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25-07-2015, 04:18

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY.

View that science somehow leads to technology through the model known oddly as the ‘‘linear model’’ fared poorly in the late twentieth century. The linear model has it that in the past, pure science led to applied science, applied science to technology, and from there the path led to engineering and production. Among late-twentieth - and early-twenty-first-century scholars, however, there is consensus: first, that technology drove science at least as much as the reverse; second, that scientific under-standing—whatever that precisely means—is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for technological progress; and third, that both are deeply influenced by a host of cultural, social, and economic factors too numerous and in dispute to list here. There is a danger that in their haste to criticize the highly simplified and schematic model, critics will end up without an appreciation of the importance of scientific knowledge in the process of technological and economic development between 1780 and 1914. Every technique has an ‘‘epistemic base’’— that is, knowledge about natural regularities and phenomena—on which it rests. At times this basis is very narrow or barely even exists; in those cases, the technique in question works, but nobody is quite sure how and why. In other instances, some minimum has to be known before the technique can be realized.

THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE

Perhaps the safest generalization one can make is that there was no single model or straightforward relationship between scientific knowledge and technological practice. Each industry and each practice differed in its need to rely on the formalized knowledge that was still known as ‘‘natural philosophy’’ in 1780. In the ensuing ‘‘long nineteenth century’’ (1789-1914), a large number of important inventions were made that owed little to science. This would include most breakthroughs in the textile industry; some of the canonical inventions that revolutionized the cotton industry were tricky mechanical problems that took mechanical ingenuity to solve, but ‘‘science’’ as such had little to do with their solution. Similarly, the invention of barbed wire by Joseph Farwell Glidden (18131906) in 1874, while of substantial significance to the American agricultural economy, owed nothing to science. A common story is that science discovers some phenomenon that can be exploited. The technique that emerges subsequently serves as a focusing device that makes scientists take a closer look, and as they begin to understand the underlying natural processes better and better, they can improve the technique and adapt it to new uses.

The paradigmatic example is of course steam power. By 1780 steam power was on its way to assume a central role in the industrialization and transportation revolution. The ‘‘science’’ behind it was nontrivial: to build an atmospheric engine, one had to know at least that the earth’s surface was at the bottom of an atmosphere, whose pressure could be

Michael Faraday’s inductor. Faraday used this device in 1831 to establish the principle of electromagnetic induction.

The Royal Institution, London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library

Exploited. James Watt’s (1736-1819) improvements to Thomas Newcomen’s (1663-1729) steam engine depended in part on the further realization, due to his fellow Scotsman William Cullen (1710-1790), that in a vacuum water boils at much lower, even tepid, temperatures, releasing steam that would ruin the vacuum in a cylinder. Yet ‘‘understanding’’ steam power in a way that would conform to our notions of science was still many decades off: in the 1820s and 1830s, the best theorists of steam power still regarded it as a vapor engine rather than recognizing it for the heat engine it was. Inspired and focused by the steam engines they observed, the great theorists of thermodynamics such as Sadi Carnot (17961832) and James Prescott Joule (1818-1889) finally formulated the science of thermodynamics. Technology did not ‘‘depend’’ on science, but better science could improve it to the point where the productivity growth due to continuous improvements drove economic growth.

Another example is the electromagnetic telegraph, one of the truly transforming inventions of the nineteenth century. Here, too, some science was necessary to make it possible. In this case, it was the discovery that electricity and magnetism were related after all (something that had been in serious doubt). In 1819 a Danish physicist, Hans Christian Oersted (1777-1851), brought a compass needle near a wire through which a current was passing. It forced the needle to point at a right angle to the current. A number of scientists put their mind to the problem, and by the mid-1830s Joseph Henry (1797-1878) and others realized that an electromagnetic telegraph was possible, and by 1837 the device was shown to work.

Yet the epistemic base was still quite narrow, and it took the genius and energy of William Thomson (1824-1907, later Lord Kelvin) to work out the principles governing the relation between the signal and the resistance, inductive capacity, and length, and to compute the resistivity of copper and the inductive capacity of gutta-percha, the insulating material. He used his knowledge to invent a special galvanometer, a siphon recorder (which automatically registered signals), and a technique of sending short reverse pulses immediately following the main pulse to sharpen the signal. These inventions were based on best-practice mathematical physics, and although the epistemic base was far from complete (Kelvin resisted the electromagnetics of James Clerk Maxwell [18311879] and held on to the notion of ether, believed to be the weightless medium for the transmission of electromagnetic waves), they improved the telegraph in every direction.

A third example of the subtle interplay between science and technology in the nineteenth century is found in soil chemistry. Since antiquity, farmers had realized that they could improve agricultural output by adding certain substances to the soil. Among those substances, animal manure and marl were widely used. Nobody, of course, quite understood how and why these procedures worked, and as a result progress in agricultural productivity was limited when judged by the standards of later development. By 1800 agricultural writers were busy cataloging what kind of substances worked on which soils and for what crops, but the episte-mic base this practice remained rather narrow and consisted mostly of empirical patterns that these writers thought they were observing. However, the closing decades of the eighteenth century saw the rise of modern chemistry, and by the 1820s and 1830s, German chemists led by Friedrich Wohler (1800-1882) and Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) discovered what today is called organic chemistry and realized that it helped them understand why certain substances such as phosphates and nitrates improved agricultural productivity. By midcentury, the important role of various chemical substances was better understood, and European farmers began to apply potash and nitrates to their soils. The greatest triumph of science was beyond question the distillation of ammonia from the atmosphere: nitrates were recognized as an essential ingredient in both fertilizers and explosives, yet although most of the atmosphere consists of nitrogen, it was not known how to extract it. Fritz Haber (1868-1934) and Carl Bosch (18741940) solved this problem around 1910. Both were highly trained professional chemists, yet their process still relied on a great deal of trial-and-error research.

