The Rise of the Technocrats

A Social History

W.H.G. Armytage

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415853828
• eBook ISBN: 9781135031619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 2006. The ambitious role cast for scientists in public affairs has been matched by an equal coyness on the part of scientists to play it. Yet in spite of themselves, they have been virtually dragged on to the political stage because of their 'collectivities' - groups formed over the last four centuries often more fugitive than institutional - which have helped modify the human environment, thereby enabling men to emancipate themselves from the tyranny of the present and plan for the future. The byproducts of such plans, from the great botanical gardens to the seed beds of physical scientists like the Ecole Polytechnique, have also incubated further ideas about the relation of science and society that are ecumenical in scope.

Indeed the positivist overtones of the Polytechnique herald the transition from platocracy to technocracy, for the technical intelligentsia trained its German, Russian and American counterparts have effected a quasi-religious synthesis of physics and politics. In this 'planning' was the central theme. The social history of such planning (with the concomitant views on the social organisation of science) is the subject of the book

Pressurising it is the conviction that " we can identify a particular thing only by pointing to the various things it successively was before it became that particular thing that it will presently cease to be", and the story, which begins four hundred years ago and ends in 1964.

PART I

Seed–Beds of Science

1

Garden Economies

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FOUR hundred years ago, a green curtain divided the world. On one side were the Portuguese and Spanish; on the other the Dutch and English. A glimpse of what lay behind the Portuguese curtain was provided in 1563 by a little book, the third in the European language to be printed in Asia, Coloquios dos simples, e drogas he cousas medicinais da India (1563). Its author, Garcia de Orta (1501–68) was a militant Marrano, who went in terror of the Inquisition for most of his life. He leased Bombay for the Portuguese and established a botanic garden at Goa. His book also recorded the plants available in the Indies, and for it the poet Camoëns, then resident at Goa, wrote a poetic preface. The book excited great interest. It was précised four years later by Charles de I'Écluse in his Aromatum Historia (1567) and by Cristobal Acosta in his Tractado de las Drogas y medicinas de las Indias Orientales. It was also translated into English by James Garret. But of all nations, perhaps the Dutch were most excited by it, and sent a spy to work for the Archbishop of Goa to glean more of its contents.¹ This spy's copy of Orta's book is still preserved today.

The Dutch took plants seriously. When the citizens of Leyden were offered exemption from taxation for ten years or having a university, they chose a university and annexed to it a botanic garden, the Hortus Botanicus Academicus Lugduni-Batavorium. This, from the time of its Padua-trained² first director, Gerait de Bondt (1536–99), became one of the sinews of its overseas empire. To protect plants from the Dutch settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, like geraniums and mesembryanthemums, a greenhouse was established in 1599. Bondt's successor, Charles de l'Ecluse (1526–1609) was a man of international reputation, whose activities were probably of more direct consequence to the history of gardening than those of any of his contemporaries. He was responsible for the introduction and first successful cultivation of the bulbous plants for which the Dutch horticultural industry has been renowned.

Just after he died, the Dutch introduced tea to Europe, cornering the market for three-quarters of a century. Not till the English King Charles II married a Portuguese queen did the English take up the habit, and not till 1689 did their East India Company begin to import it from China. Tea-drinking initiated a minor technological revolution. Utensils for brewing and drinking it were devised not from pewter but porcelain. And porcelain demanded coal, engines, chemistry and design, which in England, was quite a story.³

The Dutch foraged yet farther, when Prince Maurice of Nassau reached Brazil in 1631, accompanied by a party of forty-six scientists who founded the town now known as San Antonio, established a zoological and botanical garden, and the first astronomical and meteorological station in the New World.⁴ In 1696 Engelbert Kaempfler (1651–1761), the chief surgeon to their fleet, visited Japan in the same year as the University of Yedo was established.

There they crept through another curtain, lowered by the Shogun to prevent his barons acquiring knowledge of the West. But Dutch botanists influenced a group of Japanese known as Rangaku-sha, or the Dutch scholars. So Western science began to seep into Asia.

