| Thinking Unfashionable Thoughts, Asking Unfashionable Questions | The American Historical Review, 105.2

Review Essays

Thinking Unfashionable Thoughts,
Asking Unfashionable Questions

MARGARET C. JACOB

For my generation of historians, who went to graduate school from roughly 1962 to 1975 (and hence now for many of the graduate students we have trained), the big questions in Western or world history became strangely unfashionable. None is bigger than the question of what were the factors that made Western hegemony possible. Indeed, the very notion of Western hegemony, of the domination of much of the world by Western political or economic power from roughly 1800 to 1970, may be said to be so fraught with anger or guilt as to be almost untouchable. In the present climate, even posing the question "Why the West?" conjures up more embarrassment or hostility than awed curiosity. Just asking it suggests the possibility that the questioner approves of the course that human history took from roughly 1500 to 1900. Admitting that the West did achieve hegemony seems almost tantamount to endorsing the means and methods used to achieve it. Suspicious critics might even presume that a Eurocentric questioner would dwell on Western strengths while ignoring the injustices associated with conquest or imperialism. In addition, seldom do specialists in non-Western histories—the great Joseph Needham, as always, an exception—dwell on the question. Indeed, as the work of Roy Bin Wong shows, specialists in Chinese or African history delight in raising the stakes by showing the relative insignificance of differences between their area and period and a comparable time in the West.¹ 1

     As a result of an embarrassment sprung from a multitude of sources—not least the rise of women's history—most historians with credentials in European or American history, or even the history of science and technology, have little to say about what is, arguably, the single most extraordinary phenomenon in global history. The silence in the history of science is particularly striking. Everyone who has thought about the question "Why the West?" acknowledges the singular importance of mechanical science, both as a mindset and in its application to manufacturing technology. Inventions from larger ships to the steam engine figure prominently in the histories of the Atlantic trade or the rise of Birmingham and Manchester. But most histories of technology now stop at that point and do not ask why those inventions occurred where and when they did. In addition, the history of science has been preoccupied with recovering the social, with situating science, and occasionally with quarrels about method, where terms like "social construction" are rallying cries.² Local studies—some of them of singular quality—have dominated the history of science broadly conceived.³ Since 1945 and beyond, when most American history of science programs were started, the discipline has matured and deepened its institutional foundations. But comparative studies—even within a Western framework—have been few and far between. 2

     'Tis a pity. Because the question "Why the West?" has become unfashionable on the left—and that is where most of my academic generation situates itself—it has been consigned, broadly speaking, to the right, or to historians whose political discourse was shaped before gender, or the social, then the linguistic/cultural turn, came to prominence. Yet the big question about the rise of the West remains important, and in our own time there are still a few historians who defy fashion and try to answer it. Predictably, none of the inhibitions commonplace among post-1960s historians hamper the perspective of Alfred W. Crosby in The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600. He simply asserts that Western chauvinism has nothing to do with his enterprise, and he claims to know perfectly well that science and technology were "the edged weapon" of imperialistic expansion.⁴ The impulse that lay at their root—quantification—therefore becomes all the more interesting. Crosby wishes to understand how quantification unfolded and even to explain why it did. The impulse to measure and count, he believes, holds the best answer to "Why the West?" 3

     Crosby's endeavor has many noteworthy and positive features. He has mastered a vast English-language historical literature, both primary sources in translation and works by historians such as Samuel Y. Edgerton, Jr., Carlo M. Cipolla, and Elizabeth L. Eisenstein. He writes with admirable clarity and verve about the quantification of time, space, music, painting, even bookkeeping. He presents the Renaissance in the spirit of Jacob Burckhardt, and he gives the medieval its due. When available in paperback, the book would be superb for any Western Civilization course, readable by freshmen and sure to provoke discussion. It interrelates phenomena that tend to be studied in isolation: the invention of clocks in the 1270s and the reconceptualization of time, Ptolemy's contribution to cartography, the metaphysical implications of mathematics—"mathematics is also glorious because in its generality it is powerful enough to tempt us to tackle the biggest mysteries"⁵ —and the connections between musical theory and astronomy. 4

     Most of these connections should be familiar to historians of early modern science and technology, even if they generally do not address the large questions that Crosby has set for himself. By the fifteenth century, Westerners had quantified and mechanized their societies, Crosby claims, far more than anyplace else on earth; and, "compared with contemporary Muslim, Indian, and Chinese civilizations, [Europe] was uniquely prepared to survive and even to profit from such an avalanche of change."⁶ Why did the Italians, the French, and the Dutch pioneer the quantification of nature? In passing, Crosby hints that the West may just have been accidentally a somewhat freer place to think and write. Decentralized, "Europe has always had an attic room or at least a dry corner in the barn for émigrés . . . [T]he political and religious aristocracies of Asia and North Africa always ultimately united to keep the nouveau riche down."⁷ Crosby's answer to "Why the West?"—insofar as he has an answer—begins to sound suspiciously like that old workhorse, the rising bourgeoisie, commercially busy in cities where a relative autonomy and anonymity prevailed. 5

