Europe: Early Modern and Modern
denied the possibility of historical knowledge. This
development, he suggests, was only overcome when
Ludovico Muratori and others initiated the practice of
printing historical documents and, finally, when Giambattista Vico, who is dcpictcd as having saved history
from skepticism, entered the historiographical scene.
The author, however, makes substantial claims that
he can not support adequately. That readers became
sensitive to the distortion and error endemic to political news reporting does not necessarily mean that
many doubted the possibility of any accurate information or the reliability of all historical knowledge. If that
had been the case, there would have not been so many
avid consumers of "news." Although Dooley suggests
that the new information industry led to epistemological pessimism, the claim is difficult to sustain given the
fact that the consumers of "news" and "history" retained sufficient optimism about the possibility of
accurate information to purchase such publications.
The commercial success of the many news genres
Dooley so successfully describes makes it difficult to
sustain the connection with epistemological skepticism. A critical stance that recognizes the possibility of
bias and even falsehood does not necessarily lead to
philosophical skepticism. Dooley emphasizes the
depth of the early modern attack on empirical writing,
but that attack may be read either as grounded in
skepticism or as part of an accelerating quest for
empirical truth.
Dooley has made an important contribution to the
history of journalism and to our understanding of the
means by which political information was transmitted.
He provides an important corrective to the widely held
view that Italy was a cultural backwater and brings one
strand of early modern Italian cultural history, largely
terra incognita to non-Italian historians, to light. These
are noteworthy accomplishments, even if his speculations ahout the connections between information dissemination and philosophical skepticism cannot be
sustained.
BARBARA SHAPIRO
University of California,
Berkeley
MARGARET C. JACOB. Scientific Culture and the Making
of the Industrial West. New York: Oxford University
Press. 1997. Pp. x, 269.
There has been a crying need for instructors of Western Civilization to find readable texts that incorporate
the rise of scicnce into thc traditional historical curriculum. Margaret C. Jacob has now produced such a
work linking the Scientific Revolution to the Industrial
Revolution. A decade agu, she attempted this feat with
The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution
(1988), an original work that did not fully win over
specialists either in the history of science or the
Enlightenment. This new work, advertised as a second
edition, is a significantly expanded and improved version that fills a major vacuum. The only comparable
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
1793
attempt is the second volume of Richard Olson's
Science Deified and Science Defied: The Historical
Significance of Science in Western Culture (1990). In
contrast to Olson, Jacob "treats culture as a structure
in its own right, found in the mind, but also encoded in
thc objects available to pcoplc or inventcd by human
ingenuity" (p. 3). Using this broad definition, she is
easily able to fix her attention on the material transformations of late eighteenth-century society and relate them to the new scientific setting. The initial four
chapters are a reduced version of the first edition that
differ slightly in their discussion of the "culture of
Cartesianism," down playing the role of French educational institutions in favor of Bernard Fontenelle's
popular exposition. Jacob's longstanding claim that
Newtonian concepts were taken up as a support for the
Anglican establishment remains a key part of the
argument. Indeed, in these revised chapters, Jacob
constantly harps on the political uses to which the New
Science, Cartesian or Newtonian, was put.
In the remainder of the book, which is richly documented and brimming with new ideas, she turns her
attention to showing how a popular secularized version
of Newtonian science became an essential part of the
world of English entrepreneurs and inventors. This
section pivots around the rcccnt dcposit of thc Watt
family archives in Birmingham. Exploiting this teeming
source to the full, Jacob weaves a convincing argument
that scientific culture was not a mere adjunct to the
emerging mechanized industry: it was its essential
source. Traditional economic historians will surely
disagrce with hcr, but thcy will now necd to address
her thesis head on. Traditional historians of science
will also have to reconsider what Newtonianism meant
to the middling classes of Scotland and the Midlands,
where the Industrial Revolution first sprang forth.
In the penultimate chapter, Jacoh puts forward a set
of cultural explanations to account for England's acknowledged lead in industrialization, far ahead of
developments in the Lowlands and France. Because
Newtonianism alsu spread to the continent during the
early years of the Enlightenment, she is obliged to
explicate this national differentiation, which was already recognized by contemporaries. Commenting on
the peculiarities of the educational and bureaucratic
systems in each of these continental cultures, Jacob
weaves a complicated story based on anecdotal evidence often drawn from unpublished sources. While
this at times leads to daring insights in comparative
history, the narrative lacks the solidity of the first part
of the book. Moreover, her argument often loses the
thread of the particular religious and political issues
featured so prominently in earlier chapters. The final
chapter is framed as a vivid example of how the
scientific and rational mentality operated in decision
making about local projects vital to industrialization,
in this instance in the pmt city of Bristol. The account
offered is based on unique sources that are presumed
to be representative with respect to harbor improve-
DECEMBER
2000
1794
Reviews of Books
ments, canal building, and the draining of mines.
