Scientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State

Roland Jackson author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:University of Pittsburgh Press

Published:31st Jan '24

Should be back in stock very soon

Scientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State cover

Traces the Early Evolution of Britain’s System of Scientific Advice

In twenty-first-century Britain, scientific advice to government is highly organized, integrated across government departments, and led by a chief scientific adviser who reports directly to the prime minister.

In twenty-first-century Britain, scientific advice to government is highly organized, integrated across government departments, and led by a chief scientific adviser who reports directly to the prime minister. But at the end of the eighteenth century, when Roland Jackson’s account begins, things were very different. With this book, Jackson turns his attention to the men of science of the day—who derived their knowledge of the natural world from experience, observation, and experiment—focusing on the essential role they played in proffering scientific advice to the state, and the impact of that advice on public policy. At a time that witnessed huge scientific advances and vast industrial development, and as the British state sought to respond to societal, economic, and environmental challenges, practitioners of science, engineering, and medicine were drawn into close involvement with politicians. Jackson explores the contributions of these emerging experts, the motivations behind their involvement, the forces that shaped this new system of advice, and the legacy it left behind. His book provides the first detailed analysis of the provision of scientific, engineering, and medical advice to the nineteenth-century British government, parliament, the civil service, and the milit

No account matches the scope of Jackson’s intervention and one of its many virtues is that it helps us to see, for the first time, something like the landscape as a whole—the multiple and diverse policy-making arenas in which scientists specializing in chemistry, engineering and medicine had a role to play and the degree to which their authority and advice was acted on.

* British Journal for the History of Science *

Provides a rich and reliable resource for future historians concerned with all or any aspects of the changing and contingent relations among science, expertise, and the British state over a hundred-year period.

* Victorian Studies *

Jackson’s monograph is a timely and effective guide to the historical development of specialist knowledge in the business of governance.

* Technology and Culture *

This book is . . . destined to become a classic and an obligatory read for scholars of virtually all aspects of nineteenth-century British science, engineering, and medicine, as well as scholars of nineteenth-century British politics.

* The Renaissance Mathematicus *

A useful book providing an overview of a generally understudied area of nineteenth-century studies.

* Ambix *

Scientific advice, Roland Jackson makes clear, was shaped by the political climate, and the extent to which such advice was heeded depended on that climate. His argument is supported by a wealth of empirical data, his work the fruit of massive research, and his coverage of the field detailed and comprehensive. No other book offers such a thorough-going survey of scientific advice and its ramifications in nineteenth-century Britain.

-- John Gascoigne, author of Science and the State: From the Scientific Revolution to World War II

Jackson draws skillfully on an impressive array of sources to provide the first systematic account of the growing role of scientific advice to the nineteenth-century British state, on food and energy production, war and empire, industry, transport, taxation, and health. Combining history of science with history of the state, his book sheds new light on both the status of science and scope of government action.

-- Rebekah Higgitt, National Museums Scotland

Important, timely, and an excellent introduction to how science becomes institutionalized during this century, often at the expense of the Royal Society. Roland Jackson underlines the durable tension between the pursuit of knowledge as an individual endeavor (requiring independent funds) with state-funded research via official bodies. Anyone who wants to understand the relationship between British science and government during this period will have to read this book.

-- William J. Ashworth, University of Liver

ISBN: 9780822947905

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

464 pages