     Crosby is much better at describing how quantification moved from field to field, sometimes with practice leading theory, than he is at tackling why the purported mental undergirding of Western hegemony evolved when and how it did. Part of the difficulty lies with chronology. Crosby has chosen to end his narrative around 1600. Only hindsight (which is always 20/20) could imagine that by 1600 all the elements had been assembled that would make Western hegemony possible. With the exception of the Spanish empire, where by 1600 hegemony was more a dream than a reality, it cannot be said that by that date "Europeans . . . were [better] able to organize large collections of people and capital and to exploit physical reality for useful knowledge and for power than any other people of the time." Crosby implicitly acknowledges that their ability to master came later than did their ability to quantify, but then he asserts that "in time" the quantifying habit of thought would lead to swift advancement.⁸ Crosby never directly acknowledges that both widespread habits of mathematical thought and the means to organize people and reality were essentially developments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Only a simplistically Whiggish account could explain the intellectual and industrial developments of those two centuries solely by reference to the foundation that Crosby's book attempts to lay for them. 6

     Crosby's book ultimately fails to answer the very question that it deems so central to its enterprise. The limitations of this account derive from more than simply those imposed by its own chronological limits. They have to do with the shortcomings of intellectual history classically conceived, with the holding of social and political reality firmly in the background, if present at all. While I have no idea where the author would situate himself generationally, his book can be situated by a method that predates the innovations that transformed intellectual history and the history of science during the 1960s. "The social" is jarringly absent from Crosby's approach and hence his account. The late medieval people who made and lived with these new practices are strangely absent. We encounter intellects or ideas abstracted from their human setting. Predictably, no women figure anywhere in Crosby's story about the rise of quantification. 7

     The material and household culture wherein inventiveness occurred must be central to the story of any set of changes as relatively rapid and distinctive as Crosby claims. A new interiority that permitted change, yet allowed new practices to be reconciled with the old in some sort of personal harmony, never appears in Crosby's account either. René Descartes possessed that interiority, just as his Discours de la méthode (1637) spread it far and wide.⁹ Nor does it seem to matter that so many of the changes Crosby recounts occurred in the vernacular and not in Latin. The vernacular defined the female linguistic universe, while Latin remained an almost exclusively male medium. Household learning may have contributed as much as commerce to making quantification habitual and its range ever expanding. When we can peer into the lives of families where quantification had become habitual—the Watts of steam-engine fame spring to mind—there we find female literacy and numeracy, as well as energetic involvement in passing that education on to the next generation.¹⁰ Similarly, there is considerable evidence to suggest that literacy and numeracy spread more rapidly in Protestant and not Catholic Europe after 1600. Any account of the rise of the West that ignores the effects of the Reformation—as does Crosby's—stands remarkably out of touch with a historiography that begins with Richard Henry Tawney and includes Robert Merton, Christopher Hill, and Phyllis Mack.¹¹ 8

     In Crosby's account, the personae even of leading intellectual figures seem strangely remote. From the work of Frances Yates, we think we know the complexity of Giordano Bruno reasonably well. But in Crosby's telling, he becomes one dimensional, worth knowing when he said something deemed to be rational or progressive. Yates's Bruno, a somewhat crazed exponent of a new Copernican religiosity, has no place here.¹² Similarly, the great astrologer of Elizabethan England, John Dee, receives credit for his interest in mathematics, but Crosby tells us that "in spite of John Dee . . . the West . . . has produced most of the good applied physicists, engineers, and accountants." The John Dees of the late sixteenth century, even with their propensity to talk to angels, self-consciously sought the mathematization of all learning.¹³ The peculiar religiosity of the Dees is part of the because, not the in spite of, that Crosby is trying to understand. Beginning in the 1960s with the work of Frances Yates, historians of early modern Europe have rescued many of its leading natural philosophers from the rationalist account of their motives and interests. Crosby has not mastered that rich historiography. 9

     Because familiar historical figures seem distorted, a skeptical meditation on the book's undocumented assertions about other cultures seems appropriate.¹⁴ The self-confidence of the assertions about non-Western cultures—with which Crosby seems to have little familiarity—complements an absence of nuance about the thought and lives of Europeans. Add to that void a tendency to make firm, solely modern distinctions between science and magic—separations foreign even to Isaac Newton¹⁵ —and the reader in search of historicity begins to bristle. Could it be the case, after all, that just asking the big questions requires a slighting of the authenticity of one's subjects? That need not happen. Employing a more socially anchored history of ideas makes context more visible and allows the historian to relate new practices, whether in music or accounting, to their religious, educational, or ideological setting. 10

