History from Between: The Brokered World
The Brokered World: Go-Betweens and Global Intelligence, 1770–1820 (Sagamore Beach, Mass.: Science History Publications, 2009. Pp. xxxviii+522. $69.95) offers a fascinating picture of varied cultural exchanges and encounters during the late Enlightenment and early nineteenth century. In so doing, it makes both a historical argument and a historiographical contribution. While fifty years ago “history from below” reacted against the top-down approach typical of political and military history, recently what we might call “history from between” has presented a corrective to top-down and Eurocentric histories. In this historiography modernity is not a European creation that subsequently diffuses to other parts of the world but rather a global phenomenon owing a great deal to interaction with, and developments in, those regions subjected to the various Iberian, Dutch, French, and British empires. Of particular concern in this collection are the processes of knowledge production that underwrite, and partly constitute, modern intellectual and economic power. Knowledge production is much more than the European gathering of information from everywhere to generate the “view from nowhere”—objective knowledge and the technological success it supposedly generates. Only retrospectively can the modern disciplines of knowledge and economics of production be made out as ends of history rather than products of it.
From this perspective, the “go-between” assumes almost revelatory significance. No single definition of the type is used throughout these essays, but in broad terms the go-between was a mediator between cultures, a broker who brought together by translating between what would otherwise remain separate, or unproductively conflicting, realms. Though usually an individual, the “go-between” is sometimes an object. For example, Juan Pimentel characterizes the bones of what Georges Cuvier named Megatherium americanum (the giant American ground sloth) as a “go-between” in “pursuing the connected stories of human and non-human players” (p. 351). For my money, though, the term is best restricted to human agents.
The essays are a miscellaneous bunch both geographically and topically. An instructive pairing are those on India by Kapil Raj, who provides an overview of how British and South Asian “go-betweens” in Calcutta mediated within the Anglo-Indian world, and by Simon Schaffer, who uncovers how histories of astronomy by British and local scholars rooted Newton within ancient astronomical tradition. That process was both scholarly and of practical significance in “naturalizing” the science through which the survey and control of India was being conducted.
A number of the essays deal with networks of natural historical commerce with a view to elucidating the role of the “go-between.” Margaret Meredith illustrates her astute theorization of the moral economy of communication and friendship in eighteenth-century natural history with the example of Petrus Camper’s investigation of the fossil elephant. In that economy the primary means, and measure, of communication were channels of personal acquaintance and correspondence. Every member of a network of natural historical knowledge exchange was a go-between. Distance was more a function of the channels created by contact through war and commerce than it was of physical separation. Neil Safier examines the botanical and entomological espionage of Hipólito José da Costa, a Luso-Brazilian envoy to the United States in 1798–1800 who was charged with capturing resources of value to Portuguese agriculture. His primary target was living specimens of the cochineal insect and its host cactus. We learn about the extensive instructions issued to Hipólito, his collection of texts and, less successfully, of specimens. A severe shortage of funds drove him on occasion to fabricate journeys that were never undertaken. A Creole collector, Pedro Franco Dávila, is one focus of Juan Pimentel’s contribution. Dávila’s collection of curiosities was purchased by the Spanish crown and became the basis for the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid. Dávila and the non-human go-between already mentioned are considered in relation to, and as agents of, the major shifts in earth and life sciences of the period. While this is a fascinating case study, I would have welcomed a more measured analysis of its significance for the portentous developments with which Pimentel associates it. Emma Spary adds a vital ingredient to our understanding of natural historical travel and collection by examining the sustenance of the bodies of European travelers. She argues convincingly that breaking down the historian’s slavery to the conception of the European as a wandering eye feasting on the Other requires attention to the sustenance of the embodied traveler.
