Again, a Geological Survey of India was

made in

1851.

the 1850s onwards, censuses of regions and later of the whole

country gathered information about the name, age, occupation, caste and religion of each individual. 91 Information, including fingerprints, was also collected about murderers, robbers and other criminals. The Ethnographic Survey of India (1901) also had its practical uses. It was remarked at the time that 'It is unnecessary to dwell at length upon the obvious advantages to many branches of the administration in this country of an accurate and well-arranged record of the customs and the domestic and social relations of the various 92 castes and tribes.' Information was collected as well for the purpose of welfare, as in the case of the Survey of Orissa (1866), organized by a government commission in order to prevent famine, while the Archaeological Survey of India, begun in 1861, offers an example of government-financed knowledge for its own sake.

The training of colonial officials in Europe drew on the knowledge that had been gathered. In France, the government founded the Ecole

Employing Knowledges

129

An International coloniale (1889) to train future administrators. Colonial Institute was founded in Brussels (1894), followed by the 93

Rome

htituto Coloniale Italiano in

(1906); the Escola Colonial in

Lisbon ( 1906); the Kolonialinstitut, Hamburg ( 1908); and the Koloniaal Instituut Amsterdam (1910). A chair of colonial history was founded at the University of Leiden in 902, the year that officials of the Dutch East Indies colonial service began to be trained there. It was followed by the Beit chair of colonial history at Oxford (1905); a chair in colonial law, again at Leiden (1910); and a chair in colonial geography at 94 the University of Berlin (1911). Museums too contributed to colonial studies: the Koloniaal Museum, Haarlem (1864), for instance, the Colonial Museum in Wellington (1865) and the Belgian Musee colo1

niale (1904), as well as a

colonies themselves.

number

of natural history

museums

in the

95

among

the

new

sub-disciplines that developed out of the colonial encounter.

The

Tropical agriculture and tropical medicine were

London School of Tropical Medicine was founded in

1899, for instance,

d'agronomie coloniale in Paris in 1921. 96 Academic anthropology in particular was associated with imperialism from its beginnings around the year 1900 until the Second World War. A writer in the journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute noted in 1908 that 'Several of our distinguished administrators, both in the colonies and in India, have pointed out that most of the mistakes made by officials in dealing with natives are due 97 to the lack of training in the rudiments of ethnology.' It was for this reason that a Board of Anthropological Studies had been established in Cambridge in 1904. Leading anthropologists such as Bronislaw Malinowski sought official support by arguing that their work 'might be useful for practical purposes of administration and

and the

Institut

legislation'.

On

98

the other hand,

Edward Evans-Pritchard was concerned

from what he called

to

and South Africa, were viewed by local officials as subversive. The nature, extent and closeness of the links between the discipline of anthropology and the needs of colonial regimes remains a matter of lively debate, but the 99 existence of such links can hardly be denied. distinguish pure

some

anthropologists,

Knowledge

in

'applied' anthropology,

among them Max Gluckman

in

the Universities

Universities have long been regarded as bastions of its

own sake, of 'pure'

knowledge

for

or 'basic' research. Indeed, when Johns Hopkins

130

Knowledge

University, the

opened

Practices

first

of the great North

American research

universities,

declared that the university 'provides advanced instruction, not professional ... in various departin 1876, its Register explicitly

ments of

1

1()l)

and science the other hand, as we have literature

.

On just seen, universities have often provided training for administrators. Andrew White, president of another new university, Cornell (1868), declared that 'We ought to teach history in such a way that it can be applied to the immediate needs of our time. The period has hardly arrived for elegant and 101 learned investigation on points of mere scholarly interest.' The debate over the 'relevance' of academic knowledge, conducted in these terms from the 1970s onwards, is little more than a new version of an old controversy. From the Middle Ages onwards, European universities have found places, at the graduate level, for theology, law and medicine - in other words, vocational training for three traditional professions. Law schools, medical schools and, to a lesser extent, divinity schools remain important in North American universities. The controversial question, from the nineteenth century onwards, has been whether training for new professions such as engineering or surgery or accountancy should take place inside or outside the university. Step by step they have entered. At Edinburgh University, for instance, a Regius Chair of Military Surgery was established as early as 1806, while the Regius Chair of Engineering at Glasgow dates from 1840. North American for

universities offered

vocational training and

and

still

offer

more space

applied knowledge than European

ones. At the end of the nineteenth century, vocational courses were established in agronomy, for instance, in business, domestic science, journalism, librarianship, pedagogy, physical education and sanitary science, and since that time many other courses have been added to the curriculum. The School of Nursing at Yale University was founded in 1923 and the School of Library Administration at the University of Chicago in 1928. Today, the University of Texas has a Department of Recreation, Park and Tourism Sciences. The practice has spread to Europe, including its older universities: an Advanced School of Tourism Sciences was established at the University of Bologna in 2004. As an example of the rise of vocational training both inside and outside universities, we might look in more detail at business studies. There is of course a sense in which the academic discipline of economics may be regarded in that light. It developed out of reflection on business practices, and in the eighteenth century it was regarded

Employing Knowledges

131

German-speaking world, it formed part of Kameralwissenschaft, the knowledge expected of officials. Hence chairs in 'political economy', as it was often called, were established in Naples ( 1 754), which was under the rule of the Austrian Habsburgs at the time, and in Gottingen (1766). However, academic economics came to be regarded as too abstract and theoretical, and more practical courses, including courses in what was called 'business administration', were established in universities from the late nineteenth century onwards. In the case of the USA, one thinks of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (1881), the Graduate School of Business at the University of Chicago (1898) and Harvard Business School (1908), which awarded the first MBA in 1910. A long hiatus followed between Harvard's initiative and the recent international rise of the MBA. In 1957, INSEAD at Fontainebleau became the first European university to offer this degree, followed in 1964 by the Smurfit Business School at University College Dublin. Since then such degrees have proliferated. Academic research in the social sciences has also been used by governments and their agencies. McGeorge Bundy, the national security advisor to American presidents between 1966 and 1979, once expressed the hope that there would be 'a high measure of interpenetration between universities with area programs and the information-gathering agencies of the government of the United States', to as part of 'useful knowledge'. In the

the benefit of both.

102

There was indeed a degree of 'interpenetration' between the government and the university at the Russian Research Center at Harvard. The idea of the center came not from the university but from a suggestion to the Carnegie Corporation by the director of the US Army's Information and Education Division. The FBI 'intruded in the affairs of the Center', vetting researchers and expecting their findings to be made available to the bureau before publication. Under FBI pressure, the historian Stuart Hughes was removed from the directorship of the center on account of his left-wing sympathies.

103

As for the CIA, it sent two agents a year to study at the Russian Research Center as well as supporting the Center for International Studies (CENIS) at MIT until the mid-1960s. Secret seminars were held, some in a villa in Saigon, while the sociologist Talcott Parsons advised the agency on recruitment. 104 In the 1980s, the director of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, Nadav Safran, received over $100,000 from the CIA for research on Saudi Arabia and over $45,000 to organize a conference on Islam and politics. He was forbidden to tell the scholars whom he invited about the agency's

132

Knowledge

Practices 105

involvement, but the news leaked out. The CIA also used the big foundations such as Carnegie, Rockefeller and Ford as 'funding cover', channels through which CIA money flowed to support projects 106 Ironically enough, the CIA seems to have learned they approved. the technique of infiltrating' organizations from the communists whom they were fighting.

Alternative Institutions not difficult to think of an economic explanation for the recent apparently irresistible rise of business studies in universities: the need to compete for students with other institutions in the field of tertiary education. In the USA today, 22 per cent of bachelor's degrees are awarded to students of business, who clearly think that such a training 107 will be of use to them in their future careers. In fact, these alternative institutions have a longer history than one It is

might think. The Aula do Comercio in Lisbon was founded in 1759. speciale de commerce in Paris (1820), founded by two silk merchants, still exists (under the name Ecole superieure de commerce) and claims to be the oldest business school in the world. In Germany, commercial schools (Handelschulen) go back to the later eighteenth century, while the first Handelhochschule, jointly administered by the local chamber of commerce and the university, was founded at Leipzig in 1898 (the title Hochschule, also used for technical schools, signified a marginal status: higher than a college, lower than a university). The Handelhochschule of Berlin (1906) has been described as 'the first institution that focussed on the real world of 108 business and at the same time was truly academic in nature'. The rise of these business schools formed part of a wider trend, the proliferation of institutions of higher education teaching subjects that the universities left out, more especially technology (Technologie was a new term, coined in German in 1777 by the German philosopher Johann Beckmann and defined as the science of craft skills). The most famous example is that of the Grandes ecoles of Napoleonic France, building on foundations from the old regime, including schools of civil engineering and mining and adding the Ecole poly technique (1794), the Ecole libre des sciences politiques (1872) and the Ecole nationale d' administration (1945), which trains the civil service elite

The Ecole

known

as enarques.

Elsewhere

Europe there was a similar trend. Among institutions were the mining schools in Freiburg and the German-speaking world, founded from the later

in

for technical education

elsewhere in

Employing Knowledges

133

eighteenth century onwards, and the more general technical schools or 'polytechnics' founded in Prague (1803), Berlin (1821), Stockholm (1827), and so on. In the USA, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (1824) was followed by the Cooper Union for Advancement of Science and Art ( 859), which concentrated on architecture and engineering, and soon afterwards by MIT (1861). more recent network of alternative institutions to the university, 1

A

focused on research rather than teaching and on politics and economics rather than the natural sciences, is that of the so-called think tanks. The term was borrowed from the military slang of the Second World

War, when

rooms -

remote from the world of was planned. A think tank might be defined as a non-profit organization concerned with research on current affairs, usually independent but sometimes linked to it

referred to the

as

action as fish tanks - in which strategy

industry, as in the case of the Mitsubishi Institute in Japan; govern1

ment, as in the case of the French Institut national a etudes demographiques; or a political party, as in the case of the British Centre for Policy Studies, established in 1974 by the Conservatives. An early example of such an institution is the Russell Sage Foundation of New York (1907), concerned with 'the application of 109 research to the solution of social ills'. Others are Chatham House (1920) in London, otherwise known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and the Institut fur Konjunkturforschung (1925) in Berlin, founded in order to study business cycles and financed 110 jointly by government and industry. By the year 2000 there were over 4,000 think tanks in the world, around 1,600 of them in the USA. They employ full-time researchers, organize conferences, publish 111 journals and often support political pressure groups. In their linking of social research to the advocacy of policies, think tanks are the successors of the nineteenth-century societies that collected information in the service of action: economic action in the '

many agricultural societies established in the late eighteenth century, for instance, the pursuit of imperialism in the case of the Royal Geographical Society in Britain and its equivalents elsecase of the

in Europe, or action in favour of social reform. Reform societincluded the British National Association for the Promotion of

where ies

the Social Sciences (1857), founded by the lawyer Henry Brougham 'to aid legislation by preparing measures, by explaining them, by

recommending them

to the

community,

or,

it

may

be,

by stimulating

the legislature to adopt them';the American Social Science Association (1865), founded 'to guide the public mind' and promote a wide range of social reforms; and the German Association for Social Policy

(Verein fur Sozialpolitik, 1873). 112

134

Knowledge

Practices

Convergence There is nothing new about individuals moving between industry, government and academia, especially in the highly mobile United States. The economist J. K. Galbraith advised a series of presidents from Roosevelt to Johnson. Another economist, Walt Rostow, advised Kennedy on foreign policy, while the historian Richard Pipes led a team of analysts for Gerald Ford. 113 Again, institutions in different domains often borrow ideas from one another. A striking example is that of Operations Research, developed during the Second World War to provide a scientific basis for military decisions, and then adapted to the needs of industry. More generally, over the long term, the universities and the other institutions described above have tended to converge. On one side, there has been a trend towards academization - in other words, towards academic status and pure knowledge. One famous case is that of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), another

is

Caltech (1891), formerly Throop Polytechnic Institute.

These colleges of technology have turned into two of the world's leading universities. In the USA, as we have seen, a number of leading companies established research laboratories early in the twentieth century, and in some of them the atmosphere was and remains an academic one, with staff being given time off to attend seminars, sabbaticals, a free day or more a week to pursue their own agenda, and 114

Indeed, Apple's headquarters at Cupertino, California, is wartime Research and Analysis Division, as 'the campus'. In Germany, the technical Hochschulen gained university status in 1900, while the Handelshochschule in Frankfurt became part of the university after 1914. In Britain, the University of Manchester developed out of Owens College (1851), originally founded by a local textile merchant to teach practical subjects, and the polytechnics were renamed 'universities' in 1992, nearly a century after Germany gave so on.

known,

them

like the

parity.

More

controversial is the trend for universities to become more companies, oriented towards profit. As a recent commentator puts it, 'The American research university has become frankly corpolike

rate in

many

its

of

institutional structure,

its

ways of recognizing

its

scale, its financial routines,

merit.'

115

This trend

is

and

in

considerably

It was in 1918 that the American Veblen published a book with the arresting title The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by Business Men. Today, academics may well wish that

older than people generally think. sociologist Thorstein

Employing Knowledges

someone would analyse

13s

the present situation with the sardonic wit

of a Veblen, but the fact remains that Veblen himself had already noted the rise of the so-called entrepreneurial university, at least in the

USA,

a century ago, complaining that 'the

men

of affairs have

taken over the direction of the pursuit of knowledge' according to 'business principles'.

Now

1

lh

that universities are learning to speak the language of 'pro-

it may be worth reflecting on some precedents, notably that Academy of Sciences of the USSR. The planning of science

ductivity',

of the

was discussed in Russia in the 1920s, along with the planning of the economy. As in the case of agriculture, there was a concern with collectivization, taking the form of criticisms of 'academic individualism' and an emphasis on teamwork (on dictionaries, encyclopaedias, 117 Interest was surveys of the country's natural resources, and so on). expressed in the ideas of Frederick Taylor - ironically enough, given his association with capitalism - and in the concept of academic productivity. From 1930, scientific research was incorporated into the government's five-year economic plans. There was a shift from pure 118 to applied science and from long-range to short-term research. In short, what has been called the 'Faustian dilemma of modern science', with the loss of academic autonomy as the price for support by governments or companies, is not a new one. 119 All the same, the future of scientific research in particular seems to be associated more and more closely with hybrid or semi-academic institutions such as Norway's SINTEF (Stiftelsen for industriell og teknisk forskning, or Foundation for Industrial and Technical Research), founded in 1950. In 2006, SINTEF, with its headquarters in Trondheim, had some 2,000 employees and an income of 2 billion kroner, derived mainly from commissions from industry. It collaborates with universities in Trondheim and Oslo, sharing laboratories, equipment and staff.

Part

The

II

Price of Progress

Today, the mountain of information about almost everything available to companies, governments and universities is higher than ever before. The problem has become gaining access to what one wants, acquiring information about information. The problem of mislaying necessary information has of search engines.

The

become

increasingly acute, even in the age

history of information

been mislaid, destroyed or discarded chapter.

is

and knowledge that has

the subject of the following

Losing Knowledges

From useful and reliable knowledges, or what are viewed as such, we now turn to the other side of the coin: knowledges that come to be regarded as useless or unreliable. Until now this book has emphaand the accumulation of knowledges. There is an obvious danger of triumphalism here, an overemphasis on the heroic efforts of explorers, botanists, archaeologists, astronomers, decipherers, experimenters, popularizers, and so on. References to the 'growth' or the 'evolution' of knowledge encourage this triumphalism. An antidote to this kind of grand narrative is clearly needed, making space for defeats as well as victories. Indeed, it has been suggested that 'Every positive assertion about science and knowledge should be confronted with its negations and contradictions; every feat of science with defeat; every gain with loss.' The point is that every dominant body of knowledge 'is shaped in part by what it excludes sized the acquisition

or suppresses'.

1

'Agnotology', as the study of ignorance has been christened, was a neglected subject until recently, despite the interest of examining it

from different points of view -

'as tragedy, as

crime, as provocation,

as strategy, as stimulus, as excess or deprivation, as handicap, as

defense mechanism or obstruction, as opportunity, as guarantor of wondrous innocence, as inequity or relief, as the best defense of the weak or the common excuse

judicial neutrality, as pernicious evil, as

of the powerful'.

2

The

field, as

it

is

rapidly becoming,

is

attracting

increasing attention, especially in business studies, concerned with risk

management

in conditions of uncertainty.

Some

anthropologists

have long been interested in what they call 'structural amnesia' (the process whereby, in oral cultures, knowledge that is not useful at a

140

The

Price of Progress

moment

given

is

generally forgotten), while an older sociological

tradition of interest in ignorance

On work book

is

also in the course of revival.

3

the other hand, few historians have so far been tempted to on this topic, at least in the case of the period with which this is

concerned (the

early Middle

Ages

is

loss of

knowledge

Western Europe in the Much work remains to 1979 led by sociologists of in

of course well known).

be done, despite a pioneering study in 4 science at Edinburgh. The exile of scholars, notably the participants in the 'Great Exodus' of the 1930s (below, pp. 208f.), has been studied more from the point of view of benefits to the host countries, such as the deprovincialization of British culture, than of the costs to the

countries the scholars

left

behind, the reprovincialization of

Germany

and Austria.

The transport of books, manuscripts or other part of the world to another

is

necessarily

artefacts

from one

and simultaneously a

subtraction of knowledge from one place as well as an addition to

knowledge

in another.

Objects that are

now

visible to millions of

Museum, for instance, are no longer accessible or Nigeria. The rise of European empires resulted

visitors to the British

to scholars in Tibet

wider dissemination of western knowledges, but also in the much non-western knowledges, from the burning of 5 manuscripts by missionaries to the extinction of local languages. The emergence of new technologies is accompanied by the loss of the knowhow required to operate what have become obsolete machines. Some losses of knowledge, at least temporary ones, are virtually inevitable in the sense that they are the price of employing paradigms, approaches or methods that produce many positive results. As the in the

destruction of

American

biologist Stuart

Kauffman puts

it,

'just

the act of knowing

6

His point emphasizes what might be called the dark side of paradigms. In the classic age of anthropology, for example, the emphasis on local field experience, which brought enormous gains in understanding, came at the price of neglecting wider perspectives in space or time. In similar fashion, the revolution in historical method associated with Leopold von Ranke entailed costs requires ignorance'.

as well as benefits,

making the

discipline

more rigorous

at the price

7

its former range. It may be the case that whole cultures have their dark as well as their light sides, in the sense that they are structured to accept some kinds of knowledge at the price of

of narrowing also

rejecting others.

The following sections will examine both deliberate and unintended losses and concentrate on three processes: hiding, destroying and discarding knowledges.

Losing Knowledges

14

Hiding Knowledges is lost to many people because it is hidden from them. Technical knowledges, for instance, have often been kept as

Some knowledge

trade secrets. Medieval craft guilds (in Latin, misteria) treated their special

The

knowledges

as 'mysteries

,

to be revealed only to the initiated.

eighteenth century, an age of technological innovations, was also

an age of industrial espionage, the

1

secrets

in

which spies were sent to discover

of the success of competitors at

home

or abroad.

8

Nineteenth-century manufacturers tried to keep the knowledge of their processes secret, like the owner of a steelworks who operated 9 his enterprise only at night. The rise of private research laboratories intensified the trend. After all, 'When an industrialist supported 10 research he did not want publication of potentially profitable results.' Today, in an age of what has been called 'information feudalism' (above, p. 115), scientists working in research laboratories owned by companies may not be allowed to divulge their findings. 11 Recent discussions of 'knowledge management' (above, p. 117) discuss sharing information within a firm or a group of firms, while ignoring the process of protecting knowledge from outsiders. From the firm's point of view, secret knowledge helps them stay competitive, although from a wider point of view, national or international, such secrecy is an obstacle to economic growth. Outsiders who are kept in ignorance may include customers as well as rival enterprises. Labels on food, drink, cigarettes and other products have not always warned consumers about possible dangers to their health (labels of this kind on bottles of aspirin sold in the USA go back to 1986). Indeed, the tobacco industry tried very hard from the 1950s onwards to cast doubt on the association between smoking and lung cancer. Advertising is full of what are known as 'transparency gaps'. 12 In the political as in the

information, a

euphemism

tary 'intelligence'

is

some

it, is

sometimes defined

tion 'by covert means'.

collected

economic domain, the

for hiding

13

'classification' of

routine. Political

and

mili-

as the acquisition of informa-

In fact, intelligence agencies have long

of their information from public sources, but once

acquired most of this information not to be divulged.

is

classified as secret or 'top secret',

In Britain, for instance, a series of Official Secrets Acts (1889, 1911, 1920 and 1989) made members of intelligence services 'guilty of an offence if they disclosed 'any information, document or other article relating to security or intelligence' in their possession thanks to their 1

142

The

Price of Progress

member of those services. On these grounds the British government tried - though without success - to suppress Spycatcher (1987), the memoirs of a former MI5 agent, while the now famous code-breaking enterprise at Bletchley Park during the Second World War, the Enigma operation, could not be mentioned in the British television series World at War (1974) and was allowed to become public knowledge only in the year 2000. In early modern times many maps had been kept secret by their owners, governments in particular, and this topographical secrecy position as a

continued after 1750. The results of military surveys of Silesia, the Habsburg Empire and India were forbidden to be published. So were some of the maps made in Egypt during the French expedition of 1798, although the prohibition was annulled after Napoleon's fall in 14 1815. Relatively recent examples of topographical secrecy are not difficult to find. In Soviet Russia, for example, the naukograds, or 'cities of science' (centres for nuclear research such as Sarov, Seversk and Dubna), were invisible on maps and other public documents even in the age of Gorbachev and glasnost, until Boris Yeltsin lifted the veil in 1992.

15

Even

in

Moscow, access

to street

maps

or

telephone directories was restricted in the Soviet period, apparently to discourage meetings that might encourage criticisms of the regime. In Britain, it was only in 1953 that the press was allowed to mention the fact that Aldermaston in Berkshire was the site of the Atomic Weapons Establishment. In the USA, the Freedom of Information Act (1966) made an exception for maps of oil wells, which remained secret.

Another

traditional

dissemination

is

method of hiding knowledge or hindering

its

censorship, whether by churches or by governments,

prohibiting the circulation of certain books entirely or allowing

them

had been cut or 'expurgated'. This method continued to be employed after 1750. The Index of Prohibited Books, for instance, an official publication of the Catholic Church, was regularly brought up to date until 1948, and it was not abolished until 1966. Censorship was vigorous in the Habsburg Empire, in tsarist Russia and in the German Reich between 1871 and 1918, although it may have seemed gentle in retrospect to anyone to appear only after particular passages

who experienced 16

the censorship regimes of Nazi

Germany

or Soviet

Not only books and newspapers but theatrical performances and even lectures have been subject to censorship. The lectures given in early nineteenth-century Vienna by the phrenologist Franz Joseph Gall, for instance, were stopped by order of the emperor on the grounds that they encouraged materialism, atheism and Russia.

immorality.