Perhaps nowhere are the complexities of the relation between science and technology better illustrated than in medical technology. The growth of medical science was unusually slow. It is not an exaggeration to point out that by 1800, medical science had developed little beyond the great medical writers of antiquity. Theories of disease were confused and mutually contradictory, and the ability of science to prevent, let alone cure, often-fatal infectious diseases was negligible. This started to change in the early nineteenth century due to two major developments. The first is the recognition that relatively poorly understood natural phenomena can be analyzed by means of statistical data. On that account, for instance, it became clear through the research of the French physician Pierre-Charles-Alexandre Louis (17871872) around 1840 that bleeding ill patients did little to improve their health, and (through the work of British physicians such as John Snow [1813-1858] and William Budd [1811-1880] in the 1850s) that water that appeared and tasted clean could still transmit deadly diseases. As a result, a great deal of effort was directed toward filtering the water supply and separating drinking

Illustration of blood transfusion from the American Scientist magazine, 5 September 1874. The technique of blood transfusion developed significantly during the nineteenth century. After the first successful transfusions beginning in 1818, doctors experimented with various techniques, including the use of milk as a substitute for blood. Joseph Lister’s 1867 discovery of the efficacy of antiseptics to prevent infection during the procedure was of particular importance. Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library

Water from waste decades before the actual episte-mic base of infectious diseases was established by Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) and Robert Koch (1843-1910) in the 1860s and 1870s. Following Pasteur and Koch, however, it not only became clear how and why Louis and Snow had been correct, but also how to apply this knowledge to further advance private and public health through preventive medicine. Pasteur’s science helped change and improve the technology of surgery as much as it improved that of food canning—even if both had existed before his work.

DRIVERS AND INCENTIVES IN KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION

The model that scientific knowledge somehow ‘‘leads’’ to technology is an oversimplification for another reason as well. Science is more than just the formal and consensual knowledge familiar to the twenty-first century. The heritage of the eighteenth century to the modern age and the taproot of technological progress and economic growth was a radically different view of why and how science should be practiced. Curiosity and ‘‘wisdom’’ had to make room for another set of motives—namely, the growing conviction that understanding nature was the key to controlling it, and that controlling nature was in turn the key to technological and economic progress.

This attitude, often traced back to Francis Bacon (1561-1626), became more and more influential in the eighteenth century. It involved the separation of scientific practice from religion, the belief that nature was orderly, and that natural laws, once properly formulated, were universal with no exceptions (i. e., magic). It involved major cultural changes, above all the practice of ‘‘open science’’ (that is, placing scientific findings in the public realm), that had emerged during the Renaissance but only became unequivocally established during the second half of the seventeenth century. Open science did two things. First, it made scientific knowledge available to those who might be able to use it. Second, it increased the credibility of scientific knowledge by exposing it to the scrutiny and criticism of other experts. It was widely believed—often somewhat over-optimistically— that once scientific claims had been exposed to the rest of the world, those that survived must be correct. Scientists were rewarded by fame, prestige, and at times comfortable and secure positions, but they sought credit, not profit.

By 1780 the realm of useful knowledge had bifurcated into knowledge that was ‘‘propositional’’ (including science, mathematics, geography, and a catalog of successful techniques) in that it stated discoveries about nature and placed them in the public realm, and knowledge that was ‘‘prescriptive,’’ that is, provided the actual instructions on how to produce. The latter kind of knowledge was increasingly driven by profit motives, and for it to keep expanding, it needed to secure a way of compensating inventors for their efforts and investments. This could be (and was) done in a variety of ways. One was to secure intellectual property rights in the form of patents, which would place the knowledge in the public realm but prohibit its exploitation without the permission of the patentee. The second was to keep the invention secret, a strategy that could work at best only if the innovation could not be reverse-engineered. The third was to reward the inventor through some formal government body that assessed the value to society of this knowledge and paid the inventor from the public treasury. Finally, a few inventors simply relied on the advantage of being the first mover; they knew they would be imitated but hoped to make enough money simply by getting there first.

ACCESS AND PROGRESS

In any event, the central factor in the growth of technology in the period from 1780 to 1914 was the continuous improvement in the access to useful knowledge. Knowledge meant both power and prosperity, but only if it could be accessed by those best able to exploit it. At times, of course, scientists rolled up their sleeves and applied their knowledge to new techniques themselves. The modern-age specialization between ivory-tower theorists and practically minded engineers and inventors (more of a stereotype than a reality even in the twenty-first century) was comparatively rare in the period of the First Industrial Revolution. Many theorists and experimentalists became interested in and solved applied production problems. The great chemist Humphry Davy (1778-1829), to cite one example, invented the mining safety lamp, wrote a textbook on agricultural chemistry, and discovered that a tropical plant named catechu was a useful additive to tanning. His colleague Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford, 1753-1814) was most famous for the proof that heat is not a liquid (known as ‘‘caloric’’) that flows in and out of substances. Yet Rumford was deeply interested in technology, helped establish the first steam engines in Bavaria, and invented (among other things) the drip percolator coffeemaker, a smokeless-chimney Rumford stove, and an improved oil lamp. In the later nineteenth century, the physicist Joseph Henry (1797-1878) probably can make a good claim to being the inventor of the electromagnetic telegraph, and Lord Kelvin owned dozens of patents.