     Without embarrassment, historians of every generation need to address the big questions because they are important and because people (like our students) inevitably ask them. We are all indebted to Crosby for his courage, even if we find fault with his methods or his argument. He may also be the harbinger of a historiographical shift. More global history is now being mandated in the high schools, in Virginia, New York, California, and Texas—for starters—and the best of the new curricula evince no awkwardness about big questions.¹⁶ In a few years, many of our students will come prepared, insofar as possible, with high school courses that were not afraid to address large, globally focused questions. From their ranks may arise a new generation willing to ask, "Why the West first?" and to do so from a more global and nuanced perspective. Will Crosby's answer be sufficient? Employing his own framework of broad generalizations, here, too, the answer I must give will be "no." 11

     The impulse to quantify was singularly important to what we may call, for shorthand, the Commercial Revolution. This information leads only to the conclusion that all of Europe might have remained like the Dutch Republic. Europeans would have been immensely skilled at striking out in sleek ships and trading and keeping track of everything from goods to slaves. Like the Dutch, they may have sustained outposts and plantations, but probably they would have been forced in the end to jostle with local trading competitors who could imitate Western methods, devise new ones, and reclaim their markets. Or, in another version of Crosby's scenario, Italy and France would have remained in 1700 the intellectual powerhouses that he depicts them as having been in 1600. But who, then, would have industrialized? Advanced mathematics of the kind so brilliantly practiced in the French academies after 1700 did not an industrial revolution make.¹⁷ Having the skills to be commercial affords no guarantee of being technologically industrial, in the post-1760s British meaning of the term. Witness that the Netherlands did not industrialize until well into the nineteenth century. Indeed, Crosby's account, precisely because it stops in 1600, gives no attention to the crucial social and political settings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. State formation and systems of government played key roles in the economic developments that appear after 1750. 12

     Without the political and intellectual transformations associated with the English revolutions of 1640 and 1688, and taken up in turn by continental enlightened circles, little of the economic power represented in the concept "Western hegemony" would have been imaginable.¹⁸ Absolutist regimes put their scientific academies and their engineers under the control of both state and aristocracy. German elites who could quantify just like anybody else fought the introduction of railroads well into the mid-nineteenth century.¹⁹ Corporate structures, legal protections, local privileges, military, as opposed to civil employment for engineers, in the absolutist states, inhibited development—never mind hegemony—in vast sections of continental Europe including France. Decentralization in the highly urbanized Dutch Republic allowed all sorts of immigrants and publishers to find a haven, but it also permitted about two hundred families, who made their fortunes largely in commerce, to control local institutions right up to 1848. By that time, the Dutch had been driven out of the race for imperial dominance, casualties of their small home market and their failure to modernize socially and industrially. 13

     If there was an epicenter where hegemony was first consolidated, it was England after 1660. Agricultural surpluses combined with commercial aggressiveness put England on the world economic map in ways that contemporaries noted. But even that dynamism would have been difficult to turn into an industrial and hegemonic transformation without the securing of parliamentary and constitutional institutions after 1689. Having a centralized system of government that could be coaxed to favor commercial interests created a new infrastructure of roads and canals. They undergirded industrial expansion in the period after 1760. Similarly, the system of non-Anglican education that emerged in Britain after the Act of Toleration meant that there were dozens of academies for young men over fourteen where scientific learning and its application could be accessed with relative ease.²⁰ Scottish universities were similarly innovative. By comparison, the French colleges remained in the grip of clerical masters—25 percent of whom were Jesuits—throughout the century, and technical education entered the French curriculum in earnest only after the 1760s. By that time, the French ministers in charge of fostering manufacturing had developed a veritable obsession with British technological innovation. A generation later, a French spy writing home to the French revolutionary ministers said it all: "[When traveling in England] I saw with dismay that a revolution in the mechanical arts, the real precursor, the true and principal cause of political revolutions was developing in a manner frightening to the whole of Europe, and particularly to France, which would receive the severest blow from it."²¹ The spy Le Turc did not even think about the global implications of what he saw. But we should. 14

     Keys to answering the big question lie also in the distinctive types of scientific cultures that emerged by 1700. Crosby privileges an exclusively intellectual, scientific aesthetic and in general slights its technical and mechanical fraternal twin. His method offers no direct path to the consolidation of modern science from chemist Robert Boyle to physicist Isaac Newton, nor any path whatsoever to the scientific culture that emerged first in Britain. Based on Newtonian mechanics and housed in voluntary societies like the Spalding and the Lunar Society, scientific sociability appeared in London and the provinces after 1700. While French science, when finally Newtonian, remained conceptually and mathematically innovative, British science turned increasingly toward the applied. In his emphasis on invention, James Watt was as typical of British scientific culture as polymath Jean d'Alembert was of its French counterpart. 15