Perhaps they are.
In the end, this is a suggestive work, written with
verve and hewn from much new archival cvidcncc. But
the themes Jacob develops need to be tested and
sorted by others before the book will be fully accepted
as a standard text.
ROGER HAHN
University of California,
Berkeley
DAVID N. LIVINGSTONE and CHARLES W. J. WITHERS,
editors. Geography and Enlightenment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1999. Pp. viii, 455. Cloth
$52.00, paper $25.00.
ANNE MARIE CLAIRE GODLEWSKA. Geography Unbound:
French Geographic Science from Cassini to Humboldt.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1999. Pp. xii,
444. Cloth $65.00, papcr $27.50.
Perhaps it is only the terminology that, with the
fashions, has changed. There was a time when the
theme of nature and the Enlightenment included
geography. The spatial diffusion of the Enlightenment
added another dimension to the study of space itself.
The two books under review therefore rediscover some
important themes that have been eclipsed in recent
years, and in so doing, their authors exploit the
archives to good effect, clarify the relationship bctween the geographical traditions of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, and provide a more sophisticated basis for understanding space as a context
within which eighteenth-century institutions functioned and intellectuals were crcatcd.
Geography as a field of knowledge is Anne Marie
Godlewska's concern, and her way to narrate and
analyze the continuities and disjunctures between the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in France is to
look at the links between geography and cartography.
This is largely an internal history, but that does not
limit the book's value only to other specialists. The
larger significance of the subject relates to such key
issues in Western culture as the degree to which
knowledge is specialized, the authority of the expert,
the resolution of disputes among experts, the gencsis
of forms of information accessible to a wider public,
the subjective appreciation of the perceptions of space
as differentiated from their objective descriptions, and
the relation between geography and other fields of
knowledgc. Thc chaptcrs intcgrate the work of particular individuals (M. Edme Fran,<ois Jomard, Constantin-Fran,<ois Volney, Gilbert Chabrol de Volvic, Alexander von Humboldt) and themes (geography and
discovery, historical geography, national map surveys).
The story is of an indirect but marked decline in the
usefulness of maps, both within educational circles and
the state, and a growing conservative tendency in the
field of gcography, or in other words, a failure to
reinvent geography leading to a gradual marginalization.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
This story needs more comparative dimensions to be
confirmed, and the explanatory references to Foucault
are not very convincing. A clue to what is missing is the
lack of rcfcrcnccs to Joscph Minard and thc graphically dramatic economic and social maps of the midnineteenth century. In effect, the rate of spatial change
in the eighteenth century was sufficiently slow to
permit geography and cartography to make substantial
leaps forward, getting in advance, so to speak, of their
economic and political applications. Until the revolution, the study of geography could be a way of understanding a latent order in human affairs, as in the
works of Montesquieu. With the political and industrial revolutions, however, geographical change
seemed increasingly disconnected from nature. The
search for patterns and latent order depended far
more on statistics (Lyon Playfair) and on economic
theory (David Ricardo), but the economic approach
was largely absent from the work of the thinkers on
whom Godlewska has concentrated. The continuities
and links among geology, geological mapping (in which
the French excelled in the nineteenth century), and
evolutionary theory also do not figure in her work. This
book is well worth rcading, and it is an important
addition to the history of scientific work in nineteenthcentury France, but it is not a definitive interpretation
of the change in the intellectual weight of geography
between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
As a collective volume, this book has all the familiar
characteristics often cited by reviewers who must deal
with a range of topics covered in chapters of uneven
quality. To this reviewer, the most interesting chapters
were those by Charles Withers on "Geography, Enlightenment and the Paradise Question," David Livingstone's on "Geographical Inquiry, Rational Religion and Moral Philosophy," Michael Heffernan's
"Historical Geographies of the Future," and Peter
Gould's essay on the diffusion of information about
the Lisbon 1755 earthquake, which dealt with issues
directly related to key issues in the Enlightenment.
Methodologically intcrcsting wcrc Matthcw Edncy's
article on historical geography, Michael Bravo's chapter on ethnographic evidence in geographical studies,
and Godlewska's study of Humboldt's visual thinking.
The voluminous bibliographic references after each
chapter will lead readers to many interlibrary loan
offices or rare book rooms.
Reading this new collection after Geography Unbound, the reader is made aware of the extent to which
geography lacked a synthesis in the eighteenth century.
Yet it was pervasive in so many aspects of the Enlightenment in both its objective and scientific modes and
in its subjective and artistic representation of the
world. The two books at hand highlight the challenge
that lies in defining the basic concepts about space that
functioned within the Enlightenment while at the same
time looking carefully at the role of specialist geographers and cartographers.
JOSEF W. KONVITZ
Paris, France
DECEMBER 2000