Review of Christine MacLeod's Heroes of Invention

MacLeod Review

In her 2007 monograph Heroes of Invention,[1]Christine MacLeod analyses the cultural role that inventors played in British society during the Industrial Revolution. Beginning with the question of why so few inventors are famous today, Macleod charts the rise of inventor’s status from their mid eighteenth century status “synonymous with fraudster, cheat or swindler, effectively a criminal”[2] to their celebration as “a national benefactors by the political nation,”[3]and finally to their decline in favor of heroic “gentlemen of science”[4] at the start of the twentieth century. Primarily using James Watt as an example, though also exploring other famous figures such as Jenner, Arkwright and Davy, Macleod shows that the number of statues, biographies and honors dedicated to inventors increased at an exponential rate following the public acclaim for inventions like the smallpox vaccine, telegraph, steam engine, and balloon flight.  Praises usually reserved only for military heroes were heaped on a number of engineers and mechanics instead. This ubiquitous praise unusually came from all classes with William IV funding a statue of Watt in Westminster Abbey, middle class traders happy to privilege inventors over aristocrats and in one of her most engaging chapters, working class belief that it was the work of the ordinary man that best served the nation. Entering the classic British decline debate, she claims that any technological or economic deterioration from this period is a result of historiography and that the waning British acclaim for the inventor came not from a technological decline but the reduced role of the individual in the increasingly political and entrepreneurial economy.

            Rather than the rather large scope of other texts from this course, MacLeod has a fairly narrow geographical and chronological focus. This serves her quite well as it lends some credibility to her argument since she can concentrate on specific events like the Great Exhibition and reform of the patent system as well as the impact of individual figures on British culture. Additionally, like many other texts from this course, MacLeod draws from an extremely wide array of political, economic and literary texts to prove her thesis. Her conclusions imply that the cultural history of technology is shaped not only by what historical actors think, but also by changes in the technological process. Also implicated is that inventors, by the merit of their individual inventions contributed to political change, rather than previous texts which mostly commented on technological systems. This was true in the case of Jenner’s invention contributing greatly to demographic changes in Britain, as well as the countless inventions that lent might to the military and economic successes of the empire. They also shifted some cultural values, for the first time implying that anyone who displayed the British virtues of hard work, diligence and creativity could ascend to a place of honor.[5] Her text, though extremely interesting does lack slightly in her gender analysis especially since she frequently calls attention to how few females were idolized in statues and biographies.

            There is already a large body of literature addressing the notion of technological and economic decline in Great Britain immediately following the Industrial Revolution. Though widely debated by historians, many consider the rises in American and German political and economic status accompanied a decline in Britain. Martin Wiener in particular has asserted that Britain faced an industrial regression since the time of the Great Exhibition. MacLeod text makes a welcome addition to that body of literature. Her hagiographic look at inventors is definitely unique. Additionally, her use of Carlyle to define heroes and hero-worship was extremely interesting. Since Carlyle’s works were very popular over the course of the entire nineteenth century, she is able to accurately use the actor’s categories to identify the rise and fall of inventors. Biographies, popular in general in Victorian England, emphasizing the priestly, prophetic, and literary qualities of engineers and mechanics reached the point that some even attained celebrity status within their own lifetime. Using Carlyle is an extremely savvy tactic and one of the most enjoyable aspects of the book. Additionally, despite such a wide array of sources, her narrow focus keeps her book very tightly bound. It is an interesting read for anyone interested in economic and business history as well as the history of technology.

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[1] MacLeod, Christine. 2007. Heroes of invention: technology, liberalism and British identity, 1750-1914. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

[2] Ibid 34

[3] Ibid 91

[4] Ibid 353

[5] Ibid 20

Danish Renaissance Cartography

In the standard historical narrative, the fifteenth century marked a time when science and cartography were closely linked as maps were portrayed as becoming increasingly scientific and accurate reflections of geographical reality.  However, most recent historians have countered this idea, asserting that “cartography is primarily a form of political discourse concerned with the acquisition and maintenance of power.”[1] However, the characterization of a ‘scientific map,’ widely accepted in Early Modern Europe, led to widespread use of maps as political tools in state formation, territorial disputes and boundary negotiations.  A particularly famous example of the authority that political figures gave to maps was the famed Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494, which split colonizing rights of the non-European world between Spain and Portugal. After 1494, several different maps emerged placing the Spice Islands on various sides of the demarcation in order for one country or another to assert their sovereignty. However, maps were not only used in determining the shape of the New World, but were quite more often utilized to show the scope of an individual country. Rulers frequently commissioned national maps and cartography “became inseparable from the affirmation of monarchic power.”[2] In Denmark, the political function of maps arose much later in the Renaissance, near the late sixteenth century. Prior to this, though many maps of Scandinavia existed, they were primarily in the domain of Dutch mapmakers who created maps for mass consumption. For the Danish monarchy, maps centralized knowledge of the territory which soon let to a series of political shifts to regain lost territories, improve and expand parts of the country and gave the king a tool for absolutist authority.