Meanwhile in Holland, Leyden, with its botanic garden, became a seed-bed of science for the world. F. Sylvius (1614–72), fumbling towards a chemical view of the body, was trying, in his way, to differentiate between organic and inorganic chemistry. Three of its famous pupils were Jan Swammerdam (1637–80), a microscopist whose minute studies of the anatomy of mayflies, bees and frogs led him on to identify the red corpuscles in the blood; Regnier de Graaf (1641–73) who worked out the action of the pancreas; and Thomas Willis (1641–75) who identified diabetes mellitus. Its international character under Herman Boer-haave (1668–1738)⁵ can be seen by the composition of one of his classes in 1737. It numbered ninety-seven; twenty-three were English, five Scottish, three Irish, ten Germans, three Swedes, two Russians, a Dane, a Frenchman and a Greek. Indeed the very name ‘Leyden’ was such that when Musschen-broek (1692–1761) and his pupil Cunaeus, in working on the nervous system, discovered a device for storing electricity, it was known as the ‘Leyden jar’, even though it had previously been discovered by Kleist of Pomerania.⁶

One of these ‘Leyden jars’, taken by a Scotsman Dr. Spence to Boston in 1746, was used by Benjamin Franklin to experiment on electricity. His Experiments and observations on the subject being printed in London, were received in Europe with excitement.⁷

Throughout Europe, Leyden's influence spread: to Göttingen, through Albrecht von Haller (1708–77);⁸ to Vienna through Gerhard van Swieten (1700–72)⁹ to Edinburgh, through Alexander Munro I (1697–1767); to Moscow through L. Blumen-trost and Nicholas Bidloo, where botanical gardens were laid out in 1713¹⁰ and to America through Phineas Bond (M. D. Leyden, 1742).¹¹

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In 1565 another intelligence report came to Europe from the West. Some inkling of its importance can best be obtained from the title of the English translation: Joy full Newes out of the New Found World.¹² The joyful news was that the ague, dysentry, the pox and rheumatism could now be treated by Peruvian bark, ipecacuanha, guiacum and gontard. In addition, it told of three new products: tobacco for smoking, sassafras root as a stimulant and ‘a gumme called Tacamachachaca’ or rubber.

Like Holland, Britain had a plant-based economy. Its wood was being used so rapidly that charcoal burning and smelting were forbidden near shipbuilding areas. Alkalis were increasingly needed for soap and glass, and prospecting for them was going on to supplement the tedious and costly method of burning seaweed. Increasing prosperity was widening the spectrum of dyes from the traditional reds (from madder), yellows (broom), green (bracken), brown (lichens) and blue (woad). Thanks to the acquisition of flax from Asia in the Middle Ages, cordage, canvas, sacking, bowstrings, fishing lines, thread and linen were now available for various economic activities. Now to the belladonna, whose atropine so enlarged Italian ladies’ eyes that it got its name, the henbane whose narcotic and analgesic properties made it such a boon to those suffering from toothache, and the comfrey whose then unknown allatoin made it such a specific in bone-setting cases, and the scores of native remedies, came the news of these new sovereign remedies from the Spanish possessions in America.

The premium put by the King of Spain on what lay on his side of the curtain had been aptly recognized forty-three years earlier by the grant of a coat of arms to the first circumnavigator of the globe. It depicted two Malay kings, each holding a spice branch, supporting a glove with the motto primus circumdedisti me, whilst the shield bore the Castle of Castile, with two cinnamon sticks in saltire between three nutmegs and twelve cloves.¹³

The leakage continued. Jean de Léry, a Calvinist minister to the Huguenot Colony in Brazil published his Voyage en Amérique, avec la description des animaux et plantes de ce pays from the Huguenot centre of Rouen in 1578, whilst ten years later Thomas Harriot, the tutor and familiar of Sir Walter Raleigh published A brefe and trite report of the new found land of Virginia: of the commodities there founde and to be raised, as well marchantable, as others for victualling, building and other necessary uses for those that are and shall be the planters there; and of the nature and manners of the naturall inhabitants. (1588.)