17

Losing Knowledges

1

43

The statistics that governments were collecting in increasing numbers from the later eighteenth century onwards, as we have seen (above, p. 66), were originally treated as secrets of state. Even Sweden, which became famous for its tradition of transparency in government, kept its statistics secret at first, leading to a protest from the political economist Anders Berch that 'tables are not intended to be buried 18 in archives'. The rise of national censuses in Europe and elsewhere raised the problem of 'data protection' - in other words, confidentiality. The danger was that information given to the census-takers about individual names, ages, addresses, families, occupations, and so on, might be used for purposes other than the making of statistical tables. Hence the frequency of official statements such as the following, from a

German

draft law of 1935:

individual returns may be used only for statistical or for general economic, social or cultural policy purposes, not for any other purpose. It is forbidden to use this material as the basis for individual measures directed against the persons making the returns. In particular, it is forbidden for statistical material to be used for the purpose of tax

The

.

.

.

assessment.

By 1940, however, the head of the German Statistical Office was complaining that the government was breaching confidentiality. 19 Swiss banks have become famous or notorious for the protection of data about their clients, among them dictators who have stripped the assets of the countries they ruled. The Federal Banking Act (1934) restricted information about clients that could be passed to third parties, including foreign governments. The new law gave German Jews the opportunity to keep their wealth safe from the Nazis - but after 1945 the law was used to justify the banks' refusal to provide the families of dead clients with information about their accounts. Confidentiality extends to the past. In Britain, for example, census returns cannot be made public for a hundred years, so that the 1911 census data have only recently become available, online. 20 Other government documents remained inaccessible till 1958, when the Public Records Act released them after fifty years had passed. In 1967 21 this fifty-year rule was reduced to thirty years. Many more documents became available following the Freedom of Information Act (2000). A similar Freedom of Information Act in the USA goes back to 1966. In both countries this freedom of disclosure is limited by exceptions such as national security, trade secrets or individual privacy. historian interested in the activities of the CIA in American universities in the 1950s discovered that the agency 'has taken full

A

144

The

Price of Progress

advantage of the loophole in the Freedom of Information Act to minimize the release of its documents'. 22 There was no shortage of

WikiLeaks to divulge in 2010. Technology has been employed in the service of hiding as well as gathering information. The best answer to 'spyware' (above, p. 38) appears to be the installation of anti-spyware software. Access to many electronic databases is blocked by a 'firewall' that excludes confidential information for

individuals without the appropriate password, although this precau-

proved insufficient to prevent both amateur and professional hackers from opening the files of the Pentagon and viewing confidential information about new fighter aircraft and so on. Another method of hiding knowledge is to disseminate false knowledge, an old practice which recently acquired a new name, tion has

'disinformation'. In the

USSR,

for instance,

some maps

deliberately

showed towns in the wrong places as a defence against foreign spying. During the Second World War the British 'Twenty Committee' was formed in order to supply the Germans with 'inaccurate information'.

knowledge mislaid. The Oxford English Dictionary was intended, in the words of its editor, Henry Murray, to be 'exhaustive', but to his chagrin he discovered omissions such as 'bondmaid', probably because one of the loose slips on which information was recorded had gone missing. 23 An unintended consequence of new technology that allows large amounts of information to be Yet another form of loss

stored in a small space

is

is

to increase the possibility of this kind of

the case of the CDs that went missing in Britain in 2007, containing information about 7 million families claiming child benefit, loss, as in

including their bank details.

been mislaid by

NASA. On

tion 'are lost every day'.

The video of the

first

moon

landing has

the Internet, 'huge amounts' of informa-

24

Mislaid knowledge is often the result of excess, the needle in the haystack syndrome or, in more up-to-date language, the problem of distinguishing what one wants to hear from irrelevant 'noise'. One reason 9/11 was not detected in advance, despite advance warnings, was that these warnings were lost in the flood of data. As Condoleezza 25 Rice commented at the time, there was 'a lot of chatter in the system'. The problem is often made more acute by disorder, most vivid and palpable in the case of collections of material objects. John Hunter's collection of over 10,000 specimens, lodged at the Royal College of Surgeons in 1799, was still uncatalogued (or not completely catalogued) twenty-five years later. In the early nineteenth century, the Musee d'histoire naturelle in Paris was still cluttered with unopened boxes of specimens brought back from the French expedition to

Losing Knowledges

145

in 1798. Again, the US Exploring Expedition to the South Seas (1838-42) sent many boxes of specimens back to the newly founded Smithsonian Institution, but the institution lacked the staff needed to unpack specimens, clean shells or stuff bird skins. In the later nineteenth century, the cataloguing of German ethnographic collections 27 was unable to keep up with the dizzy rate of acquisitions.

Egypt

2(1

Destroying Knowledges

The destruction of knowledges encompasses the death of knowledgeable people, including the failure of explorers to return from their expeditions and the murder of scholars in Stalin's purges, for instance, or following the

German

invasion of Poland in 1939.

knowledges are particularly vulnerable to loss because they are stored inside the heads of individuals. Companies are becoming increasingly aware of losses to what is sometimes called 'corporate 28 memory', when employees leave without passing on what they know. Other valuable knowledge may be described as 'lost in transmission', because in hierarchical organizations the people in lower positions may prefer not to pass upwards information that they think their superiors (rulers, generals, CEOs, and so on) will not want to know. Another kind of negligence allowed the destruction of many local knowledges in the age of empire. Occasionally, some of that knowledge was salvaged. Ishi, for instance, the last of the Yahi people of northern California, was discovered in 1911 and spoke to two anthro29 pologists, demonstrating his skills in flaking flints, hunting, and so on. Many such peoples have gone unrecorded, however, just as many languages have become extinct, especially in the last few decades. A Tacit

survey

made

beginning of the twenty-first century estimated were spoken by only 4 per cent of the population, that 'nearly five hundred languages have less than a hundred speakers' and that 3,000 languages would become 30 extinct by the year 2100. In similar fashion, the current crisis of at the

that 96 per cent of the world's languages

knowledge as well as to the becoming extinct. The destruction of knowledges is sometimes accidental, sometimes purposeful, sometimes something in between. Accidental fires in libraries are a recurrent historical phenomenon, from the library of biodiversity

is

a threat to biological

species that are rapidly

Alexandria (burned in 48 bc or thereabouts) to the Library of Congress, which lost 35,000 volumes to fire in 1851, and the library 31 of Turin, which caught fire in 1904 as a result of faulty wiring. Digging the foundations of buildings often reveals archaeological

146

The

Price of Progress

only to destroy them. Amateur treasure hunters with metal sites, but also damage them and so reduce what can be learned. Archaeologists are less intrusive but they too destroy some knowledge. The negative side of the great archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth century was the disintegration of artefacts on their exposure to the air for the first time in thousands of years. In the case of Assyrian palaces, 'reliefs just exposed crumbled before the eyes of the excavators'. coat of mail and helmets 'fell apart as soon as they were exposed to the air', while a royal throne in Sennacherib's palace 'fell to pieces at the slightest touch'. Today's archaeologists regret that some sites were excavated before the development of techniques which minimize knowledge loss, but they admit that 'all excavation is to a certain extent destruction'. 32 The deliberate destruction of the knowledge stored in libraries, archives and museums is also all too common. In France, after the revolution, the Legislative Assembly ordered the destruction of what it called 'feudal' documents. In Brazil, in 1890, a minister, the lawyer Ruy Barbosa, ordered the destruction of many records of slavery following the abolition of that institution. The records of the Belgian regime in the Congo were deliberately burned in 1908. 33 In 1977, the FBI destroyed 300,000 pages of files on individuals classified as 'sex deviates'. Swiss bank was recently discovered in the act of destroying material concerning the accounts of former Jewish clients. New technology has been called in to assist with the work of destruction. Evidence Eliminator, for instance, produced by Robin Hood Software, based in Nottingham, is a computer software programme for Microsoft Windows computers that claims to delete secret information from hard disks, or at least make this information sites,

detectors reveal other

A

A

difficult to salvage. It

would be

interesting to

know who buys

this

software.

Some

acts of destruction are

porters of the Paris

Commune

on a grander

scale. In 1871, the sup-

set fire to the Prefecture

de police,

some 6,000 registers and boxes of police records. During the First World War, a German army burned the library of Louvain University; during the Second World War, another German army destroying

34

destroyed most of the state archives in Warsaw. On the other side, the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin lost around 650,000 volumes between 1939 and 1945, 350,000 of them being destroyed, mainly by bombing, while another 300,000 went missing. In the days when applying for

Reading Room of the British Museum entailed filling in a request slip, one of the recurrent reasons for non-delivery, printed on the back of the form, was 'destroyed by bombing in the war'. The destruction of knowledge did not of course end with the Second books

in the

Losing Knowledges

147

World War. To give only two examples among many, the National Library of Bosnia at Sarajevo was burned following its shelling in L992, while the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad in 2003 remains a recent memory. A more subtle form of loss concerns context, or what art historians call 'provenance'. In 17%, in a letter to General Miranda, and again in 18 15, the Frenchman Quatremere de Quincy denounced the looting of Italian works of art by Napoleon, Lord Elgin and others on the grounds that

this uprooting,

or emplacement, deprived the objects of

their cultural value. Quatremere's point was that the associations, meaning and power of an artefact depend on its uses and its location. To displace it is to destroy it. The appropriate setting for Italian artefacts was Italy itself, which he described as 'le Museum integral' - in

museum

35

without walls. Other illustrations of the loss of context come from the history of ethnography and archaeology. For example, the anthropologist Franz Boas criticized collectors for their failure to record sufficient information about the items he collected - their origins, their local names, and so on. 36 In botany and zoology, too, the lack of labels or the destruction of labels indicating the origin of specimens has meant a loss of knowledge. The same point can be made about many old photographs that lack the details of place, date and photographer that would allow them to be used as reliable evidence. Awareness of the problem has become more acute in the last few decades: in the British Museum, for instance, a project for recovering information about other words, a

provenance was

initiated in the 1980s.

37

Discarding Knowledges

A third form of knowledge loss is the result of obsolescence, or of what some individuals or groups believe to be obsolescence. The growth of knowledge is associated with what has been called collective 'forgetting' - in other words, 'getting rid of past falsified or obso38

This process of forgetting has accelerated in an age of information overload. The problem is not a new one: complaints about the 'deluge' of books go back at least as far as the sixteenth 39 century. However, the problem of overload has become more and more acute. One consequence of the acceleration of discoveries, especially in the natural sciences, is that knowledge goes out of date more and more rapidly than ever before. Hence discarding old knowledges may be seen as a form of what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called 'creative destruction', making space for the new: literal space, lete beliefs'.

148

The

Price of Progress

in the case of archives, libraries

and museums, and metaphorical

space, in the case of encyclopaedias or the curricula of schools and universities.

Discarding knowledges in this way may be desirable or even necesup to a point at least, but we should not forget the losses as well as the gains. Hence the need for cultural historians to study what is discarded over the centuries, the intellectual rubbish that includes information, ideas and even people. It has often been observed that historians are generally prejudiced in favour of winners, despite the need to reconstruct the 'vision of the vanquished' in order to understand the past. Trotsky once described losers as consigned to 'the dustbin of history', and it is notorious that successive editions of the Soviet Encyclopaedia left out people, ideas and things that came to be regarded by the Communist Party as politically incorrect, notably Trotsky himself after his break with Stalin. It is easy to ridicule the Soviet Encyclopaedia, but this example simply illustrates in extreme form a process that is much more common. Many disciplines have their excluded ancestors, individuals sary,

who have become

so

many

intellectual skeletons in the closet,

some-

times for political reasons. Such ancestors are excluded from discimay not wish to

plinary genealogies. Criminologists, for example,

remember

that one of the founders of their discipline was Cesare Lombroso, a firm believer in the existence of 'born criminals' recognizable by the shape of their skulls and other physical characteristics, just as anthropologists may prefer to forget the former association of their discipline with the idea of the superiority of the white or 40

Caucasian race. Again, for a generation, students of to forget

one of the leaders

political

thought did their best

in their field in the 1920s, Carl Schmitt,

the author of important studies of Political Theology (1922) and The Concept of the Political (1927). The author later joined the National Socialist Party,

and was therefore excluded from academic

life

in

1945, although he continued to have followers in Heidelberg and

elsewhere.

It

was only in the 1980s that Schmitt's reputation was reaswork began to be translated into English, French,

sessed and that his Italian

and Spanish. 41

and to information accustomed to recovering knowledge of the past from rubbish heaps, but historians still have to learn to retrieve items from what, adapting Trotsky, one might call 'the dustbin of intellectual history'. Shifting from archaeology in a more or less literal sense to 'archaeology' in the sense that the term was given by Michel Foucault, they might study the process of rub-

The process of displacement extends

to objects

as well as to people. Archaeologists are

Losing Knowledges

140

them into non-knowledges or 42 pseudo-knowledges. As new knowledges enter a given culture, and to make space for them, whether in academic curricula, encyclopaebishing knowledges, transforming

dias, archives

or libraries,

some old knowledges

are displaced, in the

course of what might be called 'cultural selection'. Take the case of archives. In 1821 a French prefect, in the department of the Aube, wanted to 'eliminate the mass of papers that can

never be used for anything' in order 'to be able to find useful papers 43 Again, it was in response to the Italian government's plan to throw out the majority of returns from the census of 1921 that the statistician Corrado Gini developed his famous sampling method. easily'.

Libraries

and Encyclopaedias

and encyclopaedias offers many examples of what had been taken to be knowledge. In the eighteenth century, the idea began to be entertained of destroying books not because they were heretical or subversive but because they were useless. An example of these 'fantasies of destroying useless books' is the philosopher David Hume, in his Inquiry into Human Understanding (1748): Tf we take into our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask, Does it contain any

The

history of libraries

the process of rubbishing

abstract reasoning concerning quantity or

number? No. Does

it

contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Consign

then to the flames: for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion.' Again, in a novel published in 1771, the French journalist Louis-Sebastien Mercier described an enlightened society of the year 2440 in which all but a few essential books had it

been destroyed. 44

Most

librarians

have not gone as

far as

Hume or Mercier, but they

new titles, making the problem of finding space for accessions more and more difficult. Some librarians choose to 'de-accession' books, a recent euphemism for throwing are concerned about the deluge of

them away. Others simply banish what they regard books

to

basements or stores

'off-site',

as the less useful

a half-way house or intellec-

tual limbo, out of the limelight but not yet in the dustbin.

A

study

of the books that a major library has rejected in these ways over

the centuries might reveal a

good deal about changing

priorities.

The

longevity of ideas might be studied through the 'shelf-life' of the

books

in

which these ideas were expressed.

As revealing as a study of libraries, and considerably easier to carry out,

would be a

similar investigation of the

knowledges discarded

The

150

Price of Progress

from encyclopaedias. As knowledge has grown, encyclopaedias have become larger and larger. All the same, a comparison of successive editions of the same encyclopaedia is sufficient to show that editors and compilers, at least from the late eighteenth century onwards, have often rejected a great deal of old material in the process of bringing

book up

The editors and compilers themselves stressed work. When Abraham Rees produced his Proposals (1778) for revising Chambers' Cyclopedia, he emphasized his intention 'to exclude obsolete science, to retrench superfluous matter'. The chemist Thomas Thomson explained in the supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1815-24) that, in ten years so much had gone out of date, he had to rewrite his article on chemistry the

to date.

this aspect of their

completely.

45

A

It is true that rewriting of this kind did not always take place. study of articles on the natural sciences published in British encyclopaedias in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has revealed

the survival of a

come

good deal of information which - 'alchemical residues',

to consider incorrect

scientists

had

for instance -

until the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1875) 46 introduced a major reform. Since 1875, however, the amount of material discarded in major encyclopaedias - Larousse, Brockhaus, Winkler-Prins, the Britannica, the Enciclopedia universal ilustrada europeo-americana, and so on - has grown more and more rapidly. There are obviously practical reasons for some of the omissions. All the same, we are entitled to suspect that the philosophy underlying them is often a more or less naif belief in progress, as if the latest ideas are always the best. For this reason, for certain purposes, at least in the humanities, scholars often prefer the eleventh edition of the Britannica (published in 1911) to its successors. few concrete examples may serve to show how much has been lost. In 1911 King Charles I was allocated thirteen columns and the emperor Charles V eleven columns, but they were reduced to five columns apiece in the New Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1974. Raphael was reduced from sixteen columns to five, Cicero from thirteen columns to four, and Goethe from twelve columns to six. Luther was reduced from fourteen columns to one and Plato from thirty-three columns to less than one - vivid testimonies of the decline of interest in both Christianity and classical culture. Even online encyclopaedias discard material, despite their relative freedom from storage problems - hence the proposals for a 'Wikimorgue' or 'Deletopedia' in which rejected entries would remain accessible, the digital equivalent of old editions of Brockhaus or the

A

Britannica.

41

Losing Knowledges

151

Discarding Ideas

and this for a mixture The idea of a lire-like element was once central to the discipline

Ideas, or 'paradigms', are also discarded,

of intellectual and social reasons.

known

as phlogiston, for instance,

of chemistry, but

it

gradually disappeared in the late eighteenth

century after Lavoisier had offered an alternative explanation of combustion. Again, in the 1950s, structural-functionalism was the

framework in sociology and anthropology alike, was challenged in the 1970s and gradually declined. The decline of Marxist theory in a wide range of disciplines, from economics to literature, is one of the best-known recent examples of intellectual principal analytical

but

it

devaluation.

For cultural historians, on the other hand, to ignore the ideas of the losers is, in the traditional English phrase, to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Historians might therefore be well advised to follow the English philosopher Bertrand Russell, whose Outline of Intellectual Rubbish goes back to 1943, as long as they approach the topic in a more detached and relativistic manner than his 'hilarious catalogue of organized and individual stupidity', describing and explaining rather than justifying movements to devalue old knowledges. Articles in professional journals have an increasingly limited 'life expectancy', especially low in the case of the natural sciences, middling for sociology or economics, and somewhat higher for history or 48 literary criticism. Successive editions of classic texts drop information as well as adding it. As an editor recently remarked, 'I do not know of a single case in which an edited work did not represent a 49 loss of something.' In a similar manner, unfashionable or 'cold' topics in many disciplines are in danger of being discarded or at least marginalized. They become 'devalued currency' - although revaluation may sometimes occur generations later. The boundaries between genuine and fake knowledges, or sciences and pseudo-sciences, are also subject to change over time, as groups of scholars attempt to exclude particular intellectual practices from the commonwealth of learning, often on the grounds that a particular book, method or theory is not 'really' history, philosophy, science or whatever. This is the process that Foucault called 'disqualification'. It has even been suggested, with a little exaggeration, that the history of the sciences is 'always and at the same time the history of the 50 struggle against the unscientific'. As professional scientific medicine established itself in Britain in the late eighteenth century, for example,

152

The

Price of Progress

were pushed to the 'medical fringe' or even and they were stigmatized as pseudo-medicine or 'quack51 ery'. In a sense, the professionals needed the quacks so that they could define themselves more clearly as scientific and orthodox. What counts as science or as 'pseudo-science' (a term established in English by the 1840s, soon after that of 'scientist') varies not only according to the moment but also according to the location and the 52 discipline in which the debate takes place. This 'boundary-work' is not just theoretical, part of a grand scheme for the classification of knowledge of the kind discussed in an earlier chapter. On the contrary, 'demarcation is routinely accomplished in practical, everyday settings', such as the exclusion of a particular topic from university 53 curricula or the rejection of a paper submitted to a learned journal. Whole 'disciplines' (as their followers would call them) have been rejected as pseudo-sciences, from astrology to Scientology. Some of these disciplines were regarded as sciences in one period, only to be rejected as unscientific in another. Chinese medicine, for instance, including acupuncture, was taken seriously by European doctors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. However, when western medicine was defined as scientific, alternative medicines were rejected. The European interest in acupuncture first 'subsided' and then became 'submerged'. It was only in the late 1960s and the 1970s 54 Again, that an interest in this technique revived in the West. Volkerpsychologie, the collective psychology of the different peoples of the globe, was a subject of great interest in later nineteenth-century Germany and elsewhere, but - like 'folklore' - it declined in the 55 twentieth century, to be replaced by ethnology. The following case studies focus on the loss of status of four disciplines: astrology, phrenology, parapsychology and eugenics. alternative approaches

beyond

it,

Astrology Astrology was already being discarded by some educated people in seventeenth- and by still more in eighteenth-century Europe, even if its rejection was a longer, slower process than was thought to be the 56 It has not been difficult for historians to case a generation ago. explain why astrology went into decline, invoking Max Weber's famous concept of the general 'disenchantment of the world' (' Entzauberung der Welf). It is not so easy to explain the survival or 'rebirth' of astrology in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though it is worth noting that this survival or revival came at the price of adaptation to a changing culture.

Losing Knowledges

[53

At the end of the nineteenth century some astrologers were trying up to date and to make it more scientific in

to bring their subject

order to turn their occupation into a profession. A new journal with the title of Modem Astrology was founded in London in 1895. Its first editorial declared that *the time has come to modernize the ancient system of Astrology'. One of the modernizers was a certain Richard Morrison, an ex-naval officer - at a time when sailors still navigated by the stars - who called himself Zadkiel' and made use of a crystal ball to help him with his predictions of the future. Another, Walter k

known as Sepharial\ offered his clients movements on the Stock Exchange and the k

Old,

predictions about price results of horse-races.

57

A Society for Astrological Research was founded in London in 1902, followed by an Astrological Institute in 1910 and also an Astrological 58 Lodge, which hosted weekly lectures. The main difference between this revived or reformed astrology and the more traditional kind was

its

conscious syncretism.

Some

astrologers adopted the language of the enemy, nineteenth-century science.

that

They emphasized the difference between

their field

basis of astrology' or 'the scientific proof of the link star

and

of magic and wrote about 'spiritual science', 'the scientific signs

statistics.

between the

and human behaviour'. Others used the rhetoric of some contemporary practitioners use

In similar fashion,

computers

in

order to generate horoscopes for their clients, not only an aura of high

to save time but also to give their predictions

technology.

Yet other astrologers pointed out connections between their ideas and those of the Rosicrucians, the Freemasons, and the mysteries of ancient Egypt. Many of them appropriated elements from eastern religions, from Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, whether they studied these religions directly or through the syncretist 'theosophy' or 'anthroposophy' which was spreading in England, France and elsewhere at the end of the nineteenth century (below, p. 216). 59 The revival of interest in astrology in London in the 1880s and 1890s was part of what might be called a bourgeois 'counter-culture', on the analogy of the Californian counter-culture of the 1960s. Students of the stars were likely to be interested in hypnotism, for instance, in vegetarianism and in spiritualism as well as in astrology. By the 1920s and 1930s, some astrologers were borrowing the language and ideas of the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung. Conversely, Jung himself studied the subject, while his daughter became an astrologer. In his wake, some writers psychologized astrology, describing the horoscope as 'the map of the psyche' or speaking of 'the planets within us'. This new syncretist astrology, like alternative medicine and

154

The

Price of Progress

organic or macrobiotic food, rode on the wave of the so-called

New

Age movement of the 1960s and 1970s, named after discussions the new 'Age of Aquarius' by Jung and others in the 1940s.

of

Devalued by the academic world, astrology, unlike (say) phrenoland even flourished elsewhere in the culture. Why?

ogy, has survived

Paradoxically enough,

appeal appears to be a combination of on one side the appeal to science or psychology, on the other the 'understandable reaction against its

modern and anti-modern modernity and

its

features:

cult of progress'.