Communication between scientists and manufacturers became a matter of routine in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such access is essential if the growth in useful knowledge is to have economic consequences. Early on, such contact often took place in meeting places and scientific societies that became typical of Enlightenment Europe. Of those, most famous were the Birmingham Lunar Society, in which manufacturers such as Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) and Matthew Boulton (1728-1809) picked the brains of scientists such as Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) and Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), and the London Chapter Coffee House, which boasted a similarly distinguished clientele. The Royal Institution, founded in 1800, provided public lectures for the general public.

During the nineteenth century, the number of forums in which manufacturers and engineers could meet and communicate with scientists increased rapidly. Scientists were often retained as consultants and inventors. The German chemical

Orrery designed by Thomas Blunt c. 1808. Avid interest in astronomical knowledge during the nineteenth century was manifested in numerous mechanical models of the solar system, or orreries. The first was developed in England by George Graham during the early years of the eighteenth century and named for his patron, the Earl of Orrery. Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library

And electrical firms, which carried out a substantial amount of the research and development that created the Second Industrial Revolution, often retained university professors who practiced a ‘‘revolving door’’ kind of career between their academic and industrial jobs. Thomas Edison (18471931), whose knowledge of science was intuitive rather than formal, employed a number of highly trained scientists with whom he consulted, though at times he wisely chose to ignore their advice. Yet what has to be realized is that personal contact was only necessary insofar that knowledge could not be codified—that is, described and depicted in words or pictures.

The proliferation of scientific and technological literature in the nineteenth century was simply enormous. This proliferation took the form of encyclopedias, textbooks, manuals, as well as scientific periodicals of many varieties. Libraries sprang up everywhere and the declining real price of books and printed matter made for an ever-growing accessibility of scientific and mathematical knowledge to those who could make use of it. Equally important, engineering education became increasingly science-based. In the French grandes ecoles and in the German universities, mining academies, and technical colleges, formal science became part of the education of even midlevel technicians.

Inventing remained, as it is in the twenty-first century, open to ‘‘tinkerers’’ such as Sir Henry Bessemer (1813-1898), Sidney Gilchrist Thomas (1850-1885), and Edison. Yet their inventions, no matter how brilliant, only worked because they were subsequently refined and improved by people well trained in the relevant science.

Of course, some classic inventions originally were simply mechanical. The zipper (patented in 1893 by Whitcomb Judson) and paper clips (introduced by the Gem company in Britain in the 1890s) were much like barbed wire, simple and useful ideas that needed no science. But even in many cases of simple inventions, knowledge of the finer details of metallurgy, electricity, or mass production engineering was needed for further development.

FEEDBACK FROM TECHNOLOGY TO SCIENCE

The interplay of science and technology in the nineteenth century was bidirectional and can be viewed as positive feedback in the sense that technology helped science just as science helped technology. Such positive feedback mechanisms often lead to unstable systems that never converge to a given position. While such a view may be unsettling to scholars who like to think of the world as inherently stable and predictable, it is perhaps not an inappropriate way of viewing the historical process of technological change from 1780 to 1914, a period that displays continuous unpredictable change as its most enduring feature.

The ways in which technology affected science can be viewed in three broad categories. First, as already been shown, technological practices directed and focused the interests of researchers to discover how and why they worked. The search for the deep nature of electricity spurred the work of such scientists as Svante August Arrhenius (1859-1927), George Johnstone Stoney (18261911), and Sir Joseph John Thomson (18561940), leading to the discovery of the electron. It is almost comical to contemplate Thomson’s alleged toast at an event celebrating his Nobel Prize in physics: ‘‘Here’s to the electron, may no one ever find a use for it.’’ By that time, of course, electrical lighting and appliances were ubiquitous. The practice of food canning, invented by Nicolas Appert (1749-1841) in 1795, stimulated Pasteur into his famous studies of putrefaction.

Or consider geology: the need to develop a better method to prospect for coal inspired William Smith (1769-1839) toward a growing understanding of geology and the ability to identify and describe strata on the basis of the fossils found in them. The idea (already widely diffused on the Continent but unknown to Smith) that there were strong natural regularities in the way geological strata were layered led to the first geological maps, including Smith’s celebrated Geologic Map of England and Wales with Part of Scotland (1815), a ‘‘map that changed the world.’’ It increased the epistemic base on which mining and prospecting for coal rested. One can track with precision where and through which institutions this interaction between propositional and prescriptive knowledge took place and the institutional environment that made them possible. Although the marriage between geology and mining took a long time to yield results, the widening epistemic base in nineteenth-century mining technology surely was the reason that the many alarms that Britain was exhausting its coal supplies turned out to be false.

