Book Review Of Mcconnell's Jesse Ramsden

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sistently to downplay diversity and division within it. Leaders might construct an imperial discourse, but how far did it resonate within the church’s many subcultures? Furthermore, like many other analyses of religion and empire, Strong’s tends to conflate the empire and the larger world into a single construct. While Strong argues that prior to the 1830s there was far more unity in an “orthodox” Anglican middle ground than later in the century when battles between high and low churchmen raged, it is unclear how far this extended and to what degree empire mattered outside the SPG fold. So at what point did nation, empire, and world divide in importance in the minds of Anglicans? What were their relative weights? And with the rise of critical Anglican evangelicalism, to what degree can we speak of “Anglican paradigms” of empire? Ultimately, Strong’s insistence on a large measure of Anglican unity on these matters feels forced, particularly given that evangelical Anglicans founded the CMS precisely to transcend the bounds of empire and the constraints of episcopal control, deploring that despite the over 600 clergymen the SPG sent to serve North American colonists, the talk of missions to “heathen” peoples had materialized into only limited, largely failed efforts. Most evangelical missions, of course, also collaborated with imperial power in many ways, but they had a distinctly different ethos. The fact that evangelical support for missions rapidly dwarfed that of the SPG (which had an income in 1839–40 only one-third as large as the CMS alone) suggests both a variant discourse and that the driving force of voluntary religion that necessitated changes by the Anglican leadership and the SPG came as much from within the Anglican fold as from outside of it. Strong has assembled a valuable analysis of mainstream Anglican thinking on religion, the state, empire, and missions, but, as he himself acknowledges, this represents at best a minority view. How large a minority, and among what groups it prevailed and grew, it is difficult to tell. Only a muted sense of the diversity within the Church of England comes through here, particularly reflections of those who leaned toward evangelistic voluntary activism, increasingly feminized humanitarianism, and populist emotional religious culture. Undoubtedly virtually all Anglicans, and most all Dissenters as well, viewed the empire as providential. But to what ends? This book is a welcome contribution to the scholarship on religion, nation, and empire. However it represents only one strand of a much larger movement that by 1840 was dominated not by higher churchmen, but by their Dissenting competitors whose impulses were anything but patrician. Steven S. Maughan, College of Idaho

ANITA MCCONNELL. Jesse Ramsden (1735–1800): London’s Leading Scientific Instrument Maker. Science, Technology and Culture, 1700–1945. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. 318. $99.95 (cloth). Jesse Ramsden was a superb instrument maker—one of a kind, unmatched in England and continental Europe in the late eighteenth century. For instance, when the director of the Paris Observatory, Jean-Dominique Cassini (Cassini IV), visited Ramsden’s workshop in 1787 to order a large transit, he was surprised by Ramsden’s extensive knowledge in all matters of instrument making as well as in geometry, astronomy, mechanics, optics, and physics. After two or three conversations with the London virtuoso, Cassini “became discouraged to realise that we would never have such a consummate artist in France. . . . This man is an electrical machine which has only to be touched to emit sparks” (142). Everyone who commissioned an instrument from Ramsden knew he had no equal. All knew, however, that they would also have to be extremely patient with him, because repeated delays were Ramsden’s second most famous hallmark: “That wretched Ramsden is really