60

Phrenology Phrenology has been described as 'the nineteenth century's most 61 popular and popularized "science"'. According to the phrenologists, the brain consists of separate organs (often said to be thirty-seven) which are the location of different sentiments (such as 'amativeness' or 'benevolence') and faculties (such as causality and comparison). The size of each organ is an index of the power of that faculty, and the shape of the skull is a guide to what lies within. The founder of phrenology, the German physician Franz Joseph Gall, described his system as 'the study of the skull' (Schadellehre). In English it was first known as 'craniology', followed in 1815 by 'phrenology' (a term also 62 used by the French). Some writers referred to the 'physiognomical system' of the phrenologists, and their idea of the shape of the skull as a sign of the nature of the brain within it resembled the central assumption of traditional face-readers. 63 Leaving Vienna after the government had forbidden him to lecture, Gall established himself in Paris in 1807 and soon attracted followers from specialists in mental illness. His former assistant Johann Gaspar Spurzheim left for Britain and spread the gospel of phrenology in Edinburgh and London. The Edinburgh Phrenological Society (1820), the London Phrenological Society (1823) and the Phrenological Journal and Miscellany (1823) all testify to the importance of the

movement

in Britain in the 1820s.

Phrenology was even more popular in the United States, encouraged by books such as the Scottish lawyer George Combe's The Constitution of Man (1828), which linked phrenology to ideas of selfhelp. By 1860 The Constitution of Man had sold 100,000 copies in Britain and 200,000 in the USA. Busts displaying the various sentiments and faculties appeared in the windows of chemist's shops, while many practitioners at seaside resorts and elsewhere claimed to predict future success by feeling the 'bumps' on the head. As it spread, phre-

Losing Knowledges

155

nology was simplified and became a social philosophy' or even 'a kind of church of its own\ *a kind of optimistic and sentimental deism'.

64

Phrenology was never 'accepted as an academic discipline'. 65 It was sharply criticized from the start, notably in the Edinburgh Review (1805, L815), as well as in satires with titles such as The (

raniad.

A

sociologist of science has described the phrenologists as

outsiders, interested in social institutions'.

From

reform and 'resisted by established

00

view one might say that phrenology wrong moment, the age of precise measurement. It fitted better into the early modern period, like the physiognomy from which it developed. Phrenology began to decline in the 1840s, undermined by evidence 'that the cranium did not strictly conform to the contours of the brain within', and it entered a 'precipitous decline' in 67 the second half of the nineteenth century. However, it was important enough to be given a number of its own in the Dewey Decimal 68 Classification system, where it remains to this day. The subject was a historical point of

arrived at the

by individuals as distinguished in their different Lord Palmerston and Alfred Wallace. The phrenological tra-

also taken seriously

ways

as

dition contributed to the physical anthropology of the later nine-

teenth century, concerned with the study of race and crime, while

phrenological ideas remained early twentieth century.

embedded

in

popular culture until the

69

Parapsychology 'Parapsychology' (a term first coined in German, Parapsychologie, in 70 1889) was otherwise known as 'psychical research'. In Britain, the Society for Psychical Research was founded in 1882 and formed committees concerned to investigate telepathy, mesmerism, mediums,

haunted houses, and so on: one of its projects was a census on the model of the English one were founded elsewhere: the American Society for Psychical Research (1885), the Society for Psychical Research (Selskabet for Psykisk 71 Forskning, 1905) in Denmark, and so on. ghosts,

of hallucinations. Societies

Initially, at least,

the

members

of the British society could scarcely

be described as outsiders or its investigations as pseudo-science, given that early presidents included the leading Cambridge intellectual Henry Sidgwick and the chemist William Crookes, later president of the Royal Society. Leading psychologists such as Freud, Jung, William James and William McDougall all supported this enterprise.

156

The

Price of Progress

Parapsychological phenomena were studied in the laboratory in Germany, Britain and the USA. The best-known studies of this kind were the ones on telepathy or 'extra-sensory perception' (ESP) carried out by Joseph B. Rhine, who moved to the Department of Psychology at Duke University in 1927 to work with McDougall and later headed his own Parapsychology Laboratory. One of Rhine's methods was to conduct card-guessing sessions with volunteers, and some of the results were remarkable. His experiments were replicated elsewhere, and a new discipline seemed to be emerging with the foundation in 1938 of the Journal of Parapsychology. However, Rhine's experiments were funded by private individuals, not by the university. His work, which continued for decades, lost credibility

Duke

when

his successor as director of the research centre at

University was accused, in 1974, of faking his results. The

Journal of Parapsychology still exists, but it may be significant that the Rhine Institute for Parapsychology has been renamed the

Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man. The Anglo-Hungarian writer Arthur Koestler endowed a chair in parapsychology, but the University of Oxford refused the money (the chair was eventually established at Edinburgh). Parapsychology divided the scientific community. Some of its members denounced it as a pseudo-science. Other scientists supported it, however, and a few ideas current in the movement, notably that of multiple selves, were taken up in other disciplines.

Race and Eugenics Before the middle of the eighteenth century, a concept of race was already current to refer to groups of people supposed to have a common ancestor, including nations. However, the preoccupation 72 with the races of the world was at its height between 1750 and 1950. As we have seen (p. 53), Cuvier distinguished three races; Linnaeus, four; Blumenbach, five; and Buffon, six. There was a link between racial studies (in German, Rassenkunde) and phrenology. Spurzheim compared and contrasted the heads of Chinese, Africans and Europeans. The craniologists gradually shifted

from differences between individuals to differences between groups. The Swedish anatomist Anders Retzius, for instance, devised a 'cephalic index' and distinguished two European types - the long-headed (dolichocephalic, associated with fair hair) and the round-headed (brachycephalic, associated with brown hair). their interests

Losing Knowledges

The appeal of anthropometrical

studies

was

their bearing

157

on

new German state of the 1870s, the physicianRudolf Virchow made a survey of the colour of

national identity. In the

anthropologist the hair

and eyes of 6 million schoolchildren, only to conclude that

German race but a mixture of different peoples. Virchow's example was followed by an Ethnographic Survey of Britain (1892), a study of the racial composition of Sweden (1902), based on the examination of 45,000 recruits, and a similar study of there was no pure

Denmark

(1904).

Studies of this kind were also driven by an interest in eugenics, a of racial improvement via selective breeding. The term was coined by Francis Galton in 1883 (in German a broader term, 'race hygiene', Rassenhygiene, was in use from 1895 onwards). By 1907 a disciple of Galton's commented that 'You would be amused 73 to hear how general is now the use of your word Eugenics!' Eugenics rapidly became a world movement with the foundation of the German Society for Race Hygiene (Gesellschaft fur Rassenhygiene, 1905); the Eugenics Education Society (1908) in Britain; the Svenske sallskapet for rashygien (Swedish Society for Racial Hygiene, 1909); and the International Eugenics Conference (1912). Eugenics was more than a programme, it was regarded as a science. The British statistician Karl Pearson was concerned with 'founding 74 eugenics as an academic discipline'. A Russian textbook of eugenics (1925) argued that it already was an autonomous scientific discipline. ^ Thanks to Galton's financial support, a eugenics laboratory and a chair in the subject were founded at University College London (1907, 1911). After the First World War, the establishment of eugenics in the academic world went forward, with the foundation of institutes in Uppsala (1921), Berlin (1927) and elsewhere and the involvement

programme 'eugenics'

of leading scientists such as

The

J.

B. S.

Haldane.

76

eugenics and racial studies was probably at Germany, only to fall like a stone thereafter. Serious criticisms had been made earlier. Franz Boas's studies of the

its

scientific status of

highest in Nazi

immigrants to the USA and their children led him to emphaenvironment and to argue for the replacement of the concept 'race' by that of 'culture'. 77 Lancelot Hogben, professor of social biology at the London School of Economics, was a severe critic of eugenics, and by 1934 his friend Haldane had also moved in this direction. 78 What sank the subject, however, was the discovery of the experiments carried out at Auschwitz by the SS doctor Josef Mengele, who had once worked as an assistant at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Eugenics at Berlin. 79

skulls of

size the influence of the

158

The

Price of Progress

What had been a fashionable title became a taboo word, replaced by euphemisms such as 'human genetics' or 'social biology'.* In 954, for instance, Annals of Eugenics became Annals of Human Genetics, while in 1969 the Eugenics Quarterly became Social Biology. Chairs and institutes were also renamed. The fall of eugenics brought race studies down with it, except in the form of 'race relations', where 1

research focuses on perceived rather than real difference. Some of the research was salvaged. As so often happens, the winners have

appropriated from the losers more than they care to admit. It has been argued that race remains 'embedded in many different scientific fields', even if the term 'race' has been replaced by words such as 'culture' or 'ethnicity'.

Survival

81

may even be accompanied by revival, 'retreat' by 'return'. 82

Today, craniometry is used by archaeologists studying the evolution of humanity. The investigation of the composition of nations has taken a new turn thanks to the discovery of DNA: the research project entitled a 'molecular portrait of Brazil' (2000) revealed the mixture of the population even more clearly than before. It may have been too early in 1969 to claim that 'a new eugenics has arisen', but, in the age of the Human Genome Project, it looks as if the devalua83 tion of the subject may be followed by revaluation. Some scholars have written about the recent 'rehabilitation' of racial biology. 84 The fate of folklore studies, especially in Germany and Scandinavia, following the collapse of the Third Reich, resembles that of eugenics. Folklore was an academic subject much more important on the Continent, especially in Northern Europe, than its marginal position in England might suggest. However, the subject became contaminated by the use made of it by the Nazis, who associated it with racial 85 purity. Even the word 'folk' (German Volk), now associated with racism, became taboo. What had formerly been described as 'folklore' was redefined as 'popular tradition' or 'ethnology'. Much earlier research was salvaged, but - as in the case of anthropology - the

and cultural studies. knowledges lead in different directions. Astrology was not a serious academic subject in our period, although it had once been taken seriously in universities. Expelled from the world of learning, it found a new niche that it continues to occupy. Phrenology, a fashion from the 1820s to the 1840s, never became established in academe, despite the fact that some scientists took it seriously, while it bequeathed some ideas to racial studies. Parapsychology was academically marginal. Indeed, as in the case of emphasis shifted from

The four case

racial to social

studies of rejected

astrology, the apparently anti-scientific character of parapsychology

has been an important part of

its

appeal. Relatively few findings were

Losing Knowledges salvaged

when

[59

the subject went into decline. Racial studies and

eugenics were established and then disestablished for essentially political reasons.

ethnology

is

The

story of folklore

The case

left

transformation into can say that the losers in its

we some mark on

a similar one. All the same,

these battles for legitimation

and

studies that have just

posterity.

been discussed

raise the

problem

of disciplinary frontiers, whether they are relatively clear or relatively fuzzy.

These frontier regions

chapter.

will

be a central theme

in the following

Dividing

Knowledges

it was calculated that 50,000 scientific periodicals had produced 6 million papers, increasing by 'at least half a million a year'. In 1969, a survey showed that, between 1954 and 1965, publications in physics doubled every eight years, while those in sociology doubled every three years. At a time of such a 'knowledge explosion' and the consequent increase in 'information overload' (discussed in more detail below, p. 267) specialization has become more and more

In the early 1960s,

1

necessary.

was advocated as early as the mid-eighteenth century by Albrecht von Haller, professor of medicine at Gottingen: 'The great utility of the universities', he wrote, 'is that one divides the sciences into small parts and gives each man a small and limited 2 responsibility.' Specialization allows the human race as a whole to know more than ever before and offers an increasing variety of intelSpecialization

lectual niches for different species of scholar.

trend narrows the mind and makes individuals to see even their really big picture of

own

On

the other hand, the

more and more

it

difficult for

discipline as a whole, let alone the 3

human knowledge. Hence

the not

uncommon

by the and memorably expressed, with his characteristic tragic realism, by Max Weber. 'Limitation to specialized work, with a renunciation of the Faustian universality of man which it involves, is a condition of any valuable work in the modern world' (Weber attitude of ambivalence to specialization, an attitude shared

author of

this essay

himself did not follow his

Those who approve of

own

advice).

4

this division of intellectual

it

labour

call

it

more ambiguous term than 5 may appear). Those who disapprove call it 'fragmentation'. They

'diversification' or 'professionalization' (a

Dividing Knowledges

[61

condemn the rise of specialist 'jargon'. Technical language sets up a barrier between those who can speak and understand and those who cannot.' 6 Half a century ago, the Anglo-Hungarian philosopherscientist Michael Polanyi lamented that any single scientist may be competent to judge at first hand only about one hundredth of the 7 total current output of science'. Imagine the situation today! Thirty years ago, a distinguished American historian, John Higham, noted the need for what he called 'a still unwritten history of special8 ization'. It remains unwritten, perhaps because such a multidisciplinary project requires an unspecialized scholar. All the same, it is clear that the period discussed in this essay marks crucial stages in the process, or rather the intertwined social and intellectual processes of professionalization and specialization. In the late eighteenth century, major works such as Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations were an immediate success with a nonspecialist public. However, Smith and his colleague Adam Ferguson were already discussing intellectual specialization in terms of the division of labour. In 1824, in an essay on 'superficial knowledge', the English Romantic writer Thomas De Quincey was already deploring what he called the 'tendency in science ... to extreme sub-division'. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Auguste Comte coined the term specialisation, and his example was followed by his English 9 disciple John Stuart Mill. In English, the term 'specialist' is first recorded in a medical context (1856), but it soon came to be employed more widely, for example by another disciple of Comte's, Herbert also

k

Spencer.

The Decline

One

of the

Polymath

was a change in attitudes to the polymath. It is had been regarded with distrust as well as admiration from the ancient Greeks onwards - Heraclitus called Pythagoras a charlatan for his pretension to universal knowledge, while Roger Bacon and some other medieval scholars were suspected to have the help of the devil, a suspicion that developed in the sixteenth century into the myth of Dr Faustus. All the same, a change in attitudes is sign of the times

true that polymaths

discernible in our period.

In the early nineteenth century,

it

was

still

possible for a creative

make original discoveries in several different disciplines, two examples may show. Alexander von Humboldt offers a quite

individual to as

extraordinary instance of polymathia, since his interests included

1

The

62

Price of Progress

geology, astronomy, meteorology, botany, physiology, chemistry, geog-

economy and ethnography. In all these seems, he was able to make original con-

raphy, archaeology, political fields,

incredible as

it

now

tributions to knowledge.

10

For a more modest English example we might take the case of Thomas Young of Emmanuel College Cambridge, once described as 'the last man who knew everything'. Young was trained as a physi11

cian

and pursued medical research but published important papers on the calculation of life insurance and the physics of light

as well

and sound.

He

also contributed to the decoding of Egyptian hiero-

work in this field was overtaken by that of Champollion. 'Phenomenon Young', as his contemporaries called him, wrote sixty-three articles for the supplement to the sixth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, on topics ranging from 'Languages' glyphics, although his

to 'Tides'.

Again, Young's Cambridge colleague, William Whewell, wrote books on mathematics, mechanics, mineralogy, astronomy, philosophy, theology and architecture and confessed his 'desire to read 12 all manner of books at once'. The poet Samuel Coleridge once

admitted to a friend his desire to study 'Mechanics, Hydrostatics, Optics, and Astronomy, Botany, Metallurgy, Fossilism, Chemistry, Geology, Anatomy, Medicine - then the mind of man - then the

minds of men - in all Travels, Voyages and Histories'. 13 However, the intellectual cliniate was becoming more hostile to polymaths. Humboldt complained that 'people often say that I'm curious about too many things at once'. Young sometimes published anonymously so that narrower colleagues would continue to take him seriously as a physician. It was said of Whewell that 'omniscience is his foible'. Coleridge was mocked by Thomas Peacock in the novel Headlong Hall (1816) as 'Mr Panscope', 'who had run through the 14 whole circle of the sciences, and understood them all equally well'.

The Rise It is

well

of the Scientist

known

that the

word

'scientist' in

English

is

a coinage of

German equivalent was 'investigator of nature', The new term recognized the emergence of a new group, that of scholars who focused their attention on the study of the world of nature, a group that was gradually turning into a profes15 sion. The new sense of community was expressed in phrases such as the 'commonwealth of science', competing with the older idea of the 'commonwealth of learning'. the

1830s (the

Naturforscher).

Dividing Knowledges

[63

places it was becoming possible for students to specialize study of the natural world. In the case of German secondary education, one thinks of the science-oriented Realschule, founded in In

some

in the

competition with the traditional classics-oriented Gymnasium. At the university level, examples include the foundation of the Ecole polytechnique in Paris (1794), followed by the Prague Polytechnic (1803), the Kungligci Tekniska Hogskolan in Stockholm (1827), the

German

Hochschulen, and so on. In the USA, the Lawrence School at Harvard was founded in 1845 and the Sheffield Scientific Scientific School at Yale in 1854. In Britain, the establishment of a separate course in 'natural sciences' at Cambridge (1851) was followed by the Yorkshire College of Science at Leeds (1874) and of Mason Science College, Birmingham (1875). One long-term consequence of changes such as these was the divide between the 'two cultures' famously lamented by C. P. Snow (a physical chemist turned novelist) in a lecture delivered in Cambridge in 1959. The lecture was given at the right moment and it touched a nerve, provoking a long debate first in Britain and later in Germany, Italy, Sweden and elsewhere. 16 In his lecture, Snow attacked on many fronts. What is relevant here is his argument that 'the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly split into technische

two polar groups', on one side the other the 'physical

scientists'.

The

'literary intellectuals' scientific culture

is

and on the

a culture 'not

only in an intellectual but also in an anthropological sense' of a com-

munity

in

which people more or

less

a gulf of 'incomprehension' divides

the humanities.

When

understand one another, while

its

members from

intellectuals in

17

Snow's lecture and the lecturer himself were denounced

with his customary vehemence by the literary critic F. R. Leavis, the idea of a split seemed to be reinforced. As has been pointed out more than once, the controversy between Snow and Leavis was in some respects a re-enactment of a

more

polite Victorian controversy

H. Huxley and the poet Matthew Arnold. Huxley, like Snow a century later, argued that natural science should have an important place in general education, while Arnold placed more emphasis on literary studies. 18 However, the gulf of incomprehension, if it existed in the 1880s, was considerably narrower. In the Westminster Review, for instance, one of the intellectual periodicals that flourished in Victorian England, the natural sciences took their place alongside the arts, chemistry cheek by jowl with philosophy. Contributors to the review included Huxley and George Eliot, who wrote on a wide range of topics in the arts and sciences. At the same time, the rising third culture of

between the

scientist T.

164 the

The

Price of Progress

moral or

social

sciences

was distinguishing

itself

from the

19

other two. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, many cracks opened between the different natural sciences, and these cracks became wider and wider, ending up as institutional divisions, as we shall see. Indeed, by 1959 Snow might reasonably have been criticized for his monolithic

Why

did the scientist

view of

'science'.

make an appearance

in the early

nineteenth

century?

Why

did an ever-growing cluster of specialized disciplines

emerge a

little

later? Conversely,

An

why did

scholars

become

suspicious

knowledge explosion forced most scholars to limit their intellectual ambitions and so to become suspicious of the few individuals who refused to do so. of polymaths?

A

more

obvious answer

is

that the

sociological answer, already sketched in the late eigh-

teenth century by Smith and Ferguson and developed by Karl Marx in the mid-nineteenth, would be that intellectual specialization or

prof essionalization formed a part of a more general division of labour, part of the rise first of commercial and then of industrial society. It

may not be coincidence that 1851 marks not only the Great Exhibition of manufactures in London but also the establishment of a separate

A

course in natural sciences in Cambridge. contemporary of Marx, the English sociologist Herbert Spencer, noted the rise of what he

and cultural 'differentiation'. 20 More recently, a sociolo21 gist has written about the 'iron law' of specialization. These arguments are convincing, so long as we do not assume that the process was automatic or that disciplines emerged from a process of spontaneous generation. Individuals and groups played their parts in fostering the trend, whether or not it was their intention to do so. For example, the rise of 'science' or Naturwissenschaft as a separate kind of knowledge was encouraged by the foundation of societies to promote it, among them the Society of German Scientists (Gesellschaft deutscher Naturforscher, 1828) and the British Association for the called social

Advancement

of Science (1831).

Societies, Journals

and Congresses

Reference has already been made to the stages of specialization and One such stage was marked by the foundation of amateur societies. In 1839, the German librarian Karl Preusker called his time 'the age of associations'. These voluntary associations played an important role in the establishment of new disciplines. In the eighteenth century, a number of societies had been founded to discipline-building.

Dividing Knowledges

165

support the arts and sciences in general or, as we have seen, to promote 'useful knowledge'. By contrast, the early nineteenth century was a time when many more specialized societies were founded, at

and international levels. Welcomed by many, the new trend was regretted by some scholars, among them Joseph Banks, the president of the Royal Society. T see plainly', he wrote in 1818, 'that all these new-fangled Associations will finally dismantle the Royal 22 Society, and not leave the Old Lady a rag to cover her.' Yet in 1818 the trend was only beginning. local, national

In

Berlin, for instance, foundations

included the Society for

German Language and Antiquities

(Gesellschaft fiir deutsche Sprache

und Altertumskunde,

Geography Society (Verein der

1815), the

Geographen, 1828), the Physical Society (Physikalische Gesellschaft, 1845) and the German Geological Society {Deutsche Geologische Gesellschaft, 1848). In London, the Geological Society (1807) was followed by the Astronomical Society (1820), the Royal Asiatic Society (1823), the Zoological Society (1826), the Entomological Society (1833), the Statistical Society (1834), the Botanical Society (1836), the Philological Society (1842) and the Ethnological Society

Among

learned societies in Paris were the Societe asiatique and the Societe de geographic (both 1821), the Societe phrenologique (1831), the Societe anthropologique (1832) and the Societe ethnologique (1839); by 1885 there were 120 such associations. Learned (1843).

were also numerous in the provinces. There were nearly in France by 1885, concerned especially with local 23 history and natural history and stimulated by regional patriotism. The foundation in one country of a society to promote a given subject often provoked imitation. The foundation of a political economy society in Paris (1842) was followed in Turin (1852), Brussels (1855) and Madrid (1856). 24 It was argued a generation ago that voluntary associations were societies

560 of them

important

in the

process of the modernization of society, especially

Europe and the USA. 25 The argument may be extended to the modernization of an old intellectual regime. It should be added that a number of these associations were, without knowing it, working for their own destruction. They were, among other things, pressure groups for the establishment of disciplines. When the pressure was successful, the societies gradually became obsolete or at best marginal. The field was increasingly dominated by professionals, who often established their own associations to distinguish themselves from the amateurs, although some mixed societies survived. Disciplinary self-consciousness was encouraged by professional associations, journals and congresses. In the USA, for instance,

in

1

The

66

Price of Progress

Modern Languages Association

(1883), American Historical American Psychological Association (1892), American Physical Society (1899), American Anthropological Association (1902), American Political Science Association (1903) and American Sociological Society (1905) were all founded in the crucial period for the emergence of disciplines.

the

Association

(1884),

Specialized learned journals go back further, to the later eighteenth century. In chemistry, for instance, the Chemisches Journal

Chemische Annalen) was founded in 1778 and the Annales de chimie in 1789, and these journals already made a contribution to the formation of a 'chemical community'. In 1786, for instance, a contributor to the Annalen suggested that its foundation had 'created a kind of association among Germany's chemists and natural scien(later

while another writer of the period referred to the 'chemical 26 public' {chemische Publikum). However, there was a new wave of specialized journals in the later tists',

nineteenth century associated with the separation of disciplines and departments: the American Chemical Journal (1879), for instance. In

American associations just mentioned, new journals were founded, among them the Political Science Quarterly (1886), the Quarterly Journal of Economics and the American Journal of Psychology (both 1887), the American Historical Review and the American Journal of Sociology (both 1895), and so on. Like their less parallel to the

professional predecessors, journals of this kind existed not just to

good public relations, advertising a new discipline and its contributors. The book reviews and other news of the profession helped create and maintain communicate knowledge but

also for the sake of

disciplinary communities.

