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(More customer reviews)Historians and philosophers of science have long pondered the question "What is science?" In the mid-twentieth century, the famous philosopher of science Carl Popper in an attempt to answer this very question argued that scientific theories capable of falsification demarcated the truly scientific from the pseudoscientific. Although Popper's thesis has fallen out of favor among most scholars in the Humanities for its overtly essentialist and positivist bent, his spatializing language nevertheless continues to define the question. According to Thomas Gieryn, the boundaries between "science" and "pseudoscience" are never fixed, but are rather the outcome of a series of historically and spatially contingent representations of where those boundaries should lay. Thus for Gieryn, science is "Nothing but a space, one that acquires its authority precisely from and through episodic negotiations of its flexible and contextually contingent borders and territories. Science is a kind of spatial `marker' for cognitive authority, empty until its insides get filled and its borders drawn amidst context-bound negotiations over who and what is `scientific.'"
Tides of History offers a richly empirical account of the history of tidal science and British imperialism in mid-nineteenth century Britain. Deeply influenced by the recent "spatial turn" in the history of science, Tides of History has as one of its aims to offer a spatial and historical narrative of both "the practice of science in a new global environment [the oceans] and the way Victorian scientists reconceptualized that environment through the practice of science" (17). Tides explores the ways that the spatial reconceptualization of tidal science from the littoral to the ocean enabled and was enabled by the imperial ambitions of Britain's Navy in addition to the economic imperative of keeping trading vessels safe from unruly pelagic environments. But Tides of History is also a story about scientific "boundary work." As both British imperialists and scientists expanded their spatial purview to include the ocean, so too did scientists such as William Whewell take the opportunity to legitimize and open up a new space for the modern scientist, one that expressly devalued the contribution of lay "calculators" of tidal charts and tables and privileged elites. For Whewell, the history of tidal science up to the mid-eighteenth century highlighted the importance of theory over observation and calculation in the development of the scientific discipline.
Although Tides of History offers a roughly chronological account of the spatial development of tidal science, the text can be divided into two interrelated sections, which might be described as pre-Whewellian and Whewellian. The first three chapters describe the interest in, state, and practice of tidal theory. Each chapter has its specific aims. Chapter 1 describes the seventeenth-century concern over the littoral environment, especially along the River Thames. The author demonstrates how despite Newton's initial tidal theory based on universal gravitation, tidal science remained a largely unsystematized study. Partly this was due to the inadequacy of Newton's theory for predicting tides, but it also reflected a lack of practical interest. The next two chapters go on to describe how the ebb and flow of the Thames changed in response to a bevy of environmental modifications to the river (straightening and banking the river, for example) in the early nineteenth century and how commercial concerns over these changes led to a renewed interest in tidal theory. Importantly, as the author argues in the third chapter, most of this work derived not from elite scientists (although figures such as John Lubbock, a banker, might be considered part of this group), but from rather more mundane sources: calculators.
The last half of the book, and the most argumentatively and narratively satisfying, traces the development of tidal science ("tidology" as Whewell termed it) as a thoroughly elite, and hence scientific, program. Two main spatial themes organize the last section. The first explores how Whewell's "spatial turn" in the study of tides (i.e. the movement from observation and calculation of tides in the local to a synoptic view of the oceans as exemplified by Whewell's isomaps) reorganized and reconceptualized the oceans into a geographic space amenable to the control of scientists and thus the Admiralty. This spatial move not only furthered the increasing alignment of interests between science and the state--and thus furthered British imperialism--but also opened up new spaces for redefining the boundaries between who and what is scientific, a boundary that increasing came to privilege the theorist over the observer and the elite over the lay.
Historians of science interested in British imperialism, the geophysical sciences, and spatial methodology, will find Tides of History fascinating and illuminating. There is something here for environmental historians too. The author's emphasis on the historicity of the oceans--tying conceptions of the oceans to contingent scientific practices and statecraft--is an important corrective for environmental historians who at times too easily read our conceptions of oceans today onto the past. In short, readers of Tides of History will find a sophisticated spatial history, one that show how demarcating the boundaries between the scientific and the non-scientific were predicated on a number of other equally significant spatial moves.
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In the first half of the nineteenth century, the British sought to master the physical properties of the oceans; in the second half, they lorded over large portions of the oceans' outer rim. The dominance of Her Majesty's navy was due in no small part to collaboration between the British Admiralty, the maritime community, and the scientific elite. Together, they transformed the vast emptiness of the ocean into an ordered and bounded grid. In the process, the modern scientist emerged. Science itself expanded from a limited and local undertaking receiving parsimonious state support to worldwide and relatively well financed research involving a hierarchy of practitioners.Analyzing the economic, political, social, and scientific changes on which the British sailed to power, Tides of History shows how the British Admiralty collaborated closely not only with scholars, such as William Whewell, but also with the maritime community —sailors, local tide table makers, dockyard officials, and harbormasters—in order to systematize knowledge of the world's oceans, coasts, ports, and estuaries. As Michael S. Reidy points out, Britain's security and prosperity as a maritime nation depended on its ability to maneuver through the oceans and dominate coasts and channels. The practice of science and the rise of the scientist became inextricably linked to the process of European expansion.
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