More restricted in its geographical scope is Lissa Roberts’s depiction of the dense undergrowth of steam engineering projects in Europe in this period. She challenges histories of steam that concentrate on the achievements of a few big names and fail to appreciate the crucial contributions of an extended cast of characters who have been written out of the picture. Roberts also questions the Anglocentricity of much steam history, and argues that the Watt engine did not carry all before it. A great diversity of steam devices, Savery-style pumps as much as beam engines, were adopted and adapted by a wide array of practitioners able to mediate between technological development, local circumstances, and the requirements of their clients.
Besides Schaffer’s paper, the standout essays are those by James Delbourgo and David Turnbull. Delbourgo examines the exploits of Edward Bancroft, perhaps the most intriguing, accomplished, and controversial go-between we encounter in these pages. Delbourgo states his aim clearly: “Instead of isolating [Bancroft’s] careers as diplomat, spy, pamphleteer, novelist, natural historian and chemist, the aim . . . has been to take a traveller in the age of revolutions who moved repeatedly between cultures, allegiances and regimes of scientific authority, and examine how techniques of self-translation worked across genres and settings” (p. 317). The point is that Bancroft appeared in all these guises and yet maintained, most of the time, trust and credibility as broker. The clarity of Delbourgo’s theoretical framing would have been welcome in some of the other essays.
David Turnbull is another consummate theoretician, indeed a founding one, of the brokered world. He recounts the stories of four men active in early European settlement of the Australian colonies who neatly exemplify the character of the go-between. He shows how identities and knowledge were created during the process of encounter. Bennelong, of the Eora tribe, was a famous intermediary between his people and the members of the First Fleet, a friend and aide to Governor Arthur Phillip, but also implicated in the governor’s spearing. Through Bennelong many aspects of the tense relations of Europeans and original inhabitants were negotiated. Bungaree was another Aboriginal go-between, whose complex and important role—for example, he assisted Matthew Flinders in the first circumnavigation of Australia—is less well-remembered than the famous portrayal of him barefoot in naval uniform. As Turnbull explains, the latter portrayal lent itself, from the European perspective, to a “simplistic othering” process (p. 423).
Turnbull also considers Lieutenant William Dawes, an astronomer whose observatory became a place for the study of Aboriginal languages and translation between knowledge systems, especially in the study of the weather. Dawes was not the “meteorologist” that he is often anachronistically characterized as, and was open to hybrid knowledges of such phenomena. The other European go-between, William Buckley, was an escaped convict who had turned native in 1804 and in 1835 walked unannounced into the camp of another landing party. The Europeans saw Buckley as curiously in-between, but essentially a native. His mediation attempts were stymied by the Europeans’ plans of appropriation, which descended into massacre. Buckley abandoned his role.
Importantly, this volume reveals the limitations of Eurocentric, diffusionist approaches to the emergence of modernity. Ironically, it tends to overvalorize, or give antiheroic status to, the “go-between,” both substantively and theoretically. Sanjay Subrahmanyam warns in his afterthoughts that focus on go-betweens can lead us to neglect the larger forces within which they operated, especially if we concentrate on their actions without due regard to outcomes or lack of them. It is easy, in our fascination with these colorful, puzzling, often outrageous characters, to overestimate their agency. Our frantically busy go-betweens operated in the interstices of longer-term, secular economic and cultural change, which constrained their actions. The editors recognize this in their introduction, but the insight is rarely returned to in the body of the work.
The capacious concept of the “go-between” can be applied to almost any historical actor, including the heroes of more conventional accounts. Thus, historians have not ignored go-betweens, but rather selected some for treatment over others. Selection is unavoidable, but what are the criteria for selection—charm, color, or perhaps significance, however we might interpret that? The extent to which go-betweens were also “tricksters” should also give pause for thought. The trickster is often effective and productive by virtue of sleights of hand and mind. But the trickster is also a con man, worth understanding historically, but also worth treating with caution in his claims to be an agent of historical change. These cautions once granted, however, The Brokered World is a most welcome addition to the literature, and its historiographical thrust demands the attention of all concerned with the production of knowledge and technique in the modern world.
©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.
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