In the case of history, the leading

German professional journal, the

model was folother countries with the establishment of the French Revue

Historische Zeitschrift, was founded in 1859, and this

lowed

in

historique (1876), the Rivista storica italiana (1884), the English

Review and the Dutch Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis (both and so on. Rival professional journals reflected and encouraged conflicts within the discipline. Thus the French journal Annales d'histoire economique et sociale (known to historians simply as 'Annales') was founded in 1929 by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch as an alternative to the Revue historique, still dominated by political history. In similar fashion the American Sociological Review (1936) was founded as a democratic alternative to the American Journal of Sociology (1895), viewed by its rivals as elitist and as dominated by

Historical 1886),

the 'Chicago School' (below, International congresses,

p. 244).

made

27

possible by the development of the

railway network, reinforced disciplinary identities.

The

statisticians

Dividing Knowledges held their

first

international congress in 1853, the medical

men

167 in

1867, the geographers in 1871, the art historians, the orientalists- not

term in those days - and the meteorologists in 1873, the geologists and the demographers in 1878, the dermatologists, physiologists and psychologists in 1889, the physicists and the anthropolo28 gists in 1893 and the historians, rather late in the day, in L898. None of these developments were automatic. Individuals or small groups had to take the initiative and make the effort necessary to found disciplinary associations and journals and to organize congresses. The Belgian George Sarton, for instance, founded the a pejorative

History of Science Society in 1924.

The English

philologist Frederick

Furnivall founded a whole series of societies concerned with English

Early English Text Society (1864), the Chaucer Society New Shakspere Society - his spelling - (1873), the Browning Society (1881), the Wyclif Society literature: the

(1868), the Ballad Society (1868), the

(1882) and the Shelley Society (1885).

Organizing one discipline in this way made it easier to organize another as the idea of a professional association or journal became more familiar. In academic life as elsewhere, emulation is a powerful force. Associations became bigger and bigger: in the early 1880s, for instance, there were only about 200 physicists in the whole of the United States. By 1909, the American Physical Society had recruited 495 members. By 1932, the membership had grown to 2,500 members 29 and, by 1939, to 3,600. As they increased in size, professional associations gradually split into

more and more

sections.

The American

Psychological Association, for instance, was divided into seven sections in 1947, but fifty-four.

by 2010 the number of sections had expanded to

30

Disciplines

was the age of voluntary second half was the age of the foundation and the institutionalization of new disciplines in universities. Medieval and early modern universities had taught 'arts' to undergraduates and theology, law or medicine to advanced students. This system survived If

the

first

half of the nineteenth century

associations, the

in its essentials until the

nineteenth century, with such innovations as

were made being accommodated within the system (arts was transformed in Germany into the faculty of philosophy, for instance, and in Napoleonic France into the faculties of sciences and letters). In the later nineteenth century the system exploded and fragmented, as universities,

as well,

formerly teaching institutions, became centres of research discipline after another became independent.

and one new

1

The

68

Price of Progress

Disciplines are sometimes regarded as virtually timeless, especially,

perhaps, by their practitioners.

may appear

discipline gory'.

31

In

From outside, on the other hand, a more than an administrative cate-

as 'nothing

what follows

disciplines will be presented as historical

time and place in order and solve problems but later taking on what might be called 'a life of their own' that makes them difficult, though not impossible, to change. A typical though not a universal trajectory of a newly named discipline would be from a society to a journal, a chair in a more general faculty, a seminar and finally an institute or department, often detached from an existing one. The traditional metaphor of the 'tree of knowledge' emphasized connections between the different branches and their twigs (publish32 ers sometimes call specialization the 'twigging effect'). From the nineteenth century onwards, the tree was replaced by a political metaphor that emphasized disciplinary autonomy. Whewell, for instance, noted the danger that the 'commonwealth of science' would 33 disintegrate 'like a great empire falling to pieces'. Norbert Elias once remarked on what he called the 'expansionary' policy of physicists, who 'have begun to colonize some branches of biology such as artefacts, gradually constructed in a particular

to respond to challenges

genetics, to transform

them into provinces of the great physics empire'.

In the history of knowledge, however, at least in our period, the phe-

nomenon observed by Whewell

prevailed over the one observed by - fragmentation over empire-building. Like new nations, new disciplines and the departments that house them often emerged in Elias

the course of a revolt against old ones.

They gained

dence, only to face rebellions in their turn.

their indepen-

34

Sociology, for instance, emerged from law; anatomy and biology from medicine; physiology from anatomy; philosophy from theology; and psychology from philosophy. Natural history split into three (geology, botany and zoology). Germany and the USA were the pioneers in the institutionalization of disciplines in the form of separate faculties, institutes or departments. The new university of Berlin, for instance, founded in 1810, was originally organized into the four traditional faculties of philosophy, theology, law and medicine, but it gradually diversified into institutes - for chemistry, geography, German language and literature, Hungarian studies, musicology, neurobiology, oceanography, philosophy, pharmacology, physics, prehistory,

and so on.

In Germany, seminars were another

new development

linked to

the professional training of graduate students, especially in philology

and

Seminars in philology go back to the later eighteenth century, when the example of Gottingen was followed in Wittenberg, history.

Dividing Knowledges

169

Erlangen, Kiel, Helmstedt and Halle. In the nineteenth century, the practice spread to other fields. in

Leopold von Ranke's history seminar

Berlin was the most famous example, flanked or followed by semi-

nars for oriental languages and New Testament and Indo-Germanic studies. ° Over time what began as a series of informal meetings, often

home, grew, migrated to the university, acquired became an institution. 'Seminar' became another name for

in the professor's

funds and a

department or

The

to 1914, in

institute.

later nineteenth century,

was the

German

more

exactly the period from 1866

crucial period for the rise of specialized institutes

universities. It

recognition between

new

was

a time of competition for

disciplines:

in

academic

the social sciences, for

instance, the competitors included ethnography, anthropology, sociol-

demography and human geography. 36 The trend to institutionalization was a gradual one. Despite Wilhelm Wundt's success in making experimental psychology independent in

ogy, social psychology,

Leipzig, for instance, the subject

where

in

In the

Germany

USA

remained part of philosophy

until the 1920s.

else-

37

the proliferation of departments took place a few

years later, together with a major shift in the function of the univer-

- away from teaching (in other words, the transmission of cultural traditions) and towards research (the discovery or production of new knowledge). 38 The division into departments had begun before the rise of research universities - witness the establishment of sity

modern languages and political economy at Harvard in the 1870s. However, the new universities gave an impetus to the change as well as establishing departments in relatively new subjects: physics and chemistry at Johns Hopkins (1876), for instance, political science at Cornell and Columbia (1868, 1880), sociology at Chicago (1892), and anthropology at Clark and Columbia the departments of

(1888, 1896).

Johns Hopkins University (founded in 1876) emphasized research and graduate students, and so did the University of Chicago (founded in 1890). The first president of Hopkins explained that, when choosing professors, the main criterion should be 'the devotion of the candidate to some particular line of study and the certainty of his eminence 39 in that specialty'. Hopkins and Chicago followed German models and became models in their turn for other American universities, including old ones such as Harvard and Yale, which provide good examples of what analysts of institutions call 'layering' - inserting

new elements

into a traditional framework.

40

This was also the time of the spread of the PhD as a certificate of competence in a particular discipline, first in Germany and then in

170

The

Price of Progress

the USA. The need for academics to pass this examination was and remains a stimulus to specialization. 41 Soon after 1900, however, a 'pronounced tapering-off of new departments became visible. Indeed, it has been suggested that 'The departmental structure of the American university has remained largely unchanged since its creation between 1890 and 1910', with the 42 possible exception of biology. A new system had crystallized. The German and American examples were gradually followed in other countries. In Russia in the 1920s, for instance, the Academy took over the direction of research and was divided into institutes: History, Ethnography, Oriental Studies, World Literature, History of Natural Sciences and Technology, Oceanology, Crystallography, Physiology, and so on. Similar academies were established in the

Soviet Republics, coordinating research at institutes. In the 1950s, the

USSR

had over 800 specialized institutes. 43 In Britain, one might take the case of Cambridge. In 1850 there were 'triposes' - final examinations - in only two subjects, mathematics and classics. By 1900, the number of triposes had increased to ten, with the addition, in chronological order, of moral sciences, natural sciences, theology, law, history, oriental languages, medieval and modern languages, and mechanical sciences. By 1950, six more triposes had been added: economics, archaeology and anthropology, English, geography, music and chemical engineering.Today, Cambridge is divided into more than a hundred faculties or departments. The early stages of 'discipline-building' have been described by two well-known historians of science as 'a personal, sometimes 44 heroic endeavour'. Scholars in most if not all disciplines have paid homage to their founding fathers or patron saints. Botany has Linnaeus, for instance, palaeontology has Cuvier. Economics has Adam Smith, history has Ranke. Agricultural science has Liebig, experimental psychology has Wundt, while sociology has both Durkheim and Weber. On the other hand, recent historians are critical of what they call 'founder myths', and some agree with Foucault that 'no one creates For example, a historian of sociology has criticized the heroic interpretation of the history of the discipline as the history of disciplines'.

mere catalysts of a more general movement. 45 After all, the accumulation of knowledges was making specialization more and more inevitable. Although some of the developments discussed above were planned, unintended consequences are also part of the picture. Journals and congresses may well have been established simply to promote scholarly communication, but disciplinary consciousness was an important by-product.

founders, arguing that they were

Dividing Knowledges

To resolve

this conflict,

some

distinctions

may be

helpful.

If

171 indi-

some

did at least found departanthropology. Boas established the departments In the of case ments. and Columbia at Clark University (1888) (1896), and Radcliffeviduals did not found disciplines,

Brown the departments at Cape Town, Sydney, Delhi and Chicago. Some professors ran their new departments in an autocratic manner and stamped them with their personality, like Edward Titchener in Department of Psychology at Cornell. Durkheim, Febvre and Bloch all pursued conscious strategies for the establishment and the reform of their disciplines. The success of these strategies, on the other hand, depended in part on circumstances outside the control of individuals. Some niches supported new disciplines more effectively than others. New institutions, for instance, are more likely than old ones to encourage the establishthe

ment of new

disciplines, as in the case of the University of Berlin or

examples just cited of anthropology at Clark and Columbia and psychology at Cornell (below, p. 239). Another useful distinction is that between earlier and later stages in the emergence and institutionalization of a discipline. In the early stages, individual leaders have more freedom. At this point it is worth reflecting on the fact that founders, by definition, cannot belong to that of the

New disciplines are 'inherently heteroge46 neous' because recruits have diverse origins. The first professors of the discipline they found. literature in

Germany and

Britain, for instance, included the histori-

Gottingen and Adolphus Ward at Owens College, Manchester. Friedrich Ratzel moved from zoology to geography. In sociology, Robert Park, founder of the famous 'Chicago School', came from journalism and the Italian Vilfredo Pareto from engineering. Leonard Hobhouse, first holder of the chair in sociology at the London School of Economics, was a former journalist best known as a liberal thinker and politician, while Lester Ward, someans

Georg Gervinus

at

times described as the father of sociology in the

been active

as a geologist, botanist

In the case of anthropology,

USA, had

previously

and paleontologist.

we

find that, in France, the figure

regarded as the founder of the discipline, Emile Durkheim, was trained as a philosopher, held a chair in education and preferred to call himself a sociologist. His successor Marcel Mauss was also trained as a philosopher, while Bronislaw Malinowski, sometimes considered the first 'real' anthropologist, began his career as a student of mathematics and physics at the University of Cracow. There were also recruits to anthropology from classics (James Frazer), geography (Franz Boas), medicine (Paul Broca in France and W. H. Rivers in Britain), biology (Alfred Haddon in Cambridge) and

172

The

Price of Progress

geology (John W. Powell, first director of the Bureau of American Ethnology). We might describe these individuals as 'renegades' or 'turncoats' - in the neutral sense of scholars who migrate from one discipline, usually a traditional one, to another, usually at the stage of formation.

Like migrants to the New World, they were attracted by the freedom and openness of the intellectual frontier and the life of the pioneer. Thanks to these migrants, a certain fluidity may be discerned in the early stages of disciplines. Fluidity was reduced in the second generation, recruited as it was from individuals who had studied the discipline as undergraduates and consequently took its existence for granted. It was reduced still further by the construction of departments in bricks and mortar, literally creating walls between different kinds of scholar, and turning the campus into an archipelago of disciplinary islands.

Experts and Expertise

The trend towards acquiring and employing increasingly specialized knowledge was not confined to the academic domain. It was part of what has been called the 'rise of professional society' in the nineteenth century, marked by the establishment of formal licences or 'charters' to practise, credentials that functioned as equivalents of the

academic PhD. Accreditation was the work of new associations of 47 physicians, engineers, accountants, surveyors, librarians, and so on. The American Medical Association, for instance, was founded in 1847 and its French equivalent, the Association generate des medecins de France, in 1858. In Germany, where local medical associations had been founded before the country was united, a union of such associations, the Arztevereinsbunde, was established in 1873. A similar union of associations of architects, the Verband deutscher Architekten-Vereine, took place two years earlier. In Britain the Institution of Civil Engineers was founded in 1818, the RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects) in 1834, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers in 1847, the Institution of Chartered Surveyors in 1868 and the Institute of Chartered Accountants in 1880. In the USA, examples include the American Medical Association (1847), the American Library Association (1876) and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (1880). It was also in the nineteenth century that the terms 'expert' and 'expertise' entered English to refer to the possession of specialized

knowledge

(like the equivalent expressions in

German, Fachmann

Dividing Knowledges 4*

173

One

reason for the use of such words was the and usable knowledge on the part and courts. corporations governments, of At one time, rulers and their counsellors had, or believed they had, sufficient knowledge to govern. In the eighteenth century, as we have seen, there was a move, especially in the German-speaking world, to incorporate topics such as political economy in the training of future officials. The next stage was to employ experts from outside the civil service on specific tasks such as inspection. In nineteenth-century Britain, for example, engineers were appointed inspectors of roads and railways, medics inspected sanitation or, more generally, 'public health', chemists analysed the water supply of cities, statisticians were employed in the offices of the census, and the biologist T. H. Huxley

and Fachkenntolis). rise

of a

demand

for specialized

was appointed inspector of

fisheries.

In the twentieth century, the

49

demand

for expertise increased

still

became increasingly common to was psychiatry, ballistics or even history (the historian Richard Evans testified in this way in David Irving's failed libel case against Penguin Books in 1996). 50 further. In the courts, for instance,

call

it

'expert witnesses', whether their field

Consultancy has generated high incomes for lawyers, economists, engineers, scientists and specialists in public relations. In the

USA in particular, especially in the second half of the twen-

tieth century,

candidates regularly hired political consultants to help

organize their campaigns for election.

51

on committees Environmental Protection

Scientists sat

that advised official bodies such as the

Food and Drug Administration. Governments called in leading academics to give advice on a temporary or permanent basis. The economist Walt Rostow, an adviser on national security to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, a consultant to the Department of State, both became Agency or

the

circles, at least - for the advice they gave government on how to wage war in Vietnam. 52 The political scientist Henry Kissinger advised President Nixon on national security, while Zbigniew Brzezinski, another political scientist, advised President Carter and now advises President Obama on foreign policy. Economic and political advice has been institutionalized in the think tanks founded or funded by governments or political parties

notorious - in left-wing

the

(above,

p.

133).

Yet another kind of expert

is

the 'knowledge manager', increas-

ingly divided into specialized types: the archivist, for instance, or the

concerned not only to accumulate, conserve and arrange knowledge, but also to mediate between their collections and the public of would-be users. Another kind of knowledge manager librarian, experts

The

174

Price of Progress

can be found in ministries of culture and in universities, and yet another kind in corporations. Even knowledge about knowledge is fragmented.

Fields

Some

of the processes at

work

in the establishment of disciplines

were replicated at a micro-level in the case of fields, in the sense of emerging specialities within a given discipline. 53 The metaphor, incidentally, is an old one. In his famous eighteenth-century encyclopaedia, Ephraim Chambers referred to 'the wide field of intelligibles', 'some parts of which have been more cultivated than the rest; chiefly on account of the richness of the soil, and its easy tillage', now 'conveniently circumscribed, and fenced round'. In 1834, Whewell referred to what he called the 'inconveniences' of the 'division of the soil of science into infinitely small allotments'.

54

Medicine was the pioneer in this respect. Diderot had already noted specialization in surgery and predicted the same for medicine. 55 In the 1830s to 1840s the French term specialite came into use, while the term specialiste was coined in a medical context in 1848. In 1841, a

German

physician remarked that, in France,

who wants

'a speciality is

become

the

and famous rapidly'. 56 The Germans soon followed the French model, from the 1850s onwards. Chairs and institutes in opthalmology, for instance, were created in universities from 1852. By the 1940s, fifteen medical specialities were recognized in the USA, among them dermatology, obstetrics, opthalmology, pediatrics and urology. The number had risen to fifty-four by 1967. 57 Fields of this kind have been and still are most numerous or at least most obvious in the natural sciences. For a series of striking examples of their emergence one might take the 'paleos'. As we have seen, palaeontology emerged in the early nineteenth century, and micropalaeontology developed from it, followed by palaeobotany and paleobiology, focused on the fossils of plants and animals. necessary condition for everybody

Placing the fossils in a wider context

became the

to

rich

task of palaeogeog-

raphy, palaeoclimatology and palaeoecology. Turning to the humani-

been studying palaeography for a long time, and were established in Paris (1821), Vienna (1854), Florence (1880), Louvain (1881), Prague (1882) and the Vatican ties,

historians have

chairs of the subject

(1884).

58

Physics, long divided into theoretical

and experimental branches,

has sub-divided into specialities such as mechanical physics, nuclear

Dividing Knowledges

175

energy physics, particle physics, molecular physics, geoand biophysics. There used to be a speciality called 'psychophysics', now known as the psychology and physiology of perception. A physicist turned historian has pointed out that disciplines, sub-disciplines and the still smaller units of study that he calls 'sub-fields' all look temporary in the light of history, guessing that sub-fields last about ten years, sub-disciplines such as nuclear physics 40 to 50 years' and disciplines such as physics, a century (in my view, 59 underestimating the resilience of institutionalized disciplines). Biology has moved in a similar direction, dividing like cells into developmental, environmental, evolutionary, marine, molecular and systems biologies, not to mention genetics, microbiology and neurobiology. Zoology has split, according to the kind of living creature studied, into entomology, ichthyology, ornithology, primatology, and so on. A tendency to pluralism is reflected in the rise of the term 'life sciences', in parallel with 'earth sciences' and 'plant sciences', replacing biology, geology and botany in the singular. Compared to chemistry, though, biology and physics seem unified. Once established as a discipline, chemistry split into organic and inorganic branches. Since then, distinctions have proliferated. Among the different fields, listed in alphabetical order with no attempt to comment on their relative importance, are agrochemistry, astrochemistry. atmospheric chemistry, chemical biology, chemical engineering, chemo-informatics, electrochemistry, environmental chemistry, femtochemistry, flavour chemistry, flow chemistry, geochemistry, green chemistry, histochemistry, hydrogenation chemistry, immunochemistry, marine chemistry, mathematical chemistry, mechanochemistry, medicinal chemistry, natural product chemistry, neurochemistry, organometallic chemistry, petrochemistry, photochemistry, physical organic chemistry, phytochemistry, polymer chemistry, radiochemistry, solid-state chemistry, sonochemistry, supramolecular chemistry, surface chemistry, synthetic chemistry and thermochemistry. One might say that the commonwealth of learning was replaced first by the commonwealth of science, then by disciplinary units such as the community of chemists, and more recently by still more specialized groups such as the crystallography community or the protein community. However, the rise of these fields is not the product of splitting alone. There is fusion as well as fission. Physical chemistry was established at the crossroads of physics and chemistry, and biochemistry where chemistry meets biology. Astrophysics lies on astronomy's border with physics, astrochemistry on its border with chemistry. Physico-chemical biology, a subject in which a chair was established in France in 1946, is the product of a physics, high

physics, astrophysics

k

176

The

Price of Progress

More and more of these hybrid subhave emerged, from biophysics to bioarchaeology. Ironically enough, they illustrate the unintended consequences of three-way

intersection.

disciplines

attempts at interdisciplinarity.

Interdisciplinarity

For historians

same period,

it is

no surprise to discover opposite tendencies in the war between opposite trends. In the history of

a tug of

knowledge, the centrifugal drive towards ever-increasing specialization is partially compensated by certain centripetal tendencies. Certain individuals resisted specialization. Humboldt and Young have already been quoted as early nineteenth-century examples of this resistance. Over a century later, Lewis Mumford, best known as an architectural critic and a historian of cities, proudly described himself as a 'generalist', not a specialist. Some groups also resisted specialization, in medicine for example. In the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, the medical profession generally viewed specialization as a form of charlatanism. As it gradually became respectable, doctors continued to insist that future specialists should begin their careers by training as a 'general practi60 tioner' or GP. In universities, too, especially old ones such as Oxford and Cambridge, Harvard and Yale, there was resistance to specialization in the name of general education or, in Germany, in the name of 61 Bildung. One might speak of resistance to professionalization, but it might be nearer the mark to distinguish two competing profes-

and the teacher, coexisting uneasily in and sometimes in the same person. The dilemma has not gone away. For years, when filling in official forms under the heading 'occupation', I hesitated between 'university teacher' and sional identities, the scholar

the

same

institution

'historian'. If these forms of resistance went into decline, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, a new movement of resistance to specialization developed in the same period, carrying the banner

of interdisciplinarity.