     If Crosby's exclusively mathematical explanation for the "rise of the West" were deemed sufficient, the course of world history after 1600 might have been vastly different from what in fact happened. Westerners might have remained the great quantifiers and measurers, counting their bundles or making maps for some other great empire. So, too, if Crosby's method of pinpointing ideas devoid of their setting were the only one open to us, then the actual people who used clocks, educated their children with an eye to the practical, bought the new art in Antwerp or Amsterdam boutiques, measured and weighed, would be lost to us forever. He has found a piece of the Western story and told it to good effect. It should not be presumed to be the whole, or even half, of what remains to be said. 16

Margaret C. Jacob earned her PhD from Cornell University in 1968. She is a professor of history at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her interests have taken her into European history, and she has researched extensively in archives in Britain, the Netherlands, and France. Jacob's intellectual focus has been on the meaning and impact of the Newtonian synthesis on religion, political ideology, industrial development, and cultural practices. Her books include The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1689–1720 (1976), awarded the Louis Gottschalk Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, The Cultural Meaning of the Scientific Revolution (1988), Telling the Truth about History, with Lynn Hunt and Joyce Appleby (1994), Newton and the Culture of Newtonianism, with Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs (1995), awarded the Watson-Davis Award by the History of Science Society, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (1997), and The Enlightenment: A Brief History with Readings (forthcoming, 2000).

Notes

¹ Roy Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997).
² For a summary of where the quarrels now stand, see Ronald Giere, Science without Laws (Chicago, 1999). See also Margaret C. Jacob, "Science Studies after Social Construction: The Turn toward the Comparative and the Global," in Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt, eds., Beyond the Cultural Turn: New Directions in the Study of Society and Culture (Berkeley, Calif., 1999), 95–120.
³ See, for example, Harold Cook, Trials of an Ordinary Doctor: Joannes Groenevelt in Seventeenth-Century London (Baltimore, 1994).
⁴ Alfred W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality: Quantification and Western Society, 1250–1600 (Cambridge, 1997), 5.
⁵ Crosby, Measure of Reality, 122.
⁶ Crosby, Measure of Reality, 53.
⁷ Crosby, Measure of Reality, 54–55.
⁸ Crosby, Measure of Reality, 9, 10, italics in original.
⁹ For an excellent discussion of Descartes' social and mental universe, see Stephen Gaukroger, Descartes: An Intellectual Biography (Oxford, 1995); compare Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France 1570–1715 (Berkeley, Calif., 1993).
¹⁰ Margaret C. Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (New York, 1997), chap. 6. I am aware of how difficult it is to find evidence for affective lives prior to 1700; that should not stop an author from looking for it.
¹¹ Richard Henry Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, with a new introduction by Adam B. Seligman (1926; New Brunswick, N.J., 1998). See Robert K. Merton, Science, Technology, and Society in Seventeenth Century England (New York, 1970); Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution 1603–1714 (London, 1961); Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley, Calif., 1992).
¹² Frances Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London, 1964).
¹³ Deborah Harkness, "Managing an Experimental Household: The Dees of Mortlake and the Practice of Natural Philosophy," Isis 88 (1997): 247–62.
¹⁴ See Crosby, Measure of Reality, 53–55.
¹⁵ Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, The Janus Faces of Genius: The Role of Alchemy in Newton's Thought (Cambridge, 1991).
¹⁶ History-Social Science Framework California Public Schools 1997 Updated Edition and Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), as upgraded at their respective web sites. For a survey of where various states now stand, see David W. Saxe, "State History Standards," Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, Fordham Report (February 1998), vol. 2, no. 1, www.edexcellence.net/fordham/foreports.html.
¹⁷ For a development of his point, see Jacob, Scientific Culture.
¹⁸ Compare Larry Stewart, "Glorious Industry: The Revolution of 1688 and Technological Change in England," Annals of Scholarship 5 (1988): 415–38.
¹⁹ Eric Dorn Brose, The Politics of Technological Change in Prussia: Out of the Shadow of Antiquity, 1809–1848 (Princeton, N.J., 1993).
²⁰ For the most recent contribution to the history of science education in Britain, see David A. Reid, "Science and Pedagogy in the Dissenting Academies of Enlightenment Britain" (PhD dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1999). The story was nowhere near as open for women, but note the total absence of mathematical learning for French girls; see Martine Sonnet, L'éducation des filles au temps des Lumières (Paris, 1987).
²¹ Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers, Paris, MS U 216, Le Turc to Citoyen, 14 Nivôse An 3 [December 1794]. I owe this reference to the kindness of the late J. R. Harris. See J. R. Harris, Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer: Britain and France in the 18th Century (Aldershot, Hampshire, 1998).

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