Technology also stimulated science by allowing it to carry out new research. The extent to which science was constrained by instruments and tools is rarely fully appreciated. Astronomy, it has often been observed, entered a new age the day that Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) aimed his brand-new telescope toward the sky. Microscopy had a similar effect on the world of microorganisms. The invention of the modern compound microscope by Joseph Jackson Lister (1786-1869, father of the surgeon) in 1830 serves as another good example. Lister was an amateur optician, whose revolutionary method of grinding lenses greatly improved image resolution by eliminating spherical aberrations. His invention changed microscopy from an amusing diversion to a serious scientific endeavor and eventually allowed Pasteur, Koch, and their disciples to refute spontaneous generation and to establish the germ theory. The chemical revolution initiated by Antoine Laurent Lavoisier (17431794) and his French collaborators might not have achieved such a triumph had he not been equipped with unusually precise instruments. The famous mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace (17491827) was also a skilled designer of equipment and helped to build the calorimeter that resulted in the celebrated Memoir on Heat by Laplace and Lavoisier (1783), in which respiration was identified as analogous to burning. Much of the late-eighteenth-century chemical revolution was made possible by new instruments such as Alessandro Volta’s (1745-1827) eudiometer, a glass container with two electrodes intended to measure the content of air, used by Henry Cavendish (17311810) to show the nature of water as a compound.

Perhaps the classic case of an invention that enabled scientific progress was the Voltaic Pile, the first battery that produced continuous current, invented by Volta in 1800. Through the new tool of electrolysis, pioneered by William Nicholson (1753-1815) and Davy, chemists were able to isolate element after element and fill in much of the detail in the maps whose rough contours had been sketched by Lavoisier and John Dalton (1766-1844). Volta’s pile, as Davy put it, acted as an ‘‘alarm bell to experimenters in every part of Europe.’’ Electrochemistry became the tool with which much of the chemical revolution was placed on a firm and systematic footing. For instance, Davy established that chlorine, the miraculous bleaching substance that played such a major role in the new cotton industry, was an element and not a compound.

Finally, technology often made it possible to verify and test scientific hypotheses and to decide scientific controversies. Much science is the subject of endless debate, and nothing will settle a scientific debate as effectively as a demonstrable useful application. The success of Koch and his followers in identifying a host of bacterial pathogens and the subsequent advances in public and private health helped wipe out whatever doubt there remained about the validity of the germ theory. Heinrich Rudolph Hertz’s (1857-1894) work on oscillating sparks in the 1880s and the subsequent development of wireless communications by Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge (1851-1940) confirmed Maxwell’s purely theoretical work on electromagnetic fields.

Most decisively, the success of the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk in 1903 resolved the dispute among physicists on whether heavier-than-air machines were feasible. In 1901 the astronomer and mathematician Simon Newcomb (18351909, the first American since Benjamin Franklin [1706-1790] to be elected to the Institute of France) had still opined that flight carrying any-

Revolving dioptric apparatus for a lighthouse.

Illustration from the Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts and Manufactures, edited by Charles Tomlinson, 1852. A celebration of midcentury technology, Tomlinson’s cyclopaedia was published to coincide with the London Exhibition of 1851. Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library/Ken Welsh

Thing more than ‘‘an insect’’ would be impossible. Here, too, theory and practice worked cheek-byjowl. The Wright brothers worked closely with Octave Chanute (1832-1910), the leading aeronautical engineer of the age. Yet it was only following their successful flight that Ludwig Prandtl (1875-1953) published his magisterial work on how to compute airplane lift and drag using rigorous methods.

COULD ECONOMIC GROWTH HAVE TAKEN PLACE WITHOUT SCIENCE?

It is often argued that the First Industrial Revolution (1760-1830) owed little to formal science. Most of the pathbreaking inventions such as Sir Richard Arkwright’s (1732-1792) throstle (1769) or Henry Cort’s (1740-1800) puddling and rolling technique (1785) were independent of the scientific advances of the age. While it is easy to show scientific progress during the Industrial Revolution, it is not easy to come up with many mechanical inventions that required advanced scientific knowledge as such. There are, of course, a few such instances, but before the middle of the nineteenth century they were not the rule.

In other words, scientific knowledge before 1850 was an input in innovation, but its importance was not decisive. Perhaps the best way of thinking about it is to realize that in addition to science affecting technology and vice versa, both were affected by a culture of growing material rationalism associated with the Industrial Enlightenment. It is interesting, however, to note that the major inventors of the time increasingly felt that they needed science and scientists to help them. Watt’s milieu of scientists in Glasgow (and later Birmingham), Wedgwood’s prodding of scientists (including Lavoisier himself) for advice on the technical problems that came up with his pottery, or the obsession of Leeds woolen manufacturer Benjamin Gott (1762-1840) with scientific experiment and chemistry demonstrate that such beliefs were widespread, at least in the circles that counted most.

As the nineteenth century advanced, such expectations were increasingly realized. One of the less well-known consequences of the chemical revolution is the work of the French chemist Michel-Eugene Chevreul (1786-1889), who discovered in the 1820s the nature of fatty acids and turned the manufacture of soap and candles from an art into a science. As director of dyeing at the Manufacture des Gobelins, he had a direct interest in the chemistry of dyes and colors. The original work on the chemistry of dyeing had been carried out by his predecessor at the Gobelins, Claude-Louis Berthollet (1748-1822, famous for the discovery of the bleaching properties of chlorine), but his work had been cut short by his political activities and it fell to Chevreul to realize his program.