There is of course nothing new in a creative individual or group borrowing concepts and methods from another field or discipline. In ancient Greece, Thucydides offered historical explanations that drew on the language of medicine. In the nineteenth century, Darwin famously admitted his debt to the essay on population by the clergyman Thomas Malthus. T happened to read for amusement Malthus on Population', he wrote in his autobiography,

Dividing Knowledges

177

and being well prepared to appreciate the struggle for existence which everywhere goes oil from long-continued observation of the habits of animals and plants, it at once struck me that under these circumstances favourable variations would tend to be preserved, and unfavourable ones to be destroyed. The results of this would be the formation of a new species. Here, then, had at last got a theory by which to work/ 12

I

Again, classics

may be regarded

not as a discipline but as an early

example of interdisciplinary "area studies', combining literary, philosophical, historical and archaeological approaches to ancient Greece and Rome. What was new in the middle of the twentieth century was the rise of a sharper and sharper awareness of the intellectual costs of specialization: failure to see connections for example, or what the polymath Donald Campbell called an 'ethnocentrism of disciplines' 63 Specialists were accused of that limited the learned imagination. knowing more and more about less and less, until they knew every64 thing about nothing. In his Anatomy of Britain (1962), the journalist Anthony Sampson devoted a chapter to the universities, in which he commented on Oxford history dissertations that showed 'a preference for tiny segments of the distant past', such as 'The Archepiscopate 65 of William of Corbeil, 1123-6'.

This climate of criticism encouraged the rise of a more or less organized movement or cluster of movements to promote interdisciplinary thinking and research, using similar means to the disciplinary movements of the nineteenth century - in other words, societies, journals and institutes. Like specialization, interdisciplinarity is

sometimes encouraged by the leaders of the

institutions. It often

movements

to

found new

proved easier for

institutions than to adapt

old ones.

These movements had begun before 1950 - witness the foundation Revue de synthese historique (1900), an attempt to bring history closer to the social sciences, especially psychology and sociology; the History of Ideas Club at Johns Hopkins (1923), which brought together philosophers, historians and literary scholars; the Institute for Human Relations at Yale (1929), encouraging cooperation between different kinds of social scientist; and the Warburg Institute, originally the private library of an independent scholar from Hamburg, Aby Warburg, who detested what he called the intellectual 'border police' (Grenzwachertum) and engaged in the study of culture in a broad sense (Kulturwissenschaft). 66 On the side of the natural sciences, in the 1930s the Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath planned an Encyclopaedia of Unified Science. 61 In the second half of the twentieth century, movements of this kind became stronger as they became more necessary. The year 1950 is a of the

178

The

Price of Progress

memorable symbolic date dation of a

new

university,

in the

case of England, marking the foun-

Keele

in Staffordshire, in

which

all

under-

graduates were required to take courses in both the arts and the sciences. Keele was followed in 1961 by the University of Sussex,

whose founders tried in their own words 'to redraw the map of learning' by setting up large schools of studies - European Studies, for 68 example - in the place of departments. The idea of interdisciplinarity spread sufficiently to be denounced as 'fashionable', but the problem of institutionalizing it remained. Keele and Sussex were founded to reform the teaching of undergraduates. What about research? Founding a new journal may be an effective way of opening up one discipline to others, as in the case of the Journal of Interdisciplinary History (1970), but to widen still further would mean a loss of focus. One solution adopted in a number of countries has been to found a small institute for scholars from a range of disciplines, whether as visitors for a year or so or as permanent members. The Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (1930) is an early example, followed by the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences (Palo Alto, 1954), the Maison des sciences de

Vhomme

(Paris, 1963), the

Advanced Study (Wassenaar, 1980),

Netherlands Institute for

1970), the Wissenschaftskolleg (Berlin,

and so on.

Institutes of this kind offered opportunities for dialogue across the

even if they could not ensure that such dialogue will take Another way of combating the ethnocentrism of disciplines, at least in the social sciences, was to found institutions focused on a geographical area, so that economists, sociologists, historians and others might work on a common project. Hence the foundation of the Russian Research Center (1947), the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (1954) and the Center for East Asian Research (1955), all at Harvard, the Osteuropa Institut (Berlin, 1951), the Center for Near Eastern Studies (University of California at Los Angeles, 1957), and so on. The rise of 'area studies', especially in the USA, was driven by disciplines

place.

but it should also be seen as an attempt to avoid the frontier police and to encourage teamwork. 69

politics (below, p. 231),

Teamwork Despite the myth of the individual genius, many research projects, especially but not exclusively in the natural sciences, have long been carried out by groups or teams. Indeed, the idea of intellectual teamwork is older than one might think. In the case of history, where

Dividing Knowledges individualism

still

reigns, there

tive enterprises in early

known

scholars

were

important collec-

at least three

modern Europe: those

as the 'Centuriators of

179

of the Protestant

Magdeburg' who collabo-

rated on a history of the Church, the French Benedictines of the

Congregation of St Maur the Flemish Jesuits

known

who wrote

the history of their order, and

as the 'Bollandists'

who

rewrote the

lives

of the saints. All the same, in the period 1750-2000, the trend towards collective

work

most clear in the natural sciences but also visible in the social sciences and to some extent even in the humanities. The rise of scientific expeditions is an obvious example of this is

a palpable one,

'collectivization' as

it is

of the division of labour. Geologists, botanists

and other specialists were taken on board research ships. Astronomers collaborated at the time of the transits of Venus in 1761 and 1769. The size of teams increased, with over 150 scholars accompanying Napoleon to Egypt. Again, take the case of encyclopaedias. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, important encyclopaedias were compiled by individuals such as Ephraim Chambers. In the 1750s, however, although Diderot was able to edit the Encyclopedie because his interests were encyclopaedic, the book itself was the collective work of some 140 authors. As the article on 'gens de lettres' in the Encyclopedie put it, 'universal knowledge is no longer within the reach of man' {'la science universelle n'est plus a la portee de Vhomme'). In similar fashion, in 1805, a biography of James Tytler, the editor of the supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, dismissed its protagonist with the remark: 'No man, however astonishing his talents and intense his application, can ever reasonably expect to be a walking encyclopae70 dia.' Later encyclopaedias depended on larger and larger teams. The Grande encyclopedie (1886-1902), for instance, had about 450 contributors; the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911) had 1,507, and the Enciclopedia italiana (1929-36) had 3,272. 71 Dictionaries too were the work of teams. By 1881 over 750 individuals had volunteered to help Henry Murray compile the Oxford English Dictionary.

72

Again, take the case of journals. The

papers submitted to professional number of individuals signing scientific papers has gradscientific

ually increased. In 1930s, a joint publication of three scientists

was

considered so odd that it was known as the Dreimannerwerk. In 1963 it was noted that the proportion of scientific papers by more than one author had 'accelerated steadily and powerfully' since 1900 (when fewer than 20 per cent of the articles in Chemical Abstracts, for instance,

were by more than one author). 'At present only about one

180

The

paper

Price of Progress

four has a multiplicity of three or more authors, but it the more than half of all papers will be in this category by

in

trend holds,

we shall move steadily toward an infinity of authors per One might compare this prediction with an account published

1980 and paper.

1

in 1996:

'By the 1960s and 70s, authorship by teams of four or more 1980s, a dozen or so names could be attached

became standard; by the to an article.'

73

The collectivization of research in the natural sciences today is well known and often regretted. Since the Second World War, we are told, 'there has been a profound transformation in the way that scientific work is now organized. Internal and external forces have combined to "collectivize" the research process', as the scale of projects has

increased and equipment - from particle accelerators to space tele-

scopes - has

become more and more

Science' goes back further than 1961,

christened by the

American nuclear

expensive.

when

physicist

74

However, 'Big

phenomenon was 75 Alvin Weinberg. As

the

one of the popularizers of the term has pointed out, 'the transition from Little Science to Big Science was less dramatic and more gradual than appears

at first'.

76

In the early nineteenth century, for instance, Justus von Liebig

developed a grand programme for collective research in chemistry in 77 his laboratory at Giessen. At the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in the mid-nineteenth century, the surveillance, the discipline and the 78 division of labour were all reminiscent of the factory. About a hundred people worked in Pavlov's physiology laboratory from 1891 79 to 1904, and the laboratory was described as a 'physiological factory'. By 1890 the historian Theodor Mommsen was already making unflattering comparisons between Grosswissenschaft, as he called it, and Grossindustrie, while the German chemist Emil Fischer complained in 1902 that 'mass production methods' had 'penetrated experimental science'.

The

80

was encouraged by industry and government. In the later nineteenth century, as we have seen, manufacturing firms began to found laboratories not only to test new products but also to carry out longer-term research. These establishments encouraged multidisciplinary teamwork on particular problems. Governments followed the lead of industry in the First World War, and still more in the Second. After 1945, the US government and armed forces relied increasingly for research on contracts with universities, thus introducing the methods of 'R&D' onto the campus. The rising cost of equipment reinforced an existing trend rather than rise of collective science

introducing a

new

one.

1

Dividing Knowledges

1

8

and humanities has been following and on a smaller scale. Archaeology necessarily depends on teamwork, especially at the stage of excavation. The Irish Folklore Commission drew on the services of about 600 teachers, who replied to questionnaires, while hundreds of paid collectors went around with notebooks and dictaphones recording 81 songs and stories. What might be called 'Big Sociology' imitated Big Science, as in the case of two mid-twentieth-century projects led by Gunnar Myrdal and Samuel Stouffer. Myrdal, a Swedish economist, was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to study the 'Negro problem' in the USA. He hired thirty-one researchers to assist him in the study, published under the title An American Dilemma (1944). Stouffefs project was on a still larger scale. He led the team that surveyed half a million American soldiers during the Second World War, using interviews and questionnaires to obtain the information analysed in The American Soldier (1949). In the humanities, the tradition of individualism was and remains dominant, although it is subject to national variations. In the USSR, predictably, there were criticisms of 'academic individualism' and an enthusiasm for collectivization in scholarship as in agriculture. The Soviet Academy supported teamwork on dictionaries, encyclopaedias and surveys of the country's natural resources. 82 In France, Durkheim declared in 1896 that 'sociology can only make progress by teamResearch

the

same

in the social sciences

trend, at a distance

.

.

.

83

en commun]\ In anthropology, Griaule organized group fieldwork in Africa. In history, Lucien Febvre predicted in 1949 that 'the day will come when people will speak of "historical

work

[travail

laboratories'".

In the case of history, there has indeed been a trend towards team-

work, even vidualists.

if

An

most historians would

still

International Scientific

describe themselves as indi-

Committee on Price History

was established in 1930, funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, to engage in collaborative research. 84 Collective historical projects played an important role at the Ecole des hautes etudes in the 1950s and 1960s, the age of Febvre's successor Fernand Braudel. In Britain, a team writing the biographies of all Members of Parliament has been supported since 1940 by the History of Parliament Trust, while the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure (1964) studies demographic history.

There are of course different kinds of team, some more hierarchiand others more egalitarian. Small international teams may require no more of collaborators than that they try to answer common questions, leaving them otherwise independent, while large teams cal

1

The

82

Price of Progress

the labour into smaller pieces and give

divide

individuals

less

autonomy. In short, ing,

but

it

teamwork has long existed in the commonwealth of learnmore widely and become more important in the

has spread

few decades, encouraged by developments outside the academy, especially in industry and government. It is unlikely that 'Big Humanities' will ever emulate 'Big Sociology', let alone 'Bigger and Bigger Science' with its billion-dollar projects. All the same, collective last

more funding than small-scale individual making ever more urgent the problem of organizing teams

large-scale projects attract

ones,

without suppressing individual creativity.

The Survival

of an

Endangered Species

teamwork and specialization, one might have expected generalists the lone rangers over the fields of knowledge - to have disappeared, along with the ecological niches in which such polymaths can flourish. All the same, a few favourable niches as well as some remarkable individuals survived into the twentieth century and even beyond. Journalism, for instance, allowed a few polymaths to make a living, notably Lewis Mumford and Gilberto Freyre, one from North and the other from South America. Both men combined cultural history and sociology with architectural and literary criticism. Again, some universities or colleges offered asylum to polymaths. Michel In an age of

Foucault's chair in 'the history of systems of thought' at the College

de France gave him the opportunity to range widely. Michel de Certeau's academic position was more marginal, but he was supported by the Jesuits while studying and publishing in a variety of fields: theology, philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, anthropology and sociology.

At Oxford before

the Second World War, a post was created for R. G. Collingwood that combined his interests in philosophy and the archaeology of Roman Britain. At Cambridge after the war, Joseph Needham remained on the university payroll when his interests shifted from embryology to the history of science in China. Herbert Fleure gradually moved across the campus of the University College of Aberystwyth, from the department of geology to that of zoology and then to geography and anthropology. At the University of Manchester, a chair of social studies was created for the former head of the department of physical chemistry, Michael Polanyi, now best

remembered

as a philosopher.

Dividing Knowledges

More

recently, in the

USA,Jared Diamond, whose

ornithology, linguistics and history,

moved from

183

interests include

a chair in physiology

geography while remaining at UCLA. Examples such as these are vivid reminders of the complexity of the intellectual and

to a chair in

worlds as well as the capacity of some individuals to resist powerful trends. Let us hope that Diamond is not the last of the social

dinosaurs, and that

some of

the recently founded interdisciplinary

habitats discussed earlier will continue to

welcome

this

breed of

not only in medicine that general practitioners play an important role. In an age of specialization, generalists are needed

scholar.

It is

more than ever before - not only

for synthesis, to paint the big

takes a polymath to 'mind the draw attention to the knowledges that may otherwise disappear into the spaces between disciplines, as they are currently defined and organized. picture, but also for analysis, since

gap' and

it

Part

A

III

Social History in

Three Dimensions

This final section of the

book

consists of three chapters designed to

pull together different thematic strands,

discussed as well as adding

new

drawing on examples already

ones. These chapters are designed to

provoke reflection on themes discussed earlier in the book from three points of view, which might be described as the three essential dimensions of enquiry into collective social

and the chronological.

human

activities: the

geographical, the

Geographies of Knowledge

One

of the major differences between the traditional sociology of

knowledge

as practised in the early twentieth century

and what might

be called the new of the latter with space. Despite Mannheim's famous contrast between French and German styles of thought around the year 1800, the old sociology of knowledge, strong on history, was weak on geography. However, the so-called spatial turn of the later twentieth century has made an impact in this field as elsewhere. Space was a recurrent theme in the work of Michel Foucault, for instance, especially micro2 spaces such as the clinic and the prison. Knowledge, once seen as objective and universal, has come to be regarded as situated in space as well as in society and in time. The question 'Where are you coming 3 from?' is asked more and more frequently in intellectual debates. This trend is most obvious in the history of science, where the problem of the transition from local to general knowledge, in particular that of basing generalizations on experiments conducted in parsociology of knowledge

lies in

the preoccupation

1

been the subject of a lively discussion. 4 However, similar points may be made and indeed have been made about other knowledges. Montaigne's famous remark about truth on one side of the Pyrenees becoming falsehood on the other had a parallel in the age of the Cold War, with the Iron Curtain in place of the mountains. Some anthropologists have discussed what happens to knowledge in 5 the course of the transition from the field to the book. Some sociologists have accused their colleagues of basing generalizations about 'Society', with a capital S, on the experience of Western Europe and

ticular places, has

the

USA, omitting

the equally relevant experiences of inhabitants of Eastern Europe, the tropics and elsewhere. 6

1

88

A

Social History in

Three Dimensions

by an Indian scholar recommended abandoning the attempt to view developments in other parts of the world as necessarily follow7 ing European trends. Michel de Certeau famously asked historians where they were speaking from. He was referring to the general situatedness of historical knowledge in a system of 'socio-economic, political and cultural production', but Certeau, like Foucault, had a

As

for history, a recent study

'provincializing Europe', in the sense of

8

sharp sense of geography, especially at the micro-level. The degree to which scholars from different places can escape local prejudices, especially when they are writing about people from

another part of the globe, remains a matter of debate, a debate fuelled if not sparked by Edward Said's essay Orientalism (1978). Said argued that what he called the western 'discourse' about the East, including texts by both scholars and travellers, employed simplistic and pejorative stereotypes of 'orientals' as backward, degenerate, passive and licentious. He also claimed that this discourse was an instrument of imperialism. Critics have accused Said of failing to make distinctions between kinds of western commentator, reifying and homogenizing western discourse just as he accused westerners of reifying and homogenizing the 'Orient'. 9 The debate continues. However, the centrality of place in both the production and the consumption of knowledge, even scientific knowledge, has become increasingly difficult to

deny.

Micro-spaces

A

micro-space from this point of view is Foucault's presented as 'a place of formation and transmis10 sion of knowledge'. Following this model, libraries, museums, colclassic study of

essay on the

clinic,

and especially laboratories have been analysed from this point of view. 11 Moving up the scale towards larger units, a university campus is an obvious site for studies in the geography of knowledge. For example, when laboratories became bigger, and for this reason had to move away from the centre of the university, this isolation made the scientists more inward-looking, since they only had one another to talk to, reinforcing specialization. On the other hand, in the early 1960s, the arrangement of offices in the Arts Building at the new University of Sussex supported the interdisciplinary aims of the university, juxtaposing teachers in different subjects and so encouraging them to talk to one another. It has been argued that at Cambridge the decentralized collegiate structure 'impeded the growth of the leges, botanical gardens, observatories

Geographies of Knowledge

i

tSg

12

experimental sciences', which required expensive laboratories. The cramped conditions for scientific research at traditional universities have also been noted, in physiology at Edinburgh in the early twen13 tieth century, for example. The struggle for space on the campus reveals academic attitudes to different kinds of knowledge, as two studies of the University of Glasgow in the nineteenth century have suggested in different ways. When a chair in engineering was founded in 1840, the new professor was treated as a kind of trespasser and allowed to use a classroom in the department of chemistry only on condition that he did not 'interfere with the convenience' of the head of department. On the other hand, his colleague in 'natural philosophy', appointed in 1846, was able to extend his territory at the expense of his neigh14 bours. This contrast might be explained in terms of the greater or lesser tactical skills of the two professors, but it is hard to resist the impression that not only the professor but the new subject of engineering, associated with low-status manual skills, was regarded as an interloper.

A

Moving up the scale once more, we reach cities. recent call for an 'urban history of science' might well be extended to take in knowledge more generally. 15 In some cases at least, it is clear enough that some features of a particular city encouraged the development of a particular discipline or a distinctive approach to that discipline. An obvious example is that of sociology at the University of Chicago at the end of the nineteenth century, more especially the rise of the socalled Chicago School in the 1920s. The sociologists at Chicago at that time, led by Robert Park, were pioneers in fleldwork, investigating particular zones of the rapidly growing city such as the 'Gold Coast', particular institutions such as the dance halls, and particular social groups such as hobos. Their interest in what they called the different 'ecologies' of the city was related to the reform policies and plans of City Hall at that time.

16

Again, as historians of early modern science have noted, cities encourage a certain form of intellectual sociability. The concentration of people who share a certain interest is great enough in a city to allow the everyday exchange of ideas and information in bookshops, clubs, coffeehouses and taverns, an exchange of great importance for both the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. 17 This form of sociability, whether spontaneous or planned, continued into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. To take an example almost at random, a discussion group on the philosophy of science that included Otto Neurath used to meet in a cafe in Vienna on Thursday evenings before the First World War. 18

190

A

Social History in

Three Dimensions

What made

certain cities particularly important as centres of our period was the concentration of learned institutions, often within easy walking distance of one another. In the USA, such institutions remained divided between Washington and New York, as they did in Russia between Moscow and St Petersburg. In Paris and London, on the other hand, the density of institutions provided scholars in different fields with opportunities to meet and exchange information and ideas. As the German naturalist Lorenz Oken remarked in 1822 with some envy, 'In France most of the scientists live together in Paris ... in England, the same applies to London ... we do not have a Paris or London in Germany.' Berlin would come to fill this gap. The city acquired a university and a natural history museum (1810), followed by a school of engi-

knowledge

in

neering (1816), a technical school (1821) and a museum of antiquities (1824). Berlin was also the seat of a number of learned societies, among them the Berlinische Gesellschaft fiir deutsche Sprache und

Altertumskunde (1815) and the Verein der Geographen (1828). Following German unification the city also acquired a museum of anthropology {Museum fur Volkerkunde, 1873), an institute for research in physics (Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt, 1887) and an Institute for Infectious Diseases (Preufiische Institut fiir Infektionskrankheiten, 1891). The city became

known as 'Elektropolis',

depended on research: knowledge production translated almost immediately the centre of the rapidly growing electrical industry, which into industrial production.

19

Berlin's impressive cluster of knowledge institutions

by

Paris. In 1800, Paris

was surpassed

already possessed the Bibliotheque royale, the

Observatory, the Louvre (a palace that opened to the public as a after the French Revolution), the Musee national d'histoire naturelle (formerly the Royal Gardens), the College de France and three new institutions, the Ecole poly technique, Ecole normale and

museum

Institut national des sciences et des arts (incorporating the old Academy

of Sciences). In the course of the nineteenth century, additions to this

included the Ecole superieure de commerce (1819), the (1820), the Ecole des chartes (1821), the Ecole centrale des arts et manufactures (1829), the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes (1869) and the Ecole libre des sciences politiques (1872), while the famous reading-room of the Bibliotheque nationale cluster

Academie nationale de medecine

opened

Besides these public institutions, around 120 learned in the capital by 1885, concentrated on the left bank of the Seine. 20 The world fairs, or expositions universelles, of 1878, 1889 and 1900 not only spread knowledge among the public in 1868.

societies

were based

1

Geographies of Knowledge

who

visited

them but

also brought scholars in a

number

1

9

of disciplines

to Paris for international conferences (below, p. 212).

Nineteenth-century Paris was rivalled if not surpassed by London. Before the year 1800 London was already the seat of the Royal Society, the Greenwich Observatory, the Royal Library and the newly founded Royal Institution, which played an important part in the popularization of science, as we have seen. The city acquired new knowledge institutions at a vertiginous rate from the 1820s onwards: the British Museum (1823), rapidly followed by the National Gallery and the Mechanics Institution (both 1824), University College (1826) and King's College (1829). At a less rapid rhythm there followed the Polytechnic Institution (1838) and St Mary's Hospital Medical School and the Royal College of Chemistry (both 1845). The 1850s saw another wave of foundations, including the Royal School of Mines (1851) and the South Kensington Museum (1857) as

Reading Room at the British Museum, just books there. Yet another wave followed in the 1880s, with the Natural History Museum and the Royal College of Science (both 1881), the City and Guilds College (1884) and the Science Museum (1885), while the London School of Economics opened its doors in 1895. As in the cases of Berlin and well as the opening of the in

time for Karl

Marx

to write his

Paris, the concentration of public institutions in the city attracted learned societies. Indeed, the same building, Somerset House, near King's College, housed the Royal Society, the Royal Academy and

the Society of Antiquaries until the mid-nineteenth century,

Academy and

the Antiquaries

moved

to Burlington

when

the

House and were

joined by the Linnaean and Chemical societies. It would of course be easy to extend these urban histories of knowledge into the twentieth century, but by this time the continuing growth of cities was leading to opposite results, a dispersal rather than a concentration of institutions. Centrality had a negative as well as a positive side. Urban traffic, especially electric trams, played havoc with measurement in laboratories. The pollution of the air made astronomy increasingly difficult, so that the Berlin Observatory moved out to Babelsberg in 1913 and the Royal Observatory from Greenwich to Herstmonceaux in rural Sussex.

