|
|
|
Book Review
| Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History. Edited by Susan R. Schrepfer and Philip Scranton. Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture, Volume 5. New York: Routledge, 2004. ix+ 275 pp. Illustrations, notes, list of contributors, index. Cloth $90.00, paper $24.95.
|
| Beginning with the domestication of the wolf, the manufacture of animals and plants is among the oldest human enterprises. Of course, that is a dramatic way of putting it, but the conversion of wild grains and pulses into crops, and of wild ungulates into flocks and herds—that is, the development of agriculture– underlies the many and various elaborations of human culture that have emerged in the last ten (or so) millennia. Some of these small but significant creative acts have been retroactively recognized by modern taxonomists, when they use a distinctive species name to differentiate the domesticated derivative from its parent, even if interbreeding between the two species remains possible–thus the wolf is called Canis lupus and the dog is called Canis familiaris. With most crop and livestock species, domestication was only the first and largest step in a process that ultimately led to strains or varieties or races or breeds (the number of alternative terms is more revealing than are most attempts to define or distinguish them) adapted to a range of habitats and functions. As a result, for example, the species Bos taurus (cattle) now comprehends both small hardy animals and animals that reach enormous size in settings of livestock luxury, both animals whose forte is meat production and animals designed for the dairy. The wild cabbage of Europe (Brassica oleracea) has similarly given rise to cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, and kale. |
1
|
|
The essays collected in this volume are concerned with the subsequent process of refinement, rather than the original process of domestication. Indeed, they all focus on a relatively recent modification of these ancient processes. As the title of the volume suggests, they collectively assume that the changes in scale and method that have characterized the production, distribution, and marketing of industrial goods from the eighteenth century on had equivalent impact in the realm of agriculture. The notion that the breeding of animals and plants is a kind of technology is itself neither new nor particularly obscure: biotechnologists frequently invoke it when they argue that their activities require no novel forms of regulation, since they are merely extension of an age-old process. But this set of focused case studies very persuasively illustrates the extent to which the business of producing animals and plants has altered in the last two centuries. As they elaborate these changes, these essays also demonstrate the necessity of understanding the history of agriculture within a wider disciplinary context that includes business history, the history of technology, and the history of science, as well as environmental history. |
2
|
|
Industrializing Organisms is divided into two sections, one for plants and one for animals, but the essays in both sections effectively support these claims. There is space to illustrate this convergence with only a few examples. Thus in "Creating an Industrial Plant," which deals with the biotechnology of sugar production in Cuba, Mark J. Smith argues that changes in mass marketing and consumption led to the integration of cane field and factory. Ann N. Greene's "War Horses: Equine Technology in the American Civil War," explores the apparent paradox that the first industrial war relied so heavily on the supply of animals. "Turbo-Cows" by Barbara Orland shows how the modern high-yielding dairy cow resulted from the application to agriculture of a modern culture of "competition, standardization, performance control, selection, and predictability" (p. 184). In "Canine Technologies, Model Patients," Stephen Pemberton tells the fascinating story of the production of bleeder laboratory dogs as models for the study of human hemophilia. Other essays deal with horticulture, wheat, forestry, chickens, and hogs. |
3
|
|
None of the essays offers much support for the claim embodied implicitly in the subtitle and explicitly in Edmund Russell's "Introduction." The changes in animals and plants discussed in this volume, and the processes that led to those changes, are interesting and significant primarily on the limited human historical scale, as the contributors so effectively demonstrate. Calling them evolutionary does not help to understand them, and institutionalizing this label in a sub-discipline might even prove counterproductive. The achievement of this volume lies primarily in the way it brings together historical perspectives that have normally been separated, in part by disciplinary taxonomy. Taken together, these essays suggest that, at this point, lumping may be more constructive than splitting. |
4
|
|
Harriet Ritvo is Arthur J. Conner Professor of History at M.I.T. and the author of The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in the Victorian Age and The Platypus and the Mermaid, and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination. She currently is working on a book about environment and politics in the Victorian period. |
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|