The progress of steel, one of the truly central inventions that heralded in the Second Industrial Revolution, too, depended on science more than the usual story of the invention of the Bessemer process suggests. The epistemic base of steelmaking at the time was larger than Sir Henry Bessemer’s (1813-1898) knowledge. This was demonstrated when an experienced and trained metallurgist named Robert Forester Mushet (1811-1891) showed that Bessemer steel contained excess oxygen, a problem that could be remedied by adding a decarburizer consisting of a mixture of manganese, carbon, and iron. In the years following Bessemer and Mushet’s work, the Siemens Martin steelmaking process was perfected, and Henry Clifton Sorby (1826-1908) discovered the changes in crystals in iron upon hardening and related the trace quantities of carbon and other constituents to the qualities and hardness of steel. Steelmaking may not have been ‘‘scientific’’ in the modern sense of the word, but without the growing science of metallurgy, its advance eventually would have been stunted.

Economic growth can take place in the absence of advances in knowledge, but when it does so, it usually is more vulnerable and harder to sustain over long periods and large areas. When it is based on advances in knowledge, it is much less likely to be reversed. The twentieth century made a serious attempt to return to barbarism and to undo the advances of the years from 1780 to 1914, but in the end progress was resumed and has led to the stupefying growth in riches of the post-1950 decades.

The ‘‘Great Synergy,’’ as Vaclav Smil has referred to it, between science and technology (or perhaps between propositional and prescriptive knowledge) is the central event ofmodern European history. It led to sustained and irreversible gains in productivity and quality of life, to the doubling of life expectancy, and to the realization of lifestyles that in 1780 must have seemed unimaginable in their material comfort and opulence.

See also Agricultural Revolution; Industrial Revolution, Second.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Headrick, Daniel R. When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850. Oxford, U. K., 2000.

Jacob, Margaret C. Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West. New York, 1997.

Jacob, Margaret C., and Larry Stewart. Practical Matter: Newton’s Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687-1851. Cambridge, Mass., 2004.

Mokyr, Joel. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. New York, 1990.

--. The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the

Knowledge Economy. Princeton, N. J., 2002.

--. ‘‘The Intellectual Origins of Modern Economic

Growth.’’ Journal of Economic History 65, no. 2 (2005): 285-351.

Musson, A. E., and Eric Robinson. Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution Manchester, U. K., 1969.

Petrosky, Henry. Invention by Design: How Engineers Get from Thought to Thing. Cambridge, Mass., 1996.

Rosenberg, Nathan. Perspectives on Technology. Cambridge, U. K., 1976.

--. ‘‘How Exogenous Is Science?’’ In his Inside the

Black Box: Technology and Economics. Cambridge, U. K., 1982.

Smil, Vaclav. Creating the Twentieth Century: Technical Innovations of 1867-1914 and Their Lasting Impact. New York, 2005.

Smith, Crosbie, and M. Norton Wise. Energy and Empire: A Biographical Study of Lord Kelvin. Cambridge, U. K., 1989.

Winchester, Simon. The Map That Changed the World: The Tale of William Smith and the Birth of a New Science. London, 2001.

Joel Mokyr

SCOTLAND. During a century of remarkable change, Scotland underwent some of the most profound social, economic, and political transformations found anywhere in Europe. In 1789 it was still primarily a rural society and an agrarian economy, existing politically in the shadow of its English neighbor. Yet it was separate and different in important ways, and rapid change was already underway. Scotland was a European leader in the fields of agriculture and commerce, with established coalmining and a developing textile-based industrial sector; its philosophers were changing the face of European thought; its inhabitants saw themselves as Scots, but also as Britons; its people, practices, and ideas were beginning to leave a stamp on the whole British, European, and Atlantic world. By 1914 Scotland was one of the most urbanized and industrialized countries in Europe, possessing an influential political voice within Britain and substantial wealth as well. Its people spanned the globe as traders, imperial administrators, sailors, and soldiers.

In 1789 Scotland and England shared a monarchy, parliament, empire, and an island, yet they were in many ways very different countries. The most obvious difference between Scotland and England lay in rural social structure. Scotland’s rural population generally lived in dispersed farm settlements more reminiscent of Scandinavia than the nucleated villages of England. Landownership was concentrated in the hands of a few great lords and Scottish rural society was quasi-feudal. Except in some limited regions, there was no real equivalent of the English yeoman farmer. Underway since the seventeenth century in the Lothians (the most agriculturally precocious area of Scotland, thanks to its proximity to Edinburgh, the largest city until around 1790 when Glasgow took over), consolidation of tenancies and the removal of subtenants accelerated rapidly across Scotland from the 1780s. By the 1820s Lowland society had become polarized between landowners, tenants, and landless laborers, most subtenants and many smaller tenants having been swept from the land. In the Lothians, the laborers were mostly married men paid largely in kind. Elsewhere in Scotland (such as the northeast), single servants (both living-in and housed in bothies, or huts) and smallholders provided the labor that in England came from workers hired by the day. In Scotland, where mixed agriculture was less seasonal than that of much of England, females, children, and

The Highland Shepherd. Painting by Rosa Bonheur, 1859. Hamburg Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany/Bridgeman Art Library

(for the arable Lowlands) migrant workers from the Highlands met additional labor needs.