Conversely, the advantages for scholars of a peripheral position

became increasingly apparent. Stalin had ordered the Soviet Academy of Sciences to lance. In 1965,

to Moscow in order to facilitate political surveilhowever, a new division of the Academy was opened

move

Akademgorodok

in Siberia. The fact that discussion there was relamight be explained not only by the moment, the era of 21 de-Stalinization, but also by the remoteness of the location. at

tively free

192

A

Social History in

Nationalizing

Three Dimensions

Knowledge

once more, we reach the nation, including older nation-states, such as France and Sweden; new nation-states, such as Italy and Germany, united in 1861 and 1871 respectively; and cultural nations without states of their own, such as Poland between 1795 and 1919 and Hungary before 1919. A number of scholars have pointed to the existence of national styles in science and other forms of knowledge, from anthropology to spying. These styles - French theory or British empiricism, for 22 instance - may not be conscious. What will be discussed here, on the other hand, is a conscious movement that might be described as the 'nationalization' of knowledge. Scholars came to be regarded as 'representatives of their respective countries', recruited, as Helmholtz put 23 it, into 'an organized army labouring on behalf of the whole nation'. The nationalization of knowledge might even be described on occasion as the continuation of politics by other means. Among the possible examples of this trend, one might start with history itself, since research, teaching and writing was conducted 24 increasingly in a national framework. Among the most important and the most widely read histories produced at this time were histories of nations and peoples (the Folk, the ndrod, etc.): Erik Geijer on the Swedes, Frantisek Palacky on the Czechs, Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos on the Greeks, Petrus Blok on the Dutch, and so on. In France in 1833, Frangois Guizot, a historian who held the post of minister of education, founded a society that would promote the study of national history, the Societe de I histoire de France. At about this time a visiting French scientist asked the Chilean minister of education whether the history of Chile was worth writing. This rather

Moving up the

scale

tactless question received a forthright answer: 'a national necessity'

{'una necessidad national').

25

In Brazil in 1840, the Historical Institute offered a prize for the best plan for writing the nation's history (the

was won by a German scholar). In Belgium, prizes for national were awarded, the first being won in 1851. National history was increasingly taught in schools as part of

prize

history

nation-building, aiming, for instance, to turn peasants with local identities

into 'Frenchmen'.

26

Universities

moved

in a similar direction. In

Leiden, for example, a new chair in 'the history of the fatherland' (vaderlandse geschiedenis) was founded in 1860. In Oxford, a 'School of Modern History' was founded in 1872, focused in practice on the study of English history from the Middle Ages onwards.

Geographies of Knowledge

1

93

National heroes were officially celebrated, including heroes of knowledge such as Linnaeus in Sweden. A statue of Linnaeus was erected in Uppsala in 1829, his birthplace was turned into a museum in 1866, and the bicentenary of his birth was celebrated in 1907. In funded by the state, made the Italy a series of 'national editions works of national heroes of knowledge more accessible, beginning with Galileo and moving on to Leonardo da Vinci and the physicist 1

,

Alessandro Volta. The study of geography was

encouraged for national reasons. It was taught in Italian schools after 1860 to encourage the love of the nation. In Germany, the same policy was advocated by the 27 professor of geography at Halle a little later, in 1882. It should be added that the 'nation' of the historians and the geographers not infrequently extended beyond its official borders. The study of vernacular literatures was institutionalized in universities in the nineteenth century, at the expense of the study of ancient Greek and Roman writers. A chair in German language and literature (Germanistik) was founded at the new University of Berlin in 1810, for instance, two generations before unification, while Wilhelm Grimm was a leading supporter of what was variously called deutschen or germanischen Altertumswissenschaft, 'German antiquities', a name that suggests that classical studies were taken as a model for the new discipline. 28 The first professor of English in England was appointed in 1827, at London University. When he was a professor at Jena, August Wilhelm Schlegel hoped to promote national consciousness by writing a history of German literature for use in schools, while officially

the English writer Charles Kingsley described English literature as 'the

autobiography of a nation'.

A

number

of famous histories of

national literatures were produced at this time,

among them Georg

Gervinus on German (1835-42), Francesco de Sanctis on Italian (1870-1, a decade after unification) and Gustave Lanson on France (1894).

29

In Scandinavia, the enthusiasm for philology in the age of the

Dane Rasmus Rask was linked to the search In a number of European nations, compiling

for national origins.

became was published between 1807 and 1814, a Czech dictionary between 1835 and 1839, and a Hungarian dictionary between 1862 and 1874. The editors collected information about the way in which the national language was used by speakers from different regions, but the publications themselves helped to standardize the language and so raise national a patriotic enterprise.

consciousness.

30

A

Polish dictionary

dictionaries

194

A

Social History in

Three Dimensions

and language, the material heritage of the nation The rise of concern with what we now call the national heritage dates from this period, essentially 31 from the French Revolution onwards. Public interest in archaeology, which was becoming an academic discipline at this time, was fuelled not only by the hope that excavations in the Mediterranean world would shed light on Homer and the Bible but also by national pride. Like

its

literature

was regarded

as teaching patriotism.

In 1826, for instance, the all antiquities'.

32

culture, described

local

Britain, archaeologists in the 1840s.

Greek Assembly resolved 'to declare national

Jens Worsaae, Danish archaeologist and minister of antiquities

began

as

'national

memorials'.

to use the phrase 'national

33

In

monuments'

The German scholar Gustaf Klemm believed that a 'the safest way to patriotism'. The first

knowledge of prehistory was

professor of archaeology at the Charles University in Prague, Jan

Erazim Vocel, advocated what he called 'Czech national archaeol34 Needless to say, this national approach led to controversy. ogy'. For example, German and Polish archaeologists clashed over the question of the identity of early settlers between the Oder and the Vistula.

35

In the domain of folklore and ethnography, it was a similar story. Like archaeology, these disciplines evoked enthusiasm and attracted official support for national reasons, since peasants were often viewed

most authentic part of the nation. was established at the University of Helsinki in 1898, at a time when the country was still part of the Russian Empire. Oskar Kolberg's multi-volume ethnography of Poland has been described as an illustration of 'embeddedness ... in

by middle-class

intellectuals as the

In Finland, a chair of folklore

its assumptions about the boundaries of Poland. 36 In Ireland, the Gaelic League, which had been founded in 1893 primarily to arrest the decline of the Irish language, also encouraged the collection of folklore. The establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 was rapidly followed by the foundation

the politics of national society', notably in

of the Folklore of Ireland Society (1927) and, a 37 Folklore Commission.

little later,

the Irish

Before 1900, folklore was located in museums rather than in uniThe Nordiska Museet, Stockholm (1873), emphasized panScandinavian culture, while the open-air museum at Skansen (1893), displaying rural houses and furniture, has been described as providing a narrative of Sweden. 38 Museums and galleries, which are storehouses of knowledge, were often founded by the state in the nineteenth century, and their names suggest that nation-building or national pride underlay the projects. New foundations included the National Art Gallery at The Hague

versities.

Geographies of Knowledge

[95

Danish National Museum (1809), the National Museum, Prague (1819), the National Gallery, London (1824), and the 39 Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg (1852). Most of these initiatives came from governments, but private initiatives were also important, among them the Museum of National History at Hiller0d (1878), built at the expense of J. C. Jacobsen, the owner of Carlsberg breweries, perhaps in reaction to the defeat of Denmark by Prussia (1800), the

in 1864.

Nation-building projects also underlay the foundation of libraries

and archives. The French royal library became a national library in 1793. The Royal Library at The Hague was founded as a national library in 1798, followed by the Hungarian National Library (1803), the Spanish Biblioteca Nacional (1836, formerly royal), the Italian Biblioteca Nazionale (1861, the year of the unification of Italy) and the Bulgarian National Library (1879).

was built up by a emigre who was in charge of from the 1830s to the 1860s,

In Britain, oddly enough, the national library foreigner.

Antonio Panizzi, the

the library of the British

regarded

it

Italian

Museum

as a national institution, declaring that 'This emphatically

ought to be directed most particularly to British works and to works relating to the British Empire.' 'The Museum is the library of the English nation and there ought to be in that library every book that was printed either by Englishmen or in English or British library

related to England.'

As

40

were established in 1800, the Norwegian Riksarkivet in 1817, the English Public Record Office in 1838. A major cultural project of the time was the publication of documents illustrating the history of the nation. The Monumenta germaniae historica, for instance, began publication in 1826, at the initiative of a Prussian minister, with the motto 'The Holy Love of the Fatherland Gives Encouragement [Sanctus amor patriae dat animum]\ The medieval laws of Norway were published from 1846 onwards, a project approved by the Parliament (Storting). The English Rolls Series and the Monumenta hungariae historia both began publication in 1857. Huge dictionaries of national biography were compiled in the nineteenth century. Their dates of publication, one following hard on for archives, the French Archives nationales

The Dutch dictionary (Biographisch Woordenboek der Nederlanden), in twenty volumes, began to appear in 1852; the Austrian dictionary

the heels of another, give a strong impression of national rivalry.

(Biografisches Lexikon des Kaisertums Oesterreich), in fifty-nine volumes, in 1856; the Belgian dictionary, Biographie nationale, in twenty-seven volumes, in 1866; the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie,

196 in

A

Social History in

fifty-six

Biography,

volumes, in

in

Three Dimensions 1875; the English Dictionary of National

sixty-three volumes, in

1885; the

Danish dictionary

nineteen volumes, in 1887; and the (Russky Biograficheski Slovar) in 1896. Russian dictionary These compilations were less politically neutral than they may

(Dansk Biografisk Lexicon),

in

seem. For example, some of the same individuals were claimed by different nations. Returning to the clashes between German and Polish scholars, it was inevitable that 'Copernicus, Nikolaus' would figure in the German dictionary and 'Kopernik, Mikolaj' in the Polish - though the entry in the Allgemeine deutsche Biographie, to the author's credit, points out that Copernicus was of mixed parentage (Polish father, German mother) and also that his achievement belonged to the world rather than to any nation. General encyclopaedias also acquired a national colouring. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, a Scottish initiative, goes back to 1768, the German Brockhaus to 1796, the Encyclopedia Americana to 1829, the French Grand dictionnaire universe I (known after its editor as 'Larousse') to 1864, the Dutch Winkler-Prins to 1870, the Spanish Enciclopedia universal ilustrada to 1905, the Yugoslav Narodna Enciklopedija to 1924, the Greek Megale Ellenike Enkykopaideia to 1926. The famous eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was described in a London periodical as 'a great glory to our nation', despite the well-publicized participation of distinguished foreigners

such as the Danish physicist Niels-Bohr. Encyclopaedias became one of the many arenas in which nations competed. It was recently remarked that 'Each "civilized nation" was expected to produce one in order to be taken seriously by its neigh41 bours and the European powers.' The point might be illustrated from the story of the Enciclopedia italiana, which began relatively late, in 1929. few years earlier, in 1920, an Italian ex-minister had

A

written of the need 'to give

Italy,

which lacks

it,

a national encyclo-

paedia like France, England, Germany and even Spain'. 42 The Enciclopedia italiana was designed among other things to make publicity if not propaganda for all things Italian. The entry on 'Garibaldi', for instance, takes up seventeen columns, while the corresponding entries in Brockhaus and Larousse use no more than one. The entry on 'Milano' continues for fifty-nine columns, compared to seven apiece in Larousse and Brockhaus.

Archaeology was also affected by national rivalry. The French and competed in the middle of the nineteenth century to discover the remains of Assyrian culture. Henry Rawlinson, a soldier turned excavator, asked Austen Layard, a diplomat-archaeologist, to arouse the interest of Stratford Canning, the ambassador to the the British

Geographies of Knowledge

197

court, because it pains me grievously to see the French monopolize the field.' Layard wrote to Canning that 'The national honour' was 'concerned in competing with the French in deciphering the cuneiform inscriptions/ On the other side, the French archaeologist Victor Place declared that 'we must not let ourselves be outdis43 tanced by England on a road which we ourselves have opened'. An archaeological expedition to Central Asia was recommended to the German minister of culture in 1904 in the following terms: 'we Germans must use all our powers to secure for ourselves a rightful place in this sun* - thus echoing the famous phrase from a speech by 44 the Kaiser that had been delivered three years earlier. Even the natural sciences were affected by national consciousness and national rivalries. In the 1860s, the French minister of education, Victor Duruy, described the rise of German scientists as 'a threat to 45 French science'. The first geological survey funded by the state, in the 1830s, took place in France and was emulated by other countries. The establishment of natural history museums was part of nationbuilding. The foundation of the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural in Santiago, Chile (1822), for instance, was quickly followed by that 46 of the Museo de Historia Natural (1823) in Bogota. The Swedish Museum of Geology 'contained mostly Swedish minerals'. 47 Rivalry extended to the heavens. William Herschel's discovery of the planet Uranus was seen at the time as a victory of English astronomy over its French competitors (although Herschel was a German immigrant). The president of the Royal Society, Joseph Banks, wrote to Herschel that the new planet should be named quickly, 'or our nimble neighbours, the French, will certainly save us the trouble of

Ottoman

baptizing

48 it'.

after national

The naming of

discoveries in the heavens, as

symbols such as George

III (after

whom

on

earth,

the planet

Uranus was originally christened) was a common practice. In the 1920s, the Dutch astronomer Willem Hendrik van den Bos described what he called 'a mad scramble for indiscriminate double-star discovSouthern Hemisphere, the intellectual equivalent of the 49 The Soviet-American rivalry in space exploration in the age of Sputnik (1957) and NASA (1958) may be the most famous, but it was certainly not the first example of this form of competition (below, p. 230). eries' in the

earlier 'scramble for Africa'.

The Commonwealth In the early

modern

of Learning period, the scholarly world

was sometimes

represented as a country, the commonwealth of learning or 'republic

A

198 of

Social History in

letters'

(republique

Three Dimensions des

lettres,

Gelehrtenrepublik,

etc.).

This

commonwealth was essentially an imagined community, sometimes described by means of an extended political metaphor in which the republic had a senate, laws, and so on. The political metaphor did have some teeth, though, since customs and institutions existed that facilitated scholarly collaboration or at least

cooperation

at a dis-

These customs and institutions included writing letters in Latin that broke through the barriers of the European vernaculars, making gifts of publications and information, and visiting fellow scholars when on one's travels. Most studies of this community, real or imagined, come to an end either around 1750, with the Encyclopedic, or in 1789, or at the latest around 1800. There are of course some good reasons, if not sufficient reasons, for this collective decision on the part of the community of historians - two main reasons, which might be summed up in as many words: specialization and nationalism. A monograph on the formatance.

tion of the German chemical community in the late eighteenth century neatly illustrates both points, the rise of a sense of identity defined against other disciplines and other nations - especially the

French.

50

The rise of specialization was discussed in the last chapter. The harmony of the commonwealth of learning was also threatened not only by wars but more insidiously by the shift from cosmopolitanism to nationalism, or, as Friedrich Meinecke famously put it, from Weltbilrgertum to Nationalstaat.

The Napoleonic wars had

on scholarship, disThe famous remark, made

a negative impact

rupting international communication.

around the year 1803 by an English medical scientist, that 'The sciences are never at war', was going out of date at the very moment 51 that it was made. After the wars were over, however, national rivalries did not disappear. Indeed, they gradually made a bigger and bigger impact on scholarship, as we have seen. The bigger nations (their rulers

and some of

their scholars) aspired to establish

nies over the world of learning, to

make themselves

central

hegemoand their

rivals peripheral.

Centres and Peripheries

An

important aspect of the geography of knowledge is the contrast between centres and peripheries. Unlike national frontiers, these centres and peripheries may be difficult to define - indeed, they are sometimes more subjective than objective. All the same, location on

Geographies of Knowledge

on

a periphery, together with the sense of being located

[99

a periphery,

has important cultural consequences. At the national level, the contrast between the metropolis and the provinces has often been an important one, especially, perhaps, in this period, which saw the rapid growth of cities such as

London,

Paris,

New

York, each with a network of libraries, museums, academies, universities and other institutions of learning, which gave Berlin and

scholars

who

much more immediate

lived in these cities a

access to

knowledge than their colleagues elsewhere. 'London's dominance of the scientific life of Britain', for example, was increasing between 1800 and 1850 with the concentration of knowledge institutions in the capital that was noted above. Contemporaries were impressed: for example, a German scholar, August Petermann, who came to London in 1847, described the city as the 'central point of geographical knowledge'.

may be made about

Paris

and

its

52

A

similar point

rapid accumulation of institutions

of learning from the French Revolution onwards. If

scholars in the metropolis took their privileged position for

it and for this very reason they provide more evidence about it. Two quotations from early nineteenth-century British geologists illustrate this point. Robert Bakewell, who came from Nottingham, complained that 'There is a certain prejudice among the members of the Scientific Societies in London and Paris, which makes them unwilling to believe that persons residing in provincial towns or the country can do anything important for science', while Charles Lyell, who came from Scotland, noted 'the jealous unwillingness which most metropolitan monopolists in Science, both in France and here, exhibit towards all such as happen 53 not to breathe their own exclusive atmosphere'. Jealousy apart, scholars at the centre did not always know what was happening elsewhere. famous example is that of Gregor Mendel and his now famous work on heredity. Mendel was peripheral socially, as a monk, and also geographically, living as he did in a provincial town in the Habsburg Empire (Brunn, now Brno in the Czech Republic) and publishing his discoveries in 1865 in the proceedings of the local society for natural history. His work took about thirty years to come to the attention of geneticists elsewhere, making him posthumously famous as a pioneer of what became the science of

granted, provincials often resented

A

genetics.

At

54

the international level, the period 1750-2000 witnessed succes-

hegemonies in the domain of knowledge, beginning with France, 'the centre of the scientific world' until 1830 or 1840. 55 sive national

A

number

of

German

chemists

who

later

became famous began

their

A

200

Social History in

Three Dimensions

careers by studying in Paris, notably Justus Liebig in the 1820s and Robert Bunsen in 1832. Orientalists from Germany and Sweden arrived in Paris to study with Silvestre de Sacy. Brazilian students went to Montpellier to study medicine.The ruler of Egypt, Muhammad Ali, sent forty-five students to

were taken

France

in 1826.

French institutions

Musee d'histoire naturelle, for instance, was The Berlin Geographical Society (1828) fol-

as models. The

imitated in Gottingen.

56

lowed the model of the Societe de geographie de Paris (1821), the Royal Asiatic Society of London (1823) that of the Societe asiatique, founded two years earlier, and the Instituto Historico e Geogrdfico Brasileiro (1838) that of the Institut historique.

After 1840, the French model of learning continued to be influensome parts of the world, and Paris a central place. The world fairs of 1889 and 1900, for example, made the city the location for a number of international scholarly congresses, of archaeology, chemistry, dermatology, physiology and psychology in the first case and of botany, chemistry, geology, mathematics, meteorology, physics and psychology in the second. As late as 1934, when the University of Sao Paulo was founded, a number of professors were recruited from France, some of them with brilliant careers ahead of them: the sociologist Roger Bastide, for instance, the historian Fernand Braudel and the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss. Between 1840 and 1914, however, hegemony in Wissenschaft belonged to the Germans. The French historian Ferdinand Lot, noted 57 Envy of in 1892 'the learned hegemony of Germany in all fields'. German resources for study was often expressed by foreigners. The zoologist Ray Lankester, for example, complained in 1883 that British universities 'are, with respect to the amount of money which is expended on them, the number of their teaching staff and the efficiency of their laboratories, inferior not merely to the smallest German university, but inferior to many of the technical schools of tial in

that country'.

One major

58

was the spread of German as a learned by Scandinavian, Russian or Japanese scholars in order to reach a wider public. 59 Another sign was the flocking to German universities of foreign students, some of whom became distinguished academics in their own countries. The most obvious example is that of the USA, where the rise of the research university occurred in just this period. The American philosopher Josiah Royce, who had himself studied with Wilhelm Wundt in Leipzig in the 1870s, wrote of 'a generation that dreamed of nothing lingua franca,

but the gists

sign of change

employed

German

in articles written

University'. Besides chemists, geologists, physiolo-

and astronomers, the psychologist William James, the

political

Geographies of Knowledge

201

John Burgess and the sociologist Albion Small all studied in Germany. In 1895-6, over 500 Americans matriculated at German

scientist

universities/" It is unlikely that these numbers were matched by students from any country in Europe, but the French students included Emile Durkheim; the Belgians, the historian Henri Pirenne; the Dutch, Johan Huizinga (at that time a student of languages); the Swiss, the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure; and the Russians, the geographer Pyotr Semenov. As for the British, the chemist William Perkin studied in Munich, while Peter Chalmers Mitchell declared that, when he was young in the late nineteenth century, 'to read German and to know Germans were necessary parts of education and research in zoology'. 61

Academic institutions in many countries followed German models. The seminar, for instance, was introduced into France, England, Italy and the USA, generally by scholars who had studied in Germany. In the USA, the new university of Johns Hopkins, nicknamed 'Gottingen at Baltimore', was among the first to follow the German model. Daniel Gilman, the

first

president of the university, introduced the

PhD and wanted to introduce 'some of the features of

.

.