                In Monarchs Ministers and Maps: The Emergence of Cartography as a Tool of the Government in Early Modern Europe[3], a series of historians examine the shift in authority granted to maps from the late early fourteenth century when monarchs did not use maps for practical purposes to the early eighteenth century, when maps were common administrative tools.  Examining several different countries, the authors cite centralization of political power as a key reason that monarchs became more interested in maps. Presenting surveys of Austria, the Spanish Hapsburgs, Italy, Spain, France and Poland, they do not address any Scandinavian nation. This does not detract from the book, which is not intended to be an encyclopedia. As such, if does not contrast any assertion that rather than being used because of centralized power, maps in Denmark specifically were used to centralize power due to the unique political position it held in the sixteenth century. Until 1523, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Iceland were united under the Kalmar Union. After breaking up due to internal strife, Christian III settled on the throne of Denmark and asked Marcus Jordon, a mathematics professor at the University of Copenhagen, to map “all the kingdom’s provinces, islands, towns, castles, monasteries, estates, coastlines, and anything else worth noticing.”[4] Political boundaries were not defined and in several cartographic exchanges with Sweden, the earliest maps of self-made government sanctioned maps of Scandinavia were created, though they were often crude, based on Dutch maps, and sometimes drawn freehand. These territorial disputes were not easily settled and in the early seventeenth century Christian IV commissioned expeditions to the North Atlantic to produce maps of Greenland, Iceland, and North America. Before this time, all territorial claims were based on maps created by Dutch cartographers.[5] Both land and sea maps of disputed Danish territory suddenly proliferated in the early years of the seventeenth century. This time of maps, originating in the mid-sixteenth century also initiated a series of events used by the Danish government to consolidate power.

                The first development in the Danish road to absolutism through maps seems disconnected from cartography at first glance. After the dissolution of the Kalmar Union and the resulting civil war, Christian III charged the powerful Catholic bishops with high treason and placed himself at the head of the Protestant Church. This stripped competing territoriality away from people outside the royal family and placed lands, previously sovereign to religious authority, into the hands of the monarchy, giving the king greater claims to Danish land.[6] Then, he began to use maps to create fortification plans for various towns and castles, presumably to stronghold his power. This tradition of fortified city maps continued well into the seventeenth century. At this point, engineers not only used maps to create stronger cities, but also to write in future development of the city. Additionally, in the mid seventeenth century, the Danish government employed land surveys to improve roads, collect taxes and extend a uniform code of law. This period of consolidation culminated in Christian V’s Land Register of 1687 which provided a uniform registration of all Danish territory.[7] This resulted in the state “possessing” the authorship of the cartographic representations and Copenhagen becoming a seat of the state to expand control and power.

Clearly in Early Modern Europe, the role of cartography shifted to be a political tool of the state. According to many scholars, this was due to the overall trend of government centralization in the Renaissance.  Though Denmark did undergo some in the late sixteenth century, the early and mid were characterized by disunification and civil strife.  With the scientific authority granted to maps, especially as they were more frequently authored by the state, maps enabled the throne to achieve the administrative tasks necessary in consolidating power while extending territory in the creation of a new state.

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[1] Quoted in Turnbull, David. "Cartography and Science in Early Modern Europe: Mapping the Construction of Knowledge Spaces." Imago Mundi 48.(1996): 5-24. JSTOR Arts & Sciences VII. EBSCO. Web. 3 Mar. 2011 p. 6

[2] Turnbull p. 16

[3] Buisseret, David. Monarchs, ministers, and maps : the emergence of cartography as a tool of government in early modern Europe / edited by David Buisseret. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, c1992., 1992. UNIV OF OKLAHOMA LIBRARIES's Catalog. EBSCO. Web. 3 Mar. 2011.

[4] Strandsbjerg, Jeppe. "The Cartographic Production of Territorial Space: Mapping and State Formation in Early Modern Denmark." Geopolitics 13.2 (2008): 335-358. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. Web. 3 Mar. 2011. P. 348

[5] Harley, J B, and David Woodward. The History of Cartography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Print p. 1792

[6] Strandsbjerg, 348

[7] Ibid 353