ECONOMIC CHANGES

Aristocrats and gentry (called lairds in Scotland) dominated economic, political, and cultural life, for the rural middle class in Scotland was small. In contrast, a bourgeoisie flourished in the blossoming ‘‘New Towns’’ of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Built on the profits of law, medicine, and commerce, Edinburgh’s New Town is the most famous, but comparably extensive late-Georgian developments in the neoclassical style of London and Bath can be found in Glasgow (where wealth came primarily from the tobacco trade). Later Victorian suburbs bulked out the middle-class housing stock of these and other major towns such as Aberdeen, Perth, and Dundee.

If the middle class had been made prior to 1832, new sources ofwealth enhanced its importance as the century progressed. Heavy industry began to expand from the 1830s and Scotland became a world-class industrial country. The chemical complex at St. Rollox in Glasgow was the largest manufactory in the world. The thread-making firms of J. & P. Coats and Clarks of Paisley merged in 1896 to become the largest manufacturing firm in Britain (and fifth largest in the world). Coal output rose dramatically to meet the new industrial and domestic demand, to the benefit of Scotland’s economy and the detriment of its environment. Scotland became an urbanized and industrialized country in the second half of the nineteenth century. Agriculture employed two-thirds of the male labor force around 1789, 30 percent in 1851, and just 13 percent in 1911.

POLITICS

The economic changes that created a middle class of merchants, tradesmen, and professionals early in the nineteenth century were eventually reflected in political developments. From 1707, with the Union of Parliaments, until 2000, Scotland had no representative assembly but shared its government with its larger English neighbor. Eighteenth-century Scotland was effectively managed, with little interference from London, by a system of aristocratic patronage. Scotland was able to make its own place in the British polity.

Yet the Hanoverian political consensus was being destabilized before Catholic Emancipation (1829) and the Reform Bill (1832) put an end to it. Until 1832 Scotland’s parliamentary franchise was far more restricted than in England. In the 1780s Scotland had just 3,000 county electors in a population of perhaps 1.5 million (0.2 percent), whereas the English electorate may have been as large as a third of a million in a population of about 7.5 million people (4 percent). The burgh (urban) franchise was confined to town councils: Edinburgh’s member of Parliament (MP) at Westminster was elected by just thirty-three men prior to 1832. The electorate in England increased by 80 percent from the pre-Reform figure; in Scotland the change was 1,400 percent. That meant 13 percent of Scotland’s male population could vote compared with about 20 percent of England’s. By 1867, the proportion of males enfranchised was approximately equal in Scotland and England at about one third, and in 1884 the franchise was homogenized across Britain. Women had to wait until 1918 before they, too, could participate.

However, convergence is not the whole story, for Scotland showed distinctive political values. Notable is the enduring strength of Whiggism or Liberalism from 1832 to 1914 (England was more consistently Conservative), epitomized in the Midlothian Campaign speeches (1879) of British Prime Minister William Ewert Gladstone (1809-1898). Additionally, the Union of 1707 allowed for Scottish control over the major establishments of civil society: the law, the church, and education. These peculiarly Scottish institutions provided a continuing basis for national allegiances, and this was strengthened in 1885 with the founding of the Scottish Office, which acted as a symbol of an independent Scotland.

Reformed burgh councils (from 1833) acted as a focus of local and regional independence. Reform of county government did not come until 1889 when representative county councils were established. This allowed the continuation of aristocratic influence over county politics and administration throughout the nineteenth century—and far into the twentieth. Indeed it was conservative unionism, rooted in long-established loyalty to the houses of Hanover and Windsor, which would dominate twentieth-century Scottish politics.

RELIGION

The Hanoverian political consensus had been based partly on the fiction of unity in religion. Scotland had indeed been officially Protestant since the sixteenth century, yet the religious history of the eighteenth and nineteenth century is of schisms within the church. The early nineteenth century saw a wave of religious revival movements, coupled with a broadly based drift away from the established church, principally because of opposition to patronage (appointment of clergy by other than the flock). This ended in the Disruption of 1843 and the establishment of the Free Church of Scotland.

The religious consequences of the fragmentation of Protestantism were, on balance, positive. There was a surge in church - and school-building after the Disruption by the three main Protestant churches: Church of Scotland, Free Church, and United Presbyterian Church. Further, confessional pluralism allowed a further expansion of religious participation. Religion remained central to everyday life in Victorian Scotland, dominating organized leisure, the formation of social policy, and the moral values of temperance and self-help. Irish immigrants eventually created a coherent Roman Catholicism and a strong cultural identity, especially in the towns of west-central Scotland.

Yet there was also a negative effect. Diverging values and widening social differences were fragmenting Highland and Lowland societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The religious schism of 1843 was linked to emerging class differences, and theological disputes were taken very seriously by Scots in ways perhaps unthinkable in the twenty-first century. Protestant fragmentation and Catholic consolidation after 1829 combined with a legacy of post-Reformation anti-Catholicism to create chronic sectarian rivalries.