.

the

German

62

system of priv at- do cents'. In Argentina, German scientists were welcomed, while in 1908 the dean of the University of La Plata commissioned one of the professors, Ernesto Quesada, who had studied at Leipzig and Berlin, to make a tour of German universities and report on the way in which history was taught there. 63

The

British Association for the

Advancement

of Science (1831) followed the example of the Gesellschaft deutschen Naturforscher (1828). Lord Acton, himself half German, modelled the English

Review on the Historische Zeitschrift. In France, the foundation of the Ecole pratique des hautes etudes (1869) followed a factfinding mission to Germany on behalf of the minister of education. Historical

In similar fashion, in 1897, a British mission to

Germany

studied 'the

recent progress of technical education in that country', leading to the

foundation ten years later of Imperial College of Science and Technology. Doctorates in science and literature were introduced in the University of London in the mid-nineteenth century, while the first

PhD

Oxford

at

Cambridge was taken

as late as 1917.

in

'Decades after

1882 and the

its

first

DPhil. in

introduction, the degree of

doctor of philosophy (D. Phil.) was still viewed by many arts dons as 64 a distasteful medium of dry Teutonic pedantry.' The German model did not appeal to everyone. It is less easy to say which country, if any, exercised hegemony in the field of knowledge between 1914 and 1945: it might be more exact to speak of polycentrism, with France, Britain and other countries

202

A

Social History in

Three Dimensions

dominating particular academic fields or geographical areas. After the Second World War, it was the turn of the USA and the USSR, and more recently of the USA alone, in the social as well as the natural sciences. After 1939, for instance, the centre of psychoanalysis, like so many of the analysts themselves, was displaced from Central Europe to the United States. American sociology dominated the discipline in the 1950s and 1960s in particular. Students of politics have written of the 'Americanization' of political science after 1945, 65 from Canada to Finland. In the late 1960s, an Austrian-born psychologist could claim that 'America has become the world center of 66 psychoanalysis, as it is the world center of psychology.' Regions too have their own centres and peripheries, changing over time, sometimes as a result of shifts in the communication system. The rise of Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile as centres of knowledge after 1800, for instance, occurred at a time when the Atlantic 67 route replaced the Pacific route from Europe to South America. From the point of view of the 'subaltern' or peripheral countries, these hegemonies have serious disadvantages. The sociologist Robert Merton once described what he called the 'Matthew Effect' (quoting the Gospel of St Matthew, 'to him who hath shall be given'), according to which well-known scientists often receive the credit for discoveries made by less famous figures. 68 Merton's law might be given a geographical twist and reformulated to suggest that scholars from small countries receive less credit than scholars from big countries. Alexander von Humboldt was a scholar from the centre who studied the periphery, in his case South America, and so made his reputation in Paris and Berlin. The South American astronomer and naturalist Francisco Jose de Caldas studied some of the same phenomena as Humboldt, whom he knew, but he has become little more than a footnote in the history of science. 69 As the leading French historian Fernand Braudel once remarked, his Polish colleague Witold Kula was 'more intelligent', but had access only to the Polish 'loudspeaker', while Braudel himself had the advantage of 70 the French loudspeaker. It was, for instance, the Danish philologist Rasmus Rask who first formulated what is known as 'Grimm's Law' (above, p. 82), but it was named after the German Jacob Grimm. The Swedish diplomat and orientalist Johan David Akerblad made an important contribution to the decipherment of hieroglyphs, like the Dane Niels Westergaard and the Norwegian Christian Lassen in the case of cuneiform, but the names remembered in these fields, as we have seen, are those of the Frenchman Champollion and the Englishman Rawlinson. Japan is not a small country, but it experienced similar discrimination, perhaps

Geographies of Knowledge because

its

203

known to lew Emil von Behring,

discoveries were locked up in a language

westerners. In any case,

it

was

a

German

scientist,

who

received the Nobel Prize in 1901 for the discovery of natural immunity, although he had carried out this work jointly with a 71

Japanese colleague, Shibasaburo Kitasato. Merton's law might be extended in two directions. At the macrolevel, the contributions to knowledge made by generations of scholars outside the West received insufficient acknowledgement. It has been argued, for instance, that important parts of what has been passed off as European, or Western, science were actually made elsewhere'.

72

A

similar situation prevails at the micro-level: in physics,

one study found that members of prestigious departments cite other members of prestigious departments more than they cite members of non-prestigious departments.

73

A position at the centre may be subject to costs as well as benefits. For example, the decline of French scientific hegemony has been explained by the centralization of the French academic system, as compared with

its

rivals in

Germany, Britain and the USA. Lack

of competition led to inflexibility and resistance to innovation.

74

Conversely, the peripheries of fields of knowledge should not be

regarded in a purely negative way. They are sometimes the locus of alternative

knowledges or of innovation. In Europe

teenth century, for instance,

when

in the late eigh-

the production of books in France

was controlled by both ecclesiastical and secular censors, subversive books were produced beyond the frontiers of the kingdom, in 75 Switzerland and the Netherlands, and smuggled into the country. In early twentieth-century France, despite the domination of the academic system by Paris, Bordeaux and Strasbourg became centres of innovation, the first in sociology and the second in history. The most spectacular examples of innovation on the periphery come from the frontiers between the West and other parts of the world. It is these regions that have been subject to what has been called 'academic dependency', 'scientific imperialism' or 'scientific

colonialism', defined as 'a process

whereby the center of gravity

the acquisition of knowledge about the nation

nation

A

is

for

located outside the

76

itself'.

parallel has often

been drawn between economic history and raw materials the metropolis. Theory is produced in the

the history of knowledge, with the periphery exporting that are processed in

metropolis and applied elsewhere. Social theory, for example, has generally been produced in 'the Global North', especially Western

Europe and the USA. 77 As Walter Mignolo, a critic from Argentina, puts it, with some exaggeration, scholars assume

204

A

Social History in

Three Dimensions

if you 'come' from Latin America you have to 'talk about' Latin America; that in such a case you have to be a token of your culture. Such expectation will not arise if the author 'comes' from Germany, France, England or the US. As we know: the first world has knowledge, the third world has culture; Native Americans have wisdom, Anglo 7* Americans have science.

that

on these frontiers, sometimes described as 'contact zones', knowledge has often flowed in both directions, leading on occasion to new discoveries. Take the case of the late eighteenth-century discovery that Greek and Latin descended from Sanskrit. Western scholars had not been aware of this descent because they did not know Sanskrit, and Indian scholars because they did not know Latin and In fact,

Greek, but, when William Jones studied Sanskrit with local 'pundits', the similarities between the three ancient languages became obvious. More generally, encounters between westerners and local knowledgeable people led to dialogues that resulted in 'hybrid' and 'trans79 lated' knowledges. Major examples of such translated knowledges are Hinduism, effectively discovered by westerners in the later eighteenth century, and Buddhism, discovered a generation or so later. By the late Victorian period there was 'an enormous upsurge of interest' in Buddhism in Britain, leading to a few conversions. What was 'discovered', though, was a collection cutbeliefs and practices that western scholars arranged or translated into an intellectual system that indigenous believers might not have recognized. In this sense Buddhism may be viewed as a western creation. 80 further stage in the translation of eastern ideas into western ones may be illustrated by the Russian Helena Blavatsky, who declared herself to be a Buddhist but is better seen as the founder of a new religion, Theosophy, that drew on a number of sources, from Neoplatonism to Hinduism, as well as on Buddhism. In similar fashion Rudolf Steiner's version of Theosophy, renamed Anthroposophy,

A

drew on German traditions, from Goethe 81 'the wisdom of the East'.

to Nietzsche, as well as

on

Voices from the Edge

To

identify non-western contributions to knowledge, it is often necessary to read western sources against the grain, looking for brief and

marginal acknowledgements. These sources have permitted the recovery of examples such as the following. Cook was guided through the Pacific by the Polynesian navigator Tupaia, while Lewis and Clark

Geographies of Knowledge

205

were guided through the Western United States by Sacajawea, a Shoshone woman married to a Frenchman. On his expedition to Malaya the naturalist Alfred Wallace was assisted by his 'boy' or 82 servant Ali, who helped find and identify insects and plants. The British orientalist Aurel Stein did not discover the contents of the

famous Dunhuang caves, but was informed about them by the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu, who sold him (and his French rival Paul Pelliot)

some of was

the manuscripts.

led to the Inca site of

The American

Machu

historian

Hiram Bingham

Picchu by a local farmer, Melchor

Arteaga. It was not only in the task of 'discovery' that indigenous informants - some of them scholars themselves - were indispensable. As we have seen, the British orientalist William Jones learned from local scholars, notably Tarkapanchanan, just as the missionary-sinologist James Legge learned from his assistant Wang Dao in his study of the Chinese classics. 83 In his work on the manners and customs of the Egyptians (above, p. 70), Edward Lane was assisted by an Egyptian friend, Sheikh Ahmed. The anthropologist Franz Boas gained much of his information about the Kwakiutl, in Northwest Canada, from his interpreter, George Hunt (Hunt's father was English, his mother Tlingit, while he entered Kwakiutl culture by marriage). Another anthropologist, Marcel Griaule, declared openly that much of his knowledge of the Dogon, a West African people, came from one of them, the old blind hunter Ogotemmeli. All these individuals may be described as cultural brokers, a group that is only now beginning to 84 be studied. Until relatively recently, western historians paid little attention to

alternative visions of the past, especially the 'vision of the vanquished', to use the phrase of the

Mexican historian Miguel Leon-Portilla, who

published a collection of sources under that title in 1961 telling the story of the Spanish conquest from the Aztec side. In yet another instance of the

Matthew

book by

Effect, the phrase

is

now

best

known

as the

Nathan Wachtel, whose Vision des vaincus (1971) is concerned with colonial Peru. Wachtel was among the scholars who rediscovered the historian Guaman Poma, who came from the indigenous elite and, in a chronicle written in title

of a

a French historian,

1615 (but published only in 1936), presented a view of the history of Peru before and after the Spanish conquest that was quite different from that of his Spanish contemporaries. Rediscovering Poma has been described as 'an act of decolonization'. 85 The examples given so far concern indigenous knowledge that was incorporated into the western system, so many instances of what was recently described as 'border gnosis'. 86 In the twentieth century, before,

we

find important contributions to that system

if

not

which were

206

A

Social History in

made from

a periphery

Three Dimensions

by scholars playing the game, for the most

part at least, according to the western rules.

The most obvious instances come from science. In 1930, for example, the Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to an Indian based in Calcutta, C. V. Raman. In 1957 it was shared by two Chinese scientists, Chen Ning Yang and Tsung-dao Lee, both of them based in the USA. In 1983 it was won by Raman's nephew Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, who came from Lahore but worked in Chicago. In chemistry, in 1981, the Nobel Prize was shared by the Japanese Kenichi Fukui, who was based in Kyoto, and a Polish-American, Roald Hoffmann. In the case of historical writing, following the campaign to modernJapan initiated by the Meiji regime (established in 1868), scholars such as Fukuzawa Yukichi produced works that followed western models, in his case the histories of civilization by Francois Guizot and Henry Buckle. The Japanese History Bureau commissioned an exiled Hungarian diplomat to write a history of western historiography, while a follower of Ranke, the German Ludwig Riess, was appointed 87 the first professor of history at Tokyo University. Disciplinary societies were founded in the western manner: the Geographical Society of Tokyo (1879), the Anthropological Society of Tokyo (1884), the Japanese Historical Association (1889) and the Archaeological ize

Society (1895).

Although a dominant theme

iirthe history of

archaeology has been

the excavation of the past of non-western regions by teams led by

westerners such as Layard, local scholars gradually came to play a greater part. Early examples include the Japanese Hamada Kosaku, who had studied with Petrie, and the Mexican Manuel Gamio, who

had studied with Boas, both of whom were excavating in the 1910s, and the Chinese Li Ji, who had studied at Harvard and began exca88 vating in China in the 1920s. In the case of sociology and history, Fernando Ortiz and Gilberto Freyre offer examples of scholars who changed some of the rules of the game, developing approaches that drew on local experience and from which their European and North American contemporaries learned. Ortiz was a Cuban who studied in Italy before returning to his country and writing about it. He stressed the importance of cultural encounters, which he saw as two-way processes. For this reason, in

Cuban Counterpoint,

a study published in 1940, Ortiz coined the

term 'transculturation' (transculturacion) to replace the current term 'acculturation', focused on the influence of a dominant culture on a dominated one. The new term was quickly accepted at the centre, by Malinowski.

Geographies of Knowledge

207

As for Freyre, he was a Brazilian scholar who had studied in the United States, attending Boas's lectures at Columbia University. His three-volume socio-cultural history of Brazil ( 933-59) was extremely innovative in its day, as European scholars such as Fernand Braudel were quick to recognize. A sociologist as well as a historian, Freyre 1

would allow scholand the Indian Radhakemal Mukerjee, a pioneer of an ecological approach to sociology, to be heard in the West. However, Freyre remains best known for his stress on what he called the 'interpenetration' of cultures and his definition of Brazilian identity as the product of such an interpenetration, in which Portuguese colonizers, African slaves and the indigenous peoples all played a called for the 'tropicalization' of social theory that ars like himself

significant part.

89

A more recent example of innovation at the periphery national

originated in life in

is

the inter-

by scholars who the Third World while spending most of their working

movement

for 'postcolonial' studies, led

Europe or the USA: the

critic

Edward

Said, for instance,

who

described himself as perpetually 'out of place' between Palestine and the United States, or Gayatri Spivak (nee Chakravorty), a Bengali

who

world but

90

based in America. Spivak is associated with a group or school of historians engaged in what they call 'Subaltern Studies' and led by Ranajit Guha, a Bengali scholar who has also spent most of his life outside India. Focusing on Indian history in the last 200 years, the group offers a distinctive kind of history from below, examining what they call 'the politics of the people'. Their view that the 'subaltern' or dominated classes were capable of political action runs counter not only to the travels the

is

'colonial elitism' of British historians but also to

what Guha

'bourgeois-nationalist elitism' of other Indian historians.

91

calls the

The group

maintained a dialogue with 'postcolonialist' studies of literature, at least for a time, while its approach has inspired scholars in other parts 92 of the world, notably in Latin America. In short, frontier zones are the locus of cultural encounters, collisions and translations, often producing new knowledge and new ideas.

Such encounters,

movement

collisions

and translations also

result

from the

of people, of exiles and other migrants.

Migrants and Exiles Migrants

new

may be viewed

as peripheral people, out of place in their

habitat. Their position

is

often an uncomfortable one, partly

because they lack local knowledge.

On

the other hand, they bring

A

208 their

Social History in

Three Dimensions

own knowledges with them, including tacit and technical knowlmay be lacking in the place in which they are beginning a

edges that

new

has been argued that 'The transfer of really valuable country to country or from institution to institution from knowledge cannot be easily achieved by the transport of letters, journals and life.

books:

it

It

necessitates the physical

short, 'ideas

move around

movement

inside people'.

of

human

beings.' In

93

In 1752 the head of the French Bureau de commerce, Trudaine de Montigny, had already made a similar point: 'The arts never pass by writing from one country to another.' Why should this be the case? Trudaine's ally in a plan to bring skilled English craftsmen to France, the textile manufacturer John Holker, explained that 'Good information would make little impression on a workman.' What was needed in order 'to transfer skills from one country to another' was practical 94 example. In early modern Europe, three diasporas in particular had important intellectual consequences: that of Greek scholars from Byzantium to Italy in the fifteenth century, that of Italian Protestants to Britain

and the Netherlands

in the sixteenth century,

and that of French

Protestants to Britain, the Netherlands and Prussia in the seven-

teenth century.

The migration of scholars continued to be important in the period 1750-2000. Some of these movements can be explained in terms of

new environPetersburg attracted a number of expatriate scholars in the eighteenth century: the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler, for instance, the Swedish mineralogist Johan Ferber, the German naturalists Samuel Gmelin and Peter Pallas, and 'pull',

the attractive working conditions offered in the

ment. For example, the

the

German

historian

Europeans and Asians

Academy of St

August von Schlozer. The 'brain drain' of USA in the late twentieth century was

to the

not the first in history. In other cases, migrants were not pulled so much as pushed by the fear of persecution at home. Karl Marx is the most famous of a group of mid-nineteenth-century revolutionaries who chose exile. Conversely, the Russian Revolution of 1917, inspired by Marx, was followed by a diaspora of anti-Marxist scholars, among them the historians Mikhail Rostovtsev and George Vernadsky. However, these groups are dwarfed by the 'Great Exodus' of the 1930s, the flight of scholars, most of them Jewish and Germanspeaking, from Germany and Austria to Britain, the USA, Sweden (the philosopher Ernst Cassirer), Turkey (the literary critic Erich Auerbach), New Zealand (the philosopher Karl Popper) and 95 elsewhere. Two important German institutions migrated, one in

Geographies of Knowledge

209

and the other in cultural studies: the histitut fur Sozialforschung moved from Frankfurt to New York and the Kidturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg from Hamburg to % London, where it became the Warburg Institute. The diaspora of the 1930s also included refugees from Mussolini's Italy (the economist Piero Sraffa and the ancient historian Arnaldo Momigliano) and from Spain during the Civil War (3,000 doctors and lawyers and 150 the social sciences

97

academics). The contributions to knowledge made by the emigre scientists in particular have been the object of a number of studies and led to the

coinage of a new technical term, 'emigration-induced scientific change' (EISC). 98 There is also much to say about contributions to the humanities made by the migration. The tradition of medieval studies in Argentina, for instance, stems from the exile of the Spanish historian Claudio Sanchez- Albornoz, while Momigliano left his mark

on the study of ancient history

in Britain.

Focusing still more sharply, what follows will consider the intellectual consequences of the diaspora on Britain, with special reference to sociology and art history, two relatively new and small disciplines that allowed a few remarkable immigrants to make a contribution to knowledge quite disproportionate to their numbers. In the early 1930s, sociology occupied a very small place in the British academic world. There was a tradition of social surveys - in other words, empirical, pragmatic research on social conditions - but

no

tradition of theory.

1903, a chair (at the

A

Sociological Society had been founded in

London School

of Economics) in 1907 and a

journal in 1908, but the discipline remained an affair of amateurs. In

Oxford and Cambridge rejected the offer from the Rockefeller Foundation to fund social science. After 1933, however, the LSE offered a lectureship in sociology to Karl Mannheim and a the 1930s, both

Hermann Mannheim (the two men Other German sociologists found positions at the universities of Birmingham and Manchester, while the University College of Leicester appointed the Russian Ilya Neustadt as lecturer in sociology; at first he was teaching the subject on his own and then with another exile, the German Norbert Elias, as his colleague. A generation later, by the mid-1960s, there were about 180 stulectureship in criminology to

were not

related).

A number of British sociologists who became well known later, among them Bryan Wilson, John Goldthorpe and Anthony Giddens, were either junior colleagues or students of Elias and Neustadt. As for Karl Mannheim, he edited a series of books on sociology for Routledge, while his lectures inspired two students who became distinguished sociologists, Basil Bernstein and dents of sociology at Leicester.

210

Tom

A

Social History in

Three Dimensions

Bottomore, to take up the subject as a career. Another

Pole Stanislaw Andreski,

who came

exile, the

to Britain after the invasion of

country in 1939, founded the sociology department at the University of Reading, changing his name (from Andrzejewski) so that the English could pronounce it. A generation later, another his

Polish sociologist, tion while

Zygmunt Bauman, made

he was a professor

his international reputa-

at the University of Leeds,

having come

from a wave of anti-Semitism. It would be a mistake to paint too rosy a picture. Elias was fiftyseven before he was appointed to a permanent position. Mannheim felt that he was not taken seriously in his new home and complained about the problem of explaining the sociology of knowledge to the British." All the same, the contribution of the exiles was indispensto Britain in 1971 as a refugee

able in the institutionalization of sociology in Britain at this time as well as giving

it

a certain imprint

- making British sociologists more

aware of the relevance of history to their discipline, for instance. Like sociology, art history was a very small enterprise in Britain in the early 1930s. There was a tradition of connoisseurship, empirical and pragmatic, the equivalent for art history of the tradition of social surveys for sociology, but museums, galleries and art schools rather 100 than universities were the places where the subject was studied. The situation was very different from that in Germany and Austria, where art history was already a well-established discipline in universi101 ties by the middle of the nineteenth century. In the 1930s, change was just beginning. A chair in art history had been established at the Slade School of Art in 1922, while the Courtauld Institute was founded in 1932. Following Hitler's rise to power, the staff of the institute came to include the Central European exiles Frederick Antal, Ernst Gombrich, Otto Kurz, Otto Pacht and Johannes Wilde. Another art historian, Fritz Saxl, held a position at the Warburg Institute, which moved to London in 1933, while the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner held a fellowship at Birmingham University before becoming a lecturer and later the first professor of art history at Birkbeck College. From 1949 onwards, the Slade chair in art history was held by the refugee Rudolf Wittkower, followed by another, Leopold Ettlinger. A chair in art history at Oxford was founded in the mid-1950s especially for a third refugee, Edgar Wind. The relatively methodical and theoretical approach of the exiles met with resistance from some 'natives', who viewed it as 'Teutonic'. As Saxl remarked after arriving in his new home, 'Theories are abhorred by the English in general and by the learned in particu102 lar.' On the other hand, a few British scholars welcomed the new approaches, among them Kenneth Clark, who believed that the

1

Geographies of Knowledge

2

1

English tradition of connoisseurship was 'practically exhausted', and confessed that hearing a lecture by Aby Warburg had changed his life by shifting his interests from connoisseurship to iconography. The art historians Anthony Blunt and John Berger both testified to the

importance of Frederick Antal for their intellectual development, Gombrich had a similar effect upon Michael Baxandall. Academic sociology may be regarded as a translation of the pragmatic knowledge of society, while academic art history translated connoisseurship. The key figures in these 'translations' into English culture were the exiles, individuals who had themselves been 'transwhile

lated' in the original sense of the term. The exiles came from a milieu where both art history and sociology were more highly developed and professionalized than they were in Britain, so they passed on new standards of scholarship. What they contributed might be described in social

terms as professionalization, in intellectual terms as a sense The exiles also helped to deprovincialize British aca-

of Wissenschaft.

demic

culture.

one way. Some Central European physimaking a synthesis between German theoretical and British experimental 103 traditions. In the case of sociology and art history, intellectual hybridization is equally visible. On one side we see the assimilation

The influence was not

cists

all

of this period have been described as 'bridge-builders',

or Anglicization of the emigres, with knighthoods for Sir Nikolaus

Pevsner, Sir Ernst

Gombrich and others. Pevsner in particular became

a British institution thanks to his series of architectural guides to the

On the other side, we see the professionalization or even the Germanization of the disciplines. Pevsner, for instance, counties of England.

was

critical

of the British amateur tradition in

art.

104

Synthesis was of course far from perfect. Something was, as usual,

while something else was consciously rejected. The students who became followers of exiled intellectuals (as in the case of Elias, who had a gift for attracting disciples) should be distinguished from those who disagreed with their teachers and so were affected in more subtle ways. However, the careers discussed above all illustrate what Robert Merton has called 'the role of the emigre or outsider in catalyzing intellectual and social development'. 105 In this respect there is a parallel between geographical and disciplinary 'lost in translation',

migration (above,

p. 172).