The study and propagation of these new vegetable products needed gardens. A year before Harriot's book was published, John Gerard agreed to superintend a garden for the College of Physicians at Nightrider Street, London, and to keep it full of simples. He kept another at Holborn where the potato made its first recorded appearance.¹⁴ That shrewd Elizabethan statesman, Lord Burghley, also employed him to look after his own gardens in the Strand and at Theobalds, thereby earning the dedication in Gerard's Herball: ‘What greater delight is there than to behold the earth apparalled with plants as with a robe of embroidered worke set with Orient pearls and garnished with great diversifie of rare and costly jewels ? Though the delight is great, the use is greater and joined to necessitie.’

‘Use and necessitie’, as Burghley and Gerard realized, were the root of the matter. Gerard tried to grow dates and ginger, and perhaps it was because he had failed to grow other countries’ plants that he synthesized other botanists’ knowledge in his book. His Herball was most influential. One of its seventeenth-century revisers, Thomas Johnson, was the first to exhibit a banana, whilst an eighteenth-century schoolboy, Joseph Banks, took it up to Eton with him.

The transformation of the herb to the botanic garden proper was the work of John Tradescant, best known of the Guild of Gardeners—chartered in 1606. As well as managing his own garden at South Lambeth, he managed the garden of the Earl of Salisbury at Hatfield, acquiring plants and trees from the Low Countries, France and America. His enthusiasm for America, which led him to subscribe to the Virginia Company, was shared by his son and namesake who visited it on three collecting trips in 1637, 1642 and 1654. Tradescant's own major visits took in Russia, the Mediterranean, and the Island of Rhé. Indeed, his connections with the leader of the expedition to the Island of Rhé led to him being appointed ‘garnetter’—a kind of embryo food controller.¹⁵

Tradescant's introduction of many new vegetable products like the plane tree and the Virginia creeper led to his appointment as keeper of the Oxford Botanical Garden, a post which he never took up. At the Oxford garden John Locke studied, collecting about 1,600 plants in the district alone.¹⁶ Later, he was to collect ideas in Holland for his philosophical writings. Another garden was founded at Edinburgh in 1670 by two physicians just south of Holyrood House, known as the Royal Botanic Garden under James Sutherland, who also took charge of another botanic garden founded by the town council in the grounds of what is now the Waverley Railway Station.¹⁷

Another rallying centre for those interested in the vegetable kingdom was provided by Lord Zouche's garden at Hackney, under the Dutchman, Mathias de l'Obel. L'Obel virtually sponsored the Herball of John Gerard, that itself owed so much to another Dutchman: Rembert Dodoens. L'Obel was appointed by King James I to the newly created post, that of Botanicus Regius in 1607, and when he died in 1616 the title and his manuscripts devolved on Parkinson.

Though a physick garden had existed at Westminster in 1655,¹⁸ it was not until 1673 that the Society of Apothecaries rented a garden at Chelsea from Lord Cheyne. The society found it difficult to keep going and twenty years later were thinking of abandoning it, and but for the enthusiasm of two apothecaries, Samuel Doody and James Petiver, might have had to do so. One proposal brought before the society in 1713 was that a tax should be levied on all apothecaries to sustain it. The land was conveyed to them by Hans Sloane in 1722.

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Gardens elicited many experiments in technology too. Solomon de Caus, the ‘Prince's Engineer’ designed a ‘force machine to make cascades and fountains at Hatfield. The Dutch drainage engineers like Vermuyden, Westerdyk and Kievet put so many thousands of acres into production in seventeenth-century England that Charles II asked Pepys how it came ‘to pass that England has at all times served itself with strangers for engineers’.

The influence of the Low Countries on Britain at this time has been compared by one modern historian to that of the Normans in the Middle Ages: maps, clocks, binoculars, language even, all indicate this.¹⁹

With the advent of a Dutch king, William III, to the English throne, the passion for gardening intensified. According to Daniel Defoe,

With (this) particular judgment of the King, all the gentlemen in England began to fall in; and in a few years fine gardens, and fine houses began to grow up in every corner; the King began with the gardens at Hampton Court and Kensington, and the gentlemen follow'd every where, with such a gust that the alteration is indeed wonderful thro’ the kingdom.²⁰

Apart from conspicuous displa...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE
• Part I: Seed-Beds of Science
• Part II: The Epiphany of the Technocracy
• Part III: Frontier Problems
• Part IV: The Politics of Science
• Part V: The Diaspora of Technology
• INDEX OF PERSONS
• INDEX OF SUBJECTS