SOCIAL ISSUES

In addition to their cultural implications, and when coupled with radical socioeconomic change, religious divisions also affected the structure of civil society because of the church’s importance to poor relief. While the Poor Law (Scotland) Act of 1845 marked a convergence with English practice, differences nevertheless persisted, notably the lack of formal institutions for the poor, which the Scots had never favored, and a preference for (cheaper) outdoor relief. In 1906,14 percent of Scotland’s pauper population received indoor relief, compared with 32 percent in England. Furthermore, Scotland’s poor relief (and many other aspects of its governance), remained less centralized than in England.

Despite the reorganization of relief and growing British prosperity, Scots endured a standard of living much below their English neighbors. In 1867, 70 percent of ‘‘productive persons’’ earned less than thirty pounds per annum, while the top 10 percent gobbled up half the national income. Wealth polarization was especially pronounced in towns. In 1911, over half the Scottish population lived in one - or two-roomed homes (usually apartments in the towns), and in Glasgow and Dundee the figure was over 60 percent. Overcrowding was the result, with nearly 56 percent of Glaswegians living more than two to a room. The urban poor moved into the central homes the middle class vacated on their way to ‘‘New Towns,’’ and also the newly (but badly) built ‘‘tenements’’ (apartment buildings) that housed the industrial labor force of mushrooming towns like Paisley.

EDUCATION

Other social problems were addressed more successfully, at least in the long term. For example, social and economic change quickly outdated the (very successful) eighteenth-century education system. Early nineteenth-century studies showed large numbers of children excluded from education through the necessity of earning a living to help their impoverished families. Surveys also showed that, while the majority of male adults could read, very few could write, and female literacy was even less. Legislation in the 1870s and 1880s allowed

A street in Glasgow. Photograph from the series Old Closes and Streets of Glasgow by Thomas Annan, 1868-1877. Dramatic population growth in Glasgow during the early decades of the nineteenth century led to crowded and unhealthy living conditions in many parts of the city. In 1866, photographer Thomas Annan was commissioned by Glasgow officials to document such conditions as part of a plan of urban renewal. ©Historical Picture Archive/Corbis

Scottish literacy to regain its relative standing, and by 1910-1911 Scotland had more children in the age group of five to fourteen attending school than all other northwest European countries except France.

In higher education, Scotland remained a leader. Around 1790, Scotland had the highest ratio of universities per million inhabitants in Europe (3.3 per million; the figure was 0.2 for England and Wales [and Ireland], 0.9 for France). The social distribution of university students was broader in nineteenth-century Scotland than in England—at least among males, for no woman was allowed to matriculate at any of Scotland’s live universities until 1892. Scotland’s universities produced nine out of ten British medical graduates around 1800 and, while they lacked mid-century dynamism, they were successfully reformed in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Scottish law, medical expertise, and its very university system were all successfully exported to the wider world by missionaries, migrants, and imperial bureaucrats.

The universities had been the crucible of the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment, which left a deep and lasting influence on the ideas and practices of the English-speaking world. Bound together by a shared faith in the improvability of individual and society through education, reason, and discussion, men like Adam Smith (17231790), the founder of laissez-faire, the concept that lay at the heart of nineteenth-century economics; Adam Ferguson (1723-1816); and David Hume (1711-1776) celebrated and promoted commercial change by arguing that economic cooperation and exchange would promote sociability, refinement, and ‘‘taste.’’ The effect of these ideas pervaded nineteenth-century Scottish society and they help to explain the lower levels of popular protest there than in England. The radical working and middle classes were much influenced by ideas that stressed the importance of reason and argument over violence and irrationality.

A shared faith in the value of education (whatever its actual achievements) and in the improv-ability of civil society made Scotland’s people more interested in treading a positive and peaceful path toward betterment. This is not to say that the Scots were a quiescent people: rather they coped better with change than some. Coupled with this was a darker force ensuring passivity: the power

Of paternalistic landlords and capitalists to shape individual lives and to break organized labor. Harsh brands of evangelical Protestantism also counseled quiescence.

HIGHLANDS VERSUS LOWLANDS

Not all of rural Scotland was as prosperous and peaceful as the Lowlands. Highland agriculture had long been geared to providing subsistence rather than growing productivity and Highlanders were affected by famine in the 1840s, though less severely than the Irish. Highland society had long been very different from Lowland. The great landowners left estate management to middlemen, who rented to subtenants and then to crofters. Highland society too underwent change as the landlords’ priorities shifted during the eighteenth century.

They effectively repudiated centuries of being not just landlords, but also chiefs in charge of clans built on the bonds created by kinship (real or fictive), feuding, and feasting. Leaving the land was thus a far more traumatic process in the Highlands.

Initially landowners responded to population growth, economic shifts, and their own changing priorities by trying to redistribute labor supply, as their power enabled them to do. However, over time they resorted to wholesale evictions, plantations in overcrowded and economically marginal fishing villages, or to industrial enterprises that lacked staying power (like harvesting kelp from the sea to make fertilizer), and later by emigration schemes. Highland Scotland was progressively stripped of people. The empty landscape was filled by deer forests, which by 1884 covered two million acres or one tenth of the area of Scotland. The changes in landholding and the forcible clearance of sections of the peasantry from the land fomented collective resistance, which reached its apogee in the Crofters’ Wars of the 1880s, and left a legacy of betrayal that had no Lowland equivalent. The nineteenth-century Highlands experienced social upheavals that, in their depth and breadth, were without parallel anywhere in Europe.