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making me wait for the circle which he promised me so many years ago” (113). One considered Ramsden an “arch-liar,” while another thought him “sluggish in the making of instruments” (77). Thomas Hornsby, Savilian professor and astronomer at the Radcliffe Observatory near Oxford, penned his frustration to the Duke of Marlborough: “Is there no news from the sieur Ramsden? I believe I must go and beat up his quarters myself” (77). This “love/hate” relationship with Ramsden is recurrent throughout the book. It exhibits well the pride and anxieties in ordering an instrument designed and made by such an obsessive perfectionist. Interestingly, the real protagonists in Anita McConnell’s story are the instruments—the dividing engine, astronomical circle, geodetic theodolite, transit, sextant, balance, and much more—rather than Ramsden himself. Owing to a lack of sources— there is a complete absence of personal or business papers on Ramsden and his successor, Matthew Berge—a standard biography of Ramsden is impossible. McConnell’s great strength in this book is having been able to reconstruct Ramsden’s prominent career mostly through the scientific instruments he made and from those who commissioned them. McConnell’s scholarship is remarkable. She masters the technical details of these complex machines as well as the wealth of contemporary sources and correspondences she unearthed dealing with Ramsden’s life and business. The book is roughly chronological, starting with Ramsden’s early years in London’s Haymarket and his close relationship with the Dollonds, a family of famous opticians. (Ramsden married the youngest daughter of John Dollond in 1766.) In 1773 Ramsden moved to 199 (and later added 196) Piccadilly, adjacent to St. James’s churchyard, the home and workshop where he stayed the rest of his life. In chapter 3 we learn about Ramsden’s pivotal instrument, the dividing engine, that made him the successful instrument maker he soon became. This machine was designed and used to accurately engrave the circular graduated scales on small measuring instruments—especially sextants, of which Ramsden and his assistants made around 1,450 between 1760 and 1800. The larger instruments of more than two feet in radius, such as the great astronomical circles found in observatories, were still engraved by hand. To help him, Ramsden enrolled an army of assistants that reached between forty and fifty individuals, something highly unusual even for the second half of the eighteenth century. Chapter 4 describes life in Ramsden’s workshop—the strict rules and regulations, salaries, tools and materials—and the specialized workforce (apprentices, journeymen, and simple workmen) hired from the British Isles as well as from the Continent. This chapter is unquestionably the most useful to the broader community of preindustrial economic and social scholars. The next two chapters focus chiefly on the special commissions received by Ramsden to furnish European astronomical observatories. (Also briefly mentioned are the instruments embarked on scientific expeditions—including captains James Cook’s, Jean-Franc¸ois Galaup de Lape´rouse’s and George Vancouver’s). The dividing line chosen by McConnell is 1786, the year Ramsden was elected a member of the Royal Society. Each section gives the history of an observatory, the instruments ordered, and the (often difficult) dealings with Ramsden. Some famous observatories (Paris, Palermo, Dunsink, Brera, Greenwich) as well as private ones are described in various degrees of detail. Chapters 7–9 offer next short accounts of an assorted set of instruments—thermometer, barometer, micrometer, microtome, precision balance—made in Ramsden’s workshop. In particular, we learn about Ramsden’s great geodetic theodolite, which was used to measure with great precision degrees of longitude for cartographic purposes. Thanks to the harsh accusations made against this instrument by General William Roy, who was in charge of the Paris-Greenwich triangulation on the English side, we are in possession of precious documents describing Ramsden’s design and construction of this important machine. The last part of the book deals with Ramsden’s final years and his successor, Matthew Berge. The book has a strong scholarship and is a must-read reference to Ramsden and his time,

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one I will often go back to. Yet I did not enjoy reading it. The overall prose is somewhat ungraceful, episodic, and telegraphic. Part of the text appears pieced together as if the author did not really know where or how to properly introduce certain individuals and institutions. The short interludes on J. H. Magellan, Gianntonio Rizzi Zannoni, Samuel Re´he´ (or Rhee), and the Specola Caetani are specific examples. In a few cases the descriptions of events start at one place in the book and are fully concluded later (e.g., the Dunsink Observatory, 113–17 and 257–58). Some insights are fascinating, such as how weather affects the production of instruments, while the few accounts of political events are mostly irrelevant. It is not a book I would recommend reading in entirety. Nevertheless it is an important contribution to the specialized field of scientific instruments. By carefully picking the relevant chapters and sections, this book also expands our understanding of the rise of scientific entrepreneurship in preindustrial Europe. Jean-Franc¸ois Gauvin, Harvard University

GEORGE BOULUKOS. The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 288. $95.00 (cloth). The grateful slave of George Boulukos’s title performs a good deal of hard cultural labor. This important contribution to the growing body of work on the relationship between sentimental writing, slavery, and conceptions of human difference in the eighteenth century focuses on the ubiquitous figure of the grateful slave whose thankfulness and devotion can never measure up to the master’s kindness. Often understood as serving the cause of antislavery in its attention to African suffering in the colonies, the grateful slave, Boulukos argues, generates arguments for amelioration rather than emancipation, for racial difference rather than human likeness. Thus although the trope at first glance seems to register the common humanity of slaves (in recognizing their suffering and their capacity for emotion), the grateful slave instead plays a critical role in the elaboration of concepts of racial hierarchy, as the immoderate and misplaced gratitude of the slave is shown to signal the irrational, dependent, and passionate nature of the African: the slave’s unreadiness for freedom. The grateful slave thereby bridges “a transatlantic gap in racial consciousness, between the practice of white supremacy in the middle passage and the colonies and the metropolitan discourse insisting on the unity of humankind” (38). Reversing recent claims made about the humanizing power of sentimental figures to create belief in human commonality, Boulukos argues that the grateful slave trope inculcates insidious lessons about racial difference that metropolitan readers would find unpalatable in more overt form. In Boulukos’s account, sentimental images of enthusiastically submissive slaves offer the metropolitan public a more palatable vision of colonial practices, enabling them to support the broader system while deploring its structural effects as unfortunate excesses. The selfserving fiction that Africans may be made not only to accept but also voluntarily to embrace their subjugation enabled an ideological return to a precontractual patriarchal social order grounded in obligation and paternalistic benevolence at the same time as it advanced arguments for ameliorative reforms that left the broader system intact and even augmented production under a new, ostensibly humane, disciplinary regime. Inasmuch as the slave’s humanity is tested and confirmed through expressions of gratitude toward benevolent masters, it exists only in and through the conditions of their continued subjection. The book’s six chronologically ordered chapters trace the evolution of the grateful slave