Books! (Organizations and/or Machinery Edition)
War and the State in Early Modern Europe: Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden as Fiscal-Military States (Jan Glete, 2018/#77): The overall thesis of the book is that (a) the fiscal-military State works as a social container of skills, allowing the continuous build-up of non-ephemeral military and administrative skills, as well as organizational (instead of personal) loyalty, and that (b) this gave state-builders such an advantage as sellers of violence/protection that it made sense for local elites to cooperate with them (also: was possible due to local elites' cooperation), helping acquire and control local resources in exchange for improved patronage opportunities, and the rulers' support of their own position in local society. I think it's an interesting and well-argued position, and I like the self-supporting structure of the trick: like all equilibria, it works because it works, in a literal sense. I find the "state as container of competences" idea very interesting and fruitful; it's difficult to imagine the minutiae of administrative and logistic skills (never mind the specifically military ones) in the sort of locally-led forces that predated the larger states - it's not about military strategy per se, but rather the group-cognitive limits (interesting to think about in the contemporary context as well). The author describes the three earliest examples of this model: Spain (which did it quite well, less driven by ideology than by specific situational concerns, and perhaps stealing methods and tempos from their use of galleys in their Mediterranean empire, as well as from Roman models... and then stopped doing it quite well, and in fact devolved to locally-led forces, due, I think (the author doesn't take this approach, mostly) to the Hapsburg religious-political global commitments lacking support from their subjects, whose patience in paying for wars in th Far Elsewhere was long but not infinite), the Dutch Republic (an extremely efficient fiscal and fighting machine, the author posits, once you take into account its size, relative to enemies, despite later historiography - its bottom-up nature didn't make it inefficient, but actually helped it have the elite legitimacy to support high levels of taxation), and Sweden (a poor society that, paradoxically, offered a string of competent and ambitious rulers some facilites to build this sort of state, as nobles were poor enough that they were happier than most to ally themselves with the growing state). Highly recommended, if not unopinionated.
Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Ben Marsden and Crosbie Smith, 2018/#78): Essentially a(n strongly) non-teleological history of some key technologies during the long (British) nineteenth century: steam engines, railways, steamships, and telegraphs. It emphasizes and describes the contested manner in which technological alternatives fought with each other not just through "objective comparisons" but through social, marketing, and institutional processes used to define the technologies, gather capital, build confidence, explain failures, refashion the technologists, and even generate and fight over the epistemological mechanisms. In itself very interesting and full of suggestive tidbits (e.g. uniform time was first "railway time", and followed, rather than preceded, the railways - that's a very Latour (or even Einstein) thing; Babbage was much more into cybernetics in the classical sense than I had known - he was an enthusiastic proponent of mechanical information loggers in machinery; the religious undertones in the genesis, or at least the defense, of engineering optimization practices), but also, I feel, relevant to our current tech environment, in both parallels and differences.
Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Ben Marsden and Crosbie Smith, 2018/#78): Essentially a(n strongly) non-teleological history of some key technologies during the long (British) nineteenth century: steam engines, railways, steamships, and telegraphs. It emphasizes and describes the contested manner in which technological alternatives fought with each other not just through "objective comparisons" but through social, marketing, and institutional processes used to define the technologies, gather capital, build confidence, explain failures, refashion the technologists, and even generate and fight over the epistemological mechanisms. In itself very interesting and full of suggestive tidbits (e.g. uniform time was first "railway time", and followed, rather than preceded, the railways - that's a very Latour (or even Einstein) thing; Babbage was much more into cybernetics in the classical sense than I had known - he was an enthusiastic proponent of mechanical information loggers in machinery; the religious undertones in the genesis, or at least the defense, of engineering optimization practices), but also, I feel, relevant to our current tech environment, in both parallels and differences.