During the nineteenth century, distinctions between Highland and Lowland Scotland became increasingly blurred. The 1872 Education Act banned school lessons from being taught in Gaelic, but Highlanders were already won over to the benefits of English as a result of seasonal migration to the Lowlands and imperial service in the British army. Never the majority language (most Scots spoke a variation of English), Gaelic was the first tongue of just a fifth of Scots in 1806 and a tenth in 1900. Levels of literacy in the Highlands were much lower than in the Lowlands throughout the nineteenth century.

DEMOGRAPHIC CHANGE

Such important cultural changes as the decline of Gaelic stemmed partly from demographic forces. Population trebled to 4.5 million inhabitants between 1789 and 1911, a modest rate of growth that disguises the massive redistributions of people that came out of agrarian change. As late as 1789 just under half of Scotland’s people lived north of an imaginary ‘‘Highland Line.’’ By 1911 this had

Farmers plant potatoes on the Island of Skye, Scotland, c. 1899. Skye is the largest of the Inner Hebrides Islands, which lie off the western coast of the Scottish mainland. The traditional agricultural system, called crofting in Scotland, was a system of tenant farming which provided little income for farmers and, as in other areas of Great Britain, led to political unrest in the late nineteenth century. ©Sean Sexton Collection/Corbis

Fallen to just a sixth. One Scot in eight lived in a large town in 1790, one in three by 1831, and three out of five in 1911, by which date Scotland was the most urbanized country in Europe after England. In the 1890s, a quarter of the adult population of Glasgow—then a city of 700,000 people—had been born in the Highlands and another quarter in Ireland.

In addition to redistribution and Irish immigration, emigration accelerated in the nineteenth century, when nearly two million people left Britain from Scottish ports. The majority went to North America (28 percent to Canada, 44 percent to the United States) and 25 percent to the Antipodes (Australia and New Zealand). One sort of migrant came from those dispossessed by the Highland clearances, but Lowland (disproportionately urban and industrial) emigration was every bit as significant as Highland (rural agrarian). Indeed, most nineteenth-century emigrants from

Scotland were not escaping a backward rural economy, but were voluntary exiles from a vital, industrializing and urbanizing society with plenty of employment opportunities and an improving standard of living.

Despite this, narratives of Highland dispossession dominate conventional understandings of Scottish migration, just as Highland images play a disproportionate part in modern conceptions of Scotland’s past. In fact, the association of the material aspects of Highland life and regional identity— heather and thistles, bagpipes and tartan—with the symbols of being Scottish was invented during the Romantic period by the great Tory and monarchist, Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832), and perpetuated by George IV (r. 1820-1830) and Queen Victoria (r. 1837-1901). In reality, Highlanders between 1789 and 1914 were feared, romanticized, misunderstood, and then denigrated by the majority Lowlanders. A more representative symbol of late-nineteenth-century Scotland’s people and its industrial success is the Forth Rad Bridge of 1890.

It is no myth that Scots were among the most mobile people of Europe. They had other demographic peculiarities. Mortality remained high and disease-dominated, but it was falling. Smallpox was conquered by the early nineteenth century, but typhus and cholera continued to decimate urban populations until mid-century and influenza until 1918. Infant mortality rates were lower in Scotland than England but still alarmingly high, and they did not fall as they did in England from the 1890s. Of those born around 1871, a quarter would not live to the age of five. The fertility regime was distinctive. Women married exceptionally late by European standards (a fifth did not marry at all), but, once married, fertility was high. This changed in the late nineteenth century, when Scotland participated in the fertility decline that characterized all of western Europe. The introduction of widespread knowledge and/or use of family limitation techniques produced a pronounced fall in family size. Two-fifths of marriages made in the 1870s produced more than six children, compared with less than 2 percent for 1920s marriages. Scotland’s illegitimacy was among the highest in Europe, and in one part of rural northeast Scotland, four-fifths of women marrying in the late nineteenth century had their first child before, or within three months after, marriage. Throughout the nineteenth century, Scotland’s was a young society: a third of its people were aged fourteen years or under and just 5 percent were sixty-five and over.

By 1911, the overall balance of the Scottish economy replicated the economic pattern found in the rest of Britain, mixing industrial, textile, and service industries. The first years of the twentieth century marked the zenith of power and influence of Scottish capitalists, who—despite comprising only 10 percent of Britain’s gross domestic product—controlled the biggest concentration of heavy industry in Britain and exerted substantial political influence. Their wealth, nestling in a separate Scottish banking system, enabled them to invest in shipping lines, railway companies, mining ventures, and vast expanses of farmland in North and South America, Australia, and South Africa. At no time before or since had

Scotland been so closely integrated into the power structures of the empire it had helped to make and run. At no other time had it been so economically important. The society was peaceful. But there remained problems. Scotland had some of the worst slums in Britain. Social alignments and political allegiances were changing too. The stability produced by industrial expansion and benevolent paternalism was being replaced by the tensions of class and nation. Coupled with a harsher economic climate after World War I, these forces would create a very different twentieth-century Scotland.

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