Scientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State by Roland Jackson (review)

Reviewed by:

• Scientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State by Roland Jackson
• Edward J. Gillin (bio)

Scientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State
By Roland Jackson. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023. Pp. 464.

For anyone interested in the history of scientific advice and government, the past three or four years have delivered an endless stream of gobbets, thanks in large part to the eloquence of the United Kingdom’s political elites. In July 2020, while planning the reopening of the British economy following its first COVID-19 lockdown, the then chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, was reported to have identified the real challenge to be “about handling the scientists, not handling the virus.” [End Page 1022] It later came out that the government’s chief scientific adviser referred to Sunak as “Dr Death, the chancellor.” The recent public inquiry into the U.K. government’s handling of the COVID crisis has revealed a huge lack of cohesion between policymakers and scientific advisers, characterized by mistrust, lack of understanding, and a culture of blame. With this in mind, Roland Jackson’s Scientific Advice to the Nineteenth-Century British State is timely.

As Jackson observes, nineteenth-century Britain represented a significant time and place for the formation of state-science relations, both in terms of the legislative and the executive. What follows is a broad overview of the various subjects and challenges on which nineteenth-century scientific specialists sought to influence public policy. Such a wide-ranging overview is long overdue: as the earliest nation to industrialize and mobilize fossil fuels toward economic expansion, the role of technical knowledge in the nineteenth-century British state resonates with many of the challenges facing twenty-first-century societies around the world. This is made particularly apparent by Jackson’s canny division of the areas in which the British state was most concerned between 1815 and 1900, namely the armed forces (pt. 2), the management of food resources (pt. 3), the regulation of transport and infrastructure (pt. 4), industry (pt. 5), public health and social policy (pt. 6), and revenue and standards (pt. 7). Chapter 12, “Infection and Disease,” will be especially relevant to readers, given its focus on the management of cholera epidemics and the historic tensions between politicians and advisers over quarantine periods and economic recovery. Chapter 6, on fisheries, seems equally relevant if somewhat depressing in its familiarity to contemporary discussions over sustainability in this industry: it seems that the British state has never successfully organized its fishing sector.

The extensive nature of this study inevitably means that there are a few omissions, which, while not undermining the volume’s worth, are surprising. Having established the theme of scientific practitioners achieving “authority and influence” with the British government (p. 3) early on, perhaps more could have been said about the threat to medical authority that the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts presented during the 1860s and 1870s, especially given the later importance of this to the organization of the women’s suffrage movement (pp. 252–53). Likewise, I was surprised at the omission of the government’s interventions into the risk of iron-induced compass error and the problem of reliable oceanic navigation. John Cawood (“The Magnetic Crusade,” 1979) and Christopher Carter (Magnetic Fever, 2009) have done much to show the importance of this to science-state relations during the 1830s and 1840s, particularly given the British government’s financing of the global surveying of magnetic phenomena that later became known, if ahistorically, as the “Magnetic Crusade.” To Jackson’s credit, he does acknowledge that this book is not a study of government support for scientific research or of the lobbying of Parliament for investment (p. 5). Nevertheless, given the importance he rightly attributes to the Royal Navy and Britain’s military [End Page 1023] commitments, the omission is noticeable, particularly given the question of scientific authority: as Alison Winter (“‘Compasses all Awry,’” 1994) has shown, the problem of compass error raised alarming questions over the credibility of elite scientific specialists like George Biddell Airy.

For all this, Jackson’s book successfully unpacks the constraints faced in the relationship between nineteenth-century British government and scientific advice...