Denationalizing

Knowledge

The emigres played an important

role in denationalizing knowledge, the counter-trend to the nationalization described earlier in this

212

A

Social History in

Three Dimensions

106

Equally important, perhaps, was the rise of a new institucongress of specialists in a particular discipline, chapter 6. Congresses of this kind, facilitated by in discussed already the spread of the railway network in Europe, became increasingly frequent between the middle and the end of the nineteenth century. Thinking of both trains and ships, we might speak of a 'steam age' of the commonwealth of learning, replacing the horse-drawn commonwealth of the period 1500-1850. From the middle of the nineteenth century onwards, there was also a tendency towards the 'globalization' of knowledge, as the steamship 107 In the and the telegraph brought the continents closer together. age of sail, the European commonwealth of learning had already extended its frontiers to include Batavia, Calcutta, Mexico City, Lima, Boston, Philadelphia and Rio de Janeiro, where an Academy of Sciences was founded in 1772. The steamship allowed this trend to chapter.

tion, the international

go much further. As we have seen, many Americans studied in Germany in the later nineteenth century. The steamship also made possible the lecture tours in the USA made by Charles Lyell, Matthew Arnold, T. H. Huxley and a number of British popularizers of science. On the occasion of the Universal Exposition at St Louis (1904), the German scholars Karl Lamprecht, Ferdinand Tonnies, Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber and Werner Sombart all sailed to the USA. In 1907, it was the turn of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung to lecture in the USA,

Advancement of Science met in Australia in 1914. Again, the Great Exodus of the 1930s differed from earlier learned diasporas because some scholars went beyond Europe,

while the British Association for the

Mexico, Argentina, New Zealand and elsewhere. European knowledge was becoming 'western' knowledge. At the same time, this 'western knowledge' was disseminated to other parts of the world, and modified in the course of its dissemination, undergoing a process of both linguistic and cultural translation. to the

USA,

In short,

Globalizing

Knowledge

The process of dissemination needs to be viewed from two points of view, supply and demand. In some places, the spread of western knowledge was encouraged by westerners as part of the imperial enterprise, because they believed their knowledge was superior. The most notorious example of this belief is surely that of Thomas Macaulay's 'Minute on Indian Education' (1835), in which he declared that 'a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole

3

Geographies of Knowledge native literature of India and Arabia' - a dramatic

2

1

example of what

108 has been called the 'disqualification' of indigenous knowledges. Following a policy of westernization, universities were founded in

Bombay, Calcutta and Madras in 1857. The 'Muhammedan Angloit was originally known, was established at Aligarh - by an Indian, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan - on the model of 109 St Stephen's College, Delhi, was founded Oxford and Cambridge. Oriental College', as

by Protestant missionaries in 1881. Before the policy of westernization became dominant, however,

some

British administrators

and missionaries had been much more 110

The College of Fort William had sympathetic to the local culture. been founded in Calcutta in 1800 by the governor-general in order to allow British officials to acquire what another governor111 The teachers at general called 'Oriental knowledge and science'. which this college, closed in 1854 three years before the so-called Indian Mutiny - included Bengali pundits as well as British expatriates. Conversely, Hindu College opened in 1817, again in Calcutta, with the aim of teaching the sons of the Bengali elite something of 112 both the European and the Indian cultural traditions. In other words, attempts at fusion between the two cultural traditions preceded the policy of westernization. What was undermining these attempts was the fact that mid-nineteenth-century India was 'filling with pious British Evangelicals who wanted not just to rule and administer India, but also to redeem and improve it', while on the 113 other side some Indian Muslims were becoming more radical. The demand for western knowledge is particularly visible in three cases where the initiative did not come from the West: Egypt, China and Japan. In each of these cases the opening up of a state to western knowledge was originally a defensive reaction against the threat of the West. The policy was one, as Arnold Toynbee put it, of 'a minimum dose of Westernization'. The supporters of limited opening did not realize that the adoption of a foreign technology 'will gradually work its way down till the whole of the foreign culture has been given .

entry'.

.

.

114

Egypt under

Muhammad Ali (who

ruled 1805-49) was

still nomihad become an independent state. Ali set up a military school, followed by schools of engineering, medicine, pharmacy, mineralogy and agriculture. He sent forty-five Egyptian students to France to study in 1826, and later founded a school of translation, so that western knowledge could enter the country more easily. Ali's emphasis was on technology, or more generally on 'useful knowledge', but there were exceptions to the rule. Translations into Arabic made at this time included Voltaire

nally part of the

Ottoman Empire, but

in practice

it

214

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Social History in

Three Dimensions

on Peter the Great - perhaps chosen as a great example of a Westernizer - Robertson on Charles V and Montesquieu on the Romans. 15 The supervisor of the mission to France, Rifa'ah al-Tahtawi, wrote a history of Egypt on his return which glorified the nation but 1

116

followed western models. In China, as in India, the role of missionaries as cultural brokers was important, especially from the 1850s onwards. Missionaries of western civilization as well as Christianity, they often saw it as part of their task to spread the knowledge of western science by editing itself

journals such as the Chinese Scientific Magazine (1876, planned as an equivalent of the Scientific American) and translating books on 117

As one missionary put astronomy, geology and especially medicine. 118 it, knowledge was important for 'serving the practical ends of life'. Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China had been

A

founded

in 1834,

soon

after the British one,

Diffusion of Christian and General

was established

On

the

and a Society for the

Knowledge among the Chinese

in 1887.

demand

side,

military knowledge,

an interest in western knowledge, especially

formed part of the so-called Self-Strengthening

Movement, following the principle of learning about the barbarians in order to rein them in (shiyi zhiyi). After their defeat in the Opium Wars, the Chinese government established arsenals and dockyards with the help of European expatriates. Jiangnan Arsenal in Shanghai became the site of a department of translation, concentrating on books on science and technology. Despite their obvious differences in aims, the Chinese government and the missionaries cooperated. Indeed, some missionaries entered government service, notably John Fryer, who worked in the translation department of Jiangnan Arsenal.

119

Chinese interest

in

western knowledge gradually widened.

A naval

Yan Fu, was sent to England in 1877 to study at the Naval Academy in Greenwich and later taught at a similar institution in Tianjin. Yan Fu also introduced the ideas of T. H. Huxley and Herbert officer,

Spencer to China, as well as translating John Stuart Mill's On Liberty and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. 120 Cai Yuanpei, who studied in Berlin and Leipzig, became chancellor of the newly founded Imperial Capital University, Beijing, and reformed it following the German model. 121 Shen Zhurong, who studied librarianship at the New York Public Library, adapted the Dewey system in order to clas122 sify Chinese books. As a result of this invasion by western knowledge, traditional Chinese science suffered a 'displacement'. 123 There was rivalry and even segregation. In the early twentieth century, a Chinese Medical

5

Geographies of Knowledge

2

1

Association was founded to support western medicine, followed by an Institute for National Medicine to support Chinese traditions.

There was also interaction between the two knowledge systems. A kind of hybridization took place, the 'sinicization of Western pharmacy on one side and the modernization of acupuncture on the other'.

I24

In the case of Japan, there was a remarkably rapid opening to western knowledge following the imperial restoration of 1868 and the modernization campaign that followed, although a few individuals such as Fukuzawa had already been moving in this direction. The new institutions founded within ten years of the 'restoration' included Osaka Medical Academy (1869), Keio University (1871), the Imperial College of Engineering (1873), the first commercial college (1875)

and the University of Tokyo (1877). Fact-finding missions were sent to the West, notably the Iwakura mission to the USA and Europe (1871-3), and some well-known western texts were translated into Japanese at this time, among them (as in China) John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, flanked by Self-Help by Samuel Smiles. 125 The government supported many Japanese students abroad, especially in Germany, on the principle that, as a minister put it in 1897, 'We will not go forward unless we send students to advanced 126

One leading Japanese scientist, the bacteriologist Shibasaburo Kitasato, who had studied with Robert Koch in Berlin, had such reverence for Koch that he imitated his mannerisms and set up a Shinto shrine to Koch in the Institute of Infectious Diseases that he directed in Tokyo. 127 When they returned, some of these Japanese 128 students helped establish new universities on the Prussian model. Written examinations for candidates for the civil service were adopted in the 1880s and 1890s, once again following the Prussian model. The irony was that the Prussians had been inspired by the traditional Chinese examination system, which Japan had itself imitated as early 129 as the seventh century. In the case of Japan, even more than that of China, appearances suggest a simple imitation of western knowledge practices, forming part of what has been described as a 'craze' for the West. However, appearances may deceive. Translation is necessarily cultural as well as linguistic, a kind of domestication or assimilation of the foreign. Keywords in one language may lack close equivalents in another, as sixteenth-century missionaries had discovered when they tried to translate 'God' into Chinese and chose the word tian, literally 'heaven'. Ironically enough, this is the very word that the nineteenth-century translator Yan Fu would use for 'nature' when he was turning a work of Herbert Spencer into Chinese. 130 countries.'

216

A

Social History in

Three Dimensions

In nineteenth-century Japan, the translation of Mill's

On

Liberty,

and especially of the keyword liberty', makes a particularly revealing story. The translator looked for an equivalent in traditional Japanese and chose the term jiyu. The problem was the association of jiyu with ideas of selfishness or wilfulness.

Whether

for linguistic or for wider

from its negative even for leading westernizers such as Fukuzawa. 131 The keyword vividly illustrates a more general problem: that, in Japan, cultural reasons, jiyu did not completely escape associations,

concepts that defined the content of Westernization did not translate well; they did not have a natural fit with existing Japanese concepts' - or, indeed, with the socio-political environment in which 132 Japanese reformers may have intended to they were employed. import ideas and practices from the West, but the effect was, once again, a kind of cultural hybridity. In short, the great problem for historians is not that of deciding whether or not Asians followed western models - they obviously did - but of assessing the cognitive distance between these models and local traditions, and the degree of adaptation or accommodation that took place. The results of cultural encounters are rarely if ever one way. As we have seen, a number of 'discoveries' by western explorers and scholars depended on the knowledge of their local assistants. Again, an important trend in nineteenth-century western culture was what might be called 'the discovery of the East'. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans had taken considerable interest in the Ottoman Empire and in China. Now it was the turn of Persia, Egypt and especially India. 133 In 1783, the Asiatic Society of Bengal was founded. In 1784, a translation of the famous Sanskrit text the 'the

Bhagavad-Gita appeared for the English.

first

time in a western language, in

134

The discovery of Sanskrit and ancient India was especially imporwas coming to be viewed as the birthplace or origin of western culture. The titles of two books published in German in 1808 give some idea of the new enthusiasm: Friedrich Schlegel's Uber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier ('On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians') and Othmar Frank's Das Licht der Orient tant because India

('Light

from the

East').

Some Westerners

travelled to India in search of enlightenment,

Helena Blavatsky, who visited India and Tibet in the 1850s; the English feminist Annie Besant, who went to India in the 1890s; and the German writer Hermann Hesse, who visited India in the 1910s. Conversely, some Hindus made successful lecture tours in the West - indeed, all over the world - among them Tagore and like

Geographies of Knowledge

217

Vivekananda. As a youth, the writer Rabindranath Tagore had studied in England; in later life he lectured there, as well as in the USA, Japan, Peru and elsewhere. He spoke on many subjects, but an important part of his appeal was that he represented the wisdom of the East. The same is true of Swami Vivekananda, an Indian delegate to the 'Parliament of World Religions in Chicago in 1893 and a successful lecturer in the USA, who founded a Vedanta Society in New York the following year. As for the most visible manifestation of Hinduism in the West, the 'Society for Krishna Consciousness', it was founded 1

in 1965.

The theme of hybridity recurs yet again. The early members of the Theosophy Society, founded in New York in 1875, were interested in Neoplatonism as well as eastern religions. In similar fashion, nearly a century later, the New Age movement drew freely on both eastern and western sources. The religious ideas of Arnold Toynbee, who was quoted above as a historian,

illustrate

able before the twentieth century. in the

London in 1951 in which he invoked and 'Christ Tammuz, Christ Adonis, Christ Sometimes we find a synthesis between different knowl-

National Gallery in

Buddha, Osiris'.

an eclecticism hardly imagin-

He recorded a religious experience

135

Muhammad

edges, at other times a kind of segregation. Today,

when practices such

yoga and acupuncture are common, if not yet embedded, in western cultures, the clients generally share western attitudes in other respects. The Asian examples discussed above suggest some of the political imperatives that encouraged the reception of foreign knowledge. The politics of knowledge, together with the economics and sociology of knowledge, will be the main themes of the following chapter. as

8 Sociologies of Knowledge

In a broad sense the whole of this book is concerned with the social dimension of knowledge, but a chapter on the subject may still be necessary in order to analyse more precisely the relation between knowledge and its social environment, especially in the age of what has been variously called the 'knowledge economy', the 'knowledge society' or the 'knowledgeable state'. Here as elsewhere the emphasis will fall on institutions, followed by the social groups that make 1

them

up.

Economics

of

Knowledge

Gathering, analysing and disseminating knowledge are expensive activities, and they became more and more expensive in the course of the period, especially in the case of 'Big Science' (in German, Grosswissenschaft or Grossforschung) - in other words, collective projects involving large teams of researchers as well as expensive

apparatus. Research of this kind goes back, as

Germany in

we have seen

(p. 180),

became more 2 visible, as well as bigger still, during the Second World War. Since then, scientific apparatus has become even more costly. At $2 billion, the Hubble Space Telescope was, in its day (1990), the most expensive to

the later nineteenth century, although

it

instrument in world history, but it has already been overtaken by the Large Hadron Collider, at more than twice the price. It is time to discuss who paid the bill - in other words, the patronage of knowledge, both private and public. scientific

9

Sociologies of

Knowledge

2

1

One major

patron was business. The idea that 'knowledge managenow called, gives companies a competitive edge was 3 formulated relatively recently. However, this formulation only made explicit what was already implicit in the practice of many companies and had been so in early modern times, notably in the cases of the ment', as

it

is

Dutch and the English East India Company. When the latter sponsored an Arabic grammar (1776), for instance, funded the Asiatick Society of Bengal' (1784), founded a botanic garden in Calcutta (1787) or supported the Royal Institution (1799), it was continuing 4 an older tradition. Again, unsurprisingly, support for business studies, and for economics in general, has often come from the business community. The Ecole speciale de commerce of Paris, often described as the oldest business school in the world, was founded in 1820 by two silk merchants. In the USA, Joseph Wharton, a Philadelphia businessman who had made his fortune in mining and steel manufacture, gave $100,000 to the University of Pennsylvania to establish what became the Wharton Business School. The first German business school (Handelhochschule), founded in Leipzig in 1898, received support from the local chamber of commerce. In Belgium, a similar school was founded in Brussels in 1903 by the businessman Ernest Solvay. The support of the business community for scientific research with industrial applications has been much more spectacular, especially from the late nineteenth century onwards. As we saw in chapter 4, from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards a number of

companies set up their own laboratories and their own 'research and development' programmes, especially in the United States, and later, in the age of Toshiba and Canon, in Japan. By 1925 Bell 5 Laboratories, for instance, had a budget of $12 million. Alternatively, companies gave money to academic institutions to support research which they expected to be useful. In Germany, for example, the engineer-industrialist Werner von Siemens sponsored a chair in machine construction and electrical engineering at the Polytechnic (Technische Hochschule) of Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1883, as well as giving half a million marks to the Imperial Physical and Technical Institute (Physikalisch-Technische Reichsanstalt), founded in 1887. 6 Again, in Britain in the later nineteenth century, the chemist-industrialist Ludwig Mond endowed the Davy Faraday Research Laboratory at the Royal Institution, while the chemical manufacturer John Brunner paid for a chair of physical chemistry at large

Liverpool.

7

This kind of funding was not restricted to the natural sciences. Brunner, for example, endowed chairs in economics and Egyptology

220

A Social

History in Three Dimensions

The chair in Chinese at Oxford, founded in was funded by merchants who traded with the Far East. In similar fashion, a course in Chinese, given in Lyon from the year 1900 onwards, was established by the local chamber of commerce. Royal Dutch Oil's support of oriental studies at the University of Utrecht 8 led to mocking references to the 'Oil Faculty'. The study of colonial history and geography was also supported by the business community in both Lyon and Marseille. In Britain, a chair in colonial history was founded at King's College London in 1905 by Alfred Beit, a businessman who made his fortune in South Africa trading in gold and diamonds. In Germany, the Kolonialinstitut founded in Hamburg in 1908 was supported by 9 businessmen interested in expanding trade. More recently, the research institutes known as 'think tanks' have often been funded by business, whether directly, as in the case of the Mitsubishi Research Institute (1970), or indirectly, via the Carnegie and other as well as in chemistry.

1875,

foundations.

Some academic

researchers have been adept in making use of

profit-driven funding.

who

The

sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld, for instance,

directed a centre at the University of

carried out research for commercial clients

Newark

in the 1930s,

and was able to use some

own work. 10 However, some businessmen, especially in the USA, gave large sums of money to support 'pure' or general knowledge. John JacobrAstor, for instance, who made a fortune from fur trading, left money to establish what became the of the conclusions in his

New York

Public Library. John D. Rockefeller, whose riches came founded the University of Chicago, while Leland Stanford, a railway magnate, founded Stanford University. The French banker Edmond de Rothschild established a foundation for scientific research. The Swede Alfred Nobel, whose money came from the arms industry, founded the Nobel Prizes.

from

oil,

In the

USA,

a great deal of research, in the humanities as well as

and social sciences, has been supported by three wealthy 11 foundations: Rockefeller, Carnegie and Ford. Rockefeller and Ford have also supported research in other countries. Both foundations gave money to St Antony's College, Oxford, while the Ford Foundation in the natural

also gave a grant to the Free University of Berlin in

its

early years.

In France, the Rockefeller Foundation supported social science in the 1930s, while in the 1950s it gave money for the French equivalent of area studies at the Vie Section of the Ecole des hautes etudes. The Ford Foundation gave a third of the money to establish the Maison des sciences de Vhomme (1963) as well as supporting a new Institute

of

European Sociology

in Paris.

12

The CIA, besides supporting poetry

Sociologies of Knowledge

221

and painting, subsidized contributions to knowledge by European academics such as the Swiss historian Herbert Liithy and the French 13

Bertrand de Jouvenel. Despite these spectacular examples, it is fair to say that the funding of research by companies is usually an investment, expected to produce returns. As the head of the research laboratories at Western Electric used to say, 'The practical question is "Does this kind of 14 It often did. The collaboration between scientific research pay?'" universities and business (ranging from armaments to pharmaceuti15 However, this collaboration cals) goes back more than a century. has become increasingly important, increasingly visible and increasingly criticized in the last few decades, the age of what has been called intellectual

the 'entrepreneurial university'.

16

In 1974, for instance, Harvard Medical School signed a contract worth $23 million with an agricultural company, Monsanto. Still more recently, universities have come to appoint industrial liaison officers and to patent discoveries, while some academics, ranging from computer engineers to molecular biologists, found companies of their 17 own. In the 1990s, Stanford University and MIT, among other insti18 Needless to say, tutions, obtained half their income from patents. these financial advantages came with strings attached. The most obvious examples of these strings come from the USA, where in 1900, for instance, Mrs Leland Stanford, widow of the founder of Stanford University and its sole trustee, fired the left-wing economist Edward Ross, leading to a storm of protests. 19 When the Rockefeller Foundation financed research at the Ecole des hautes etudes, doubts were expressed about requests to support one sinologist because he was a member of the French Communist Party and another because he studied the Song dynasty (960-1279), viewed by 20 the foundation as too remote from the present.

As for Britain, the historian Edward Thompson's celebrated denunciation of 'Warwick University Ltd' (1970) was concerned with the influence of the Rootes Group, local car manufacturers, on the affairs of the university and, in particular, an attempt by the chairman of Rootes to have a left-wing American scholar in the history department dismissed and deported. 21 The economics of knowledge cannot be separated from its politics.

The As

Politics of

Knowledge

the chapter on chronologies should make clear, the major political events of the period such as the French and Bolshevik Revolutions,

A

222

Social History in

Three Dimensions

the rise of Napoleon and Hitler, and the First and Second World Wars all had important consequences for the commonwealth of learning

and for other forms of knowledge as well. The politics is a much broader theme than the relation between government, as famous studies by Michel Foucault Said - and the controversies provoked by these studies

As Foucault

of knowledge

research and

and Edward may remind

-

power operates at the micro-level. knowledge includes not only the state, the 'Leviathan' of Thomas Hobbes, but also the academic microcosm of 22 the Cambridge classicist Francis Cornford. To illustrate the variety of ways in which politics may impinge upon the university, one might take the example of academic freedom, as illustrated by the titles of three 'free' universities, each using the term in a different sense. The Universite libre de Bruxelles (1834) was so called because it was supposed to be free from the interference of the Church. The Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (1880), a Calvinist university, was free from the interference of the state. The Freie Universitdt Berlin (1948), a creation of the Cold War period, was supposed to be free from communism - a university defined against its opposite us.

Hence

liked to emphasize,

the politics of

East Berlin, the Humboldt University. Private foundations are involved with the politics as well as the economics of knowledge, as the story of the Rockefeller Foundation's doubts about the two French sinologists illustrates. Again, in the 1950s, the Ford Foundation was concerned both to improve the image

number

of the

in

USA

Europe and to fight communism. 23 What follows, concentrate on the state, which was, like business, a

in

however, will major patron of research, as we have already seen

on

scientific expeditions, for instance,

edge. If researchers devise the tactics,

who

in the sections

and on nationalizing knowlit

is

generally their patrons

set the strategies, and, the bigger the research, the greater

management. National censuses, for instance, involved considerable expenditure, especially on salaries: 24 in 1913, the Prussian statistical office employed 722 people. Welfare states in particular commissioned social surveys, in order to know how best to distribute benefits to the sick, old, unemployed, and so on. 25 the need for planning and for

Some governments, especially

empires, played a

much

greater role

than others. In the eighteenth century, the Spanish government had 'incomparably the biggest scientific budget of any European state', spending the money on numerous expeditions to its empire in the 26 Americas. In the nineteenth century, this role would be taken over by Britain, France and Russia.

Sociologies of Knowledge

223

Big versus Small States

The contrast between the organization of research the

USA,

in the

USSR

especially in the middle years of the twentieth century,

more general

and is

a

between two forms of government: the big, interventionist or 'scientific state', on one side, and 27 the relatively small state or 'stateless' society on the other. In the USSR, it was the state that organized and funded research, vivid

example of

via the

Academy

a

division

Sciences, once a learned society,

28

The Imperial Academy of was already taking over the direction

of Sciences (figure 13).

of research before 1917, but the

Academy

of Sciences of the

USSR

went much further in this direction, incorporating institutions such as the Pulkov Observatory and the archaeological commission, which became the Academy for the History of Material Culture. By 1950 the Academy of Sciences employed 20,000 (as

it

became

in 1925)

people,

among them

fifteen

laboratories, seven

6,000 'scientific workers', in fifty-six institutes,

museums and

Academy's empire extended

four observatories.

The

to the humanities, including institutes

of history, ethnography, oriental studies and world literature.

The Russian model for the organization of research was extended communist regimes of Eastern Europe. In East Germany, for instance, the former Prussian Academy of Sciences was reopened in to the

1946 by order of the Russian Military Administration. Like its sister Moscow, the Academy took over other research institutes fifty-seven of them by 1989, by which time it had 23,675 employees. It was dissolved in 1990, shortly before the end of the German Democratic Republic. All the employees lost their jobs and 29 only a few were rehired. In the USA on the other hand, the land of individualism and capitalism, central government did have a role to play, but for a long time it was a relatively restricted one. President Thomas Jefferson, for instance, launched the Lewis and Clark expedition (above, p. 15). In the mid-nineteenth century, Congress funded the Geological Survey and published studies of Indian peoples and the exploration of the American West. The Department of Agriculture also supported research. Until the Second World War, however, the major patrons of

institution in

research were private corporations. Britain, at least until the

end of the nineteenth century,

another example of the 'reluctant

state' that generally left the

offers

funding

of research, in science as in the humanities, to private individuals and

voluntary associations. 30 Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society

*—

X) t/3

3J

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e CD

< 1/3