Category: Technocracy in the UK

This is basically a quick post to serve as evidence that I am still alive and well. I’m now living in Silver Spring, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC.  The last month has been incredibly busy as I’ve transitioned back to life in the United States, and into a new job, all toting along a one-year-old.  I have had some opportunity to work on my interests in the history of science, but not ones that will result in a blog post. However, one of the big things I’ve been doing is inspired by the continued traffic I’m seeing on my “Agricultural Colleges in Britain” post.  Basically that post presented a chronological list of Britain’s colleges.  But it turns out to be possible—thanks largely to the British zeal for local history—to pinpoint their locations (and the locations of agricultural research facilities), even for those that are now long gone.

So, what I’ve been doing is working on my skills with Javascript and (partially inspired by Alex Wellerstein’s marvelous work on Nukemap) the Google Maps API, to create a temporally dynamic map of Britain’s landscape of agricultural research and education.  The above image is a non-dynamic still, which aggregates all locations I have mapped even though they might not have co-existed in time.  I have the time variable working, but I don’t have all the foundation/closure/name-change information programmed in.  And, as you can see from the image, I have put little effort into making it look pretty.  I can’t say when this will go up, given my schedule, but I think it’s an interesting exercise.  It nicely demonstrates that any historical appreciation of agricultural science and education in Britain cannot take into account the experiences of a single location or handful of locations, but must contend with the full research and education landscape, with which agricultural experts during any part of the twentieth century would have been well familiar.

A while ago, I assembled tentative lists of agricultural colleges, agricultural research institutes, and some related institutions in the UK in the twentieth century. Since then, I have been in contact with Carrie de Silva of Harper Adams University College, who has put together a more expansive “Short History of Agricultural Education and Research: Some key places, people, publications and events from the 18th to the 21st centuries”. She emphasizes that it is more of a tentative guide to chronology than a well-verified academic study (the same goes for my lists), so use it with due caution, and feel free to suggest amendments to her. It is nevertheless a very useful and unprecedented effort to survey the lay of the historical land on this topic.  It is available here.

Although I identify as a historian of science, my current project to survey expertise in the British state makes no real effort to distinguish between scientific and non-scientific forms of expertise.  In a subsequent post I intend to elaborate on my beliefs that such distinctions have not mattered much to historical actors either.  For now, however, since I don’t want to extend my survey to basically anyone with specialized skill, which would include, say, clerks, I’ve needed a working definition: anyone a) whose input affects the design of a policy, or b) who must apply a policy in concrete situations.

To my comfort, I soon found this bifurcated view of expertise casually expressed in conversations within the British civil service.  One inquiry into the worth of a research branch of the Agricultural Land Service of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries asked for comments on its work’s bearing on either the “formulation” or the “administration” of policy.  I’ll be on the lookout to see whether this pairing is a term of art, or simply an off-the-cuff way of distinguishing obvious functional divides in bureaucratic work.

Another issue is the overlapping of expertise and representation.  In British agriculture, the importance of location was well appreciated, and knowledge of local conditions was considered a form of expertise to be consulted as a matter of course in the formulation and administration of agricultural policies.  Bodies such as the Agricultural Improvement Council (AIC) sought out membership that represented the full diversity of farming conditions in the English and Welsh countryside (Scotland and Northern Ireland even had their own separate advisory bodies).  Likewise, it went without saying that the powerful National Farmers’ Union was always to have at least one representative on the council.  The National Union of Agricultural Workers also had a representative throughout the AIC’s existence.  Later a land agent was included as well.

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Having managed to get settled pretty well at Imperial College London and in my new place in Shepherds Bush, I am now starting my new project in earnest.  After a few days of preliminary research, I have found myself knee-deep in the historiography of British agricultural science, which already is pretty fascinating.  In the earlier part of the century, the agricultural experimental stations (and this is something historians of this stuff know well) turn out to be caught between problems of improving agricultural yield, studying the nutritional requirements of plants and livestock, suggesting how agriculture can best meet the nutritional requirements of the nation, but also doing academic research in the nascent field of genetics.

The key figures immediately turn out to be politically interesting, as agricultural science is hyped heavily for its social relevance.  At the same time the science becomes a central battleground over the question of the “planning” of fundamental science when the genetics of Lysenko become a scandal.  John Boyd Orr — director of the Rowett Research Institute in Aberdeen from 1914 to 1945, and first director-general of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization — turns out to be an advocate for world government who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1949.  (World government, by the way, is a topic explored in respect to airpower and atomic weapons in the thesis of recent Imperial PhD Waqar Zaidi)

But all this is getting ahead of myself, and there will be more details to come.  What I’d like to do now is introduce the broader research program of which all this is a part.  The title of my project is “British State Expertise in Food, Construction, and Defence, 1945-1975”.

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