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Peter G. Ayres. Shaping Ecology: the Life of Arthur Tansley. Shaping Ecology: the Life of Arthur Tansley by Peter G Peter G. Ayres. Shaping Ecology: The Life of Arthur Tansley. Shaping Ecology: The Life of Arthur Tansley by Peter G. Ayres Review by: Peder Anker Isis, Vol. 105, No. 2 (June 2014), pp. 446-447 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/678012 . Accessed: 01/09/2014 10:04 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The University of Chicago Press and The History of Science Society are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Isis. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 216.165.95.66 on Mon, 1 Sep 2014 10:04:37 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 446 BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 105 : 2 (2014) more when they became part of the Hindu social for example, how the tapping of keys, the reform movement’s drive to uplift women. Re- pulling of levers, and the pushing of buttons formers successfully urged middle-class women affected the conception of writing as a hand- to take up sewing both as a modern domestic crafted, manual exercise. Nor are we told how duty and to support the family. sewing machines changed women’s experi- David Arnold argues that the foreign origin of ence of domestic life. The book points to the small machines was no hindrance to their ready association of bicycles with health and plea- acceptance. Thus bicycles, like sewing ma- sure in advertisements but does not address chines, were also imported. By the 1890s, a how they changed the riders’ experience of significant number of bicycles began to appear time and space. Failing to address these is- in import trade statistics. The extension of urban sues, it reads like a survey, touching on a and rural roads and the need for mobility in a number of interesting details but seldom dig- growing market economy created the conditions ging deep. The result is that the term “every- for the widespread use of bicycles. Employers day technology” in the book’s title remains supplied them to office workers, low-level gov- restricted to meaning items of daily use; it ernment servants like policemen, and postal and does not rise to provide an account of every- sanitation staff. Bicycles became a common day technological life as a distinct space of sight in cities and towns and even penetrated the modernity in colonial India. These flaws countryside. Also commonly visible in the vil- aside, the volume provides a useful overview lages was mechanized rice milling. With the of the presence of small technologies in colo- component parts easy to replicate, rice mills to nial India that will be valuable for further husk paddy were widely adopted. Rich peasants research. and trading communities led the way, seeing an GYAN PRAKASH economic advantage in milling over agricultural cultivation. Typewriters did not achieve the ubiquity of Peter G. Ayres. Shaping Ecology: The Life of sewing machines, bicycles, and rice mills, but Arthur Tansley. xii ϩ 213 pp., illus., bibl., they became a common sight in government index. Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. offices, commercial establishments, courts, and $99.95 (cloth). political organizations. The typewriter brought women into the modern workplace, though ini- This new biography of Arthur George Tansley, tially they were largely Europeans and Indian the British ecologist and psychologist, brings Christians. together a complete account of his life and work. Modernizing goods were easily accepted, but Peter G. Ayres has done a fine job of construct- the numbers were limited. In 1946, for example, ing a likable and well-written history. there were only 4 bicycles per 1,000 inhabitants Tansley was a bigwig in the field of ecology. in India, compared to 255 in Britain and 463 in Born in London in 1871, he attended classes at the Netherlands. The figures for sewing ma- the left-leaning Working Men’s College before chines, typewriters, and rice mills were even he began studying botany at the University Col- lower. The problem was the cost. The price of lege, London, and subsequently at Trinity Col- imported machines was beyond the reach of lege, Cambridge. From the mid 1890s he would most Indians. In spite of the demand for the promote the field of ecology in no uncertain small machines, no manufacturing developed in terms as the founding editor of the New Phy- India because, as the nationalists charged, colo- tologist and the Journal of Ecology,asakey nial tariffs and economic policies systematically president of the British Ecological Society, and, favored imports. American manufacturers, who later, as professor of botany at Oxford until his excelled in the production and marketing of small retirement in 1937. Up to his death in 1955 he machines, carved out a large share in sales of was the prime architect behind the Nature Con- typewriters, sewing machines, and rice mills. servancy and a mover in environmental policy Remington typewriters and Singer sewing ma- issues in Britain and beyond. Ecologists today chines became household names in India. tend to remember him for coining ecosystem What was the social and cultural impact of terminology. the entry of small machines on Indian life? Ayres provides the reader with both a detailed Here, the contribution of Everyday Technol- account of Tansley’s professional life as a sci- ogy is anecdotal. It refers to the appearance of entist and his personal and social contextual bicycles and typewriters in Indian novels but history. The book benefits from the fact that fails to explore the meaning of technological Ayres worked with and was taught by former modernity in everyday life. We do not learn, friends of Tansley—and from Ayres’s long ser- This content downloaded from 216.165.95.66 on Mon, 1 Sep 2014 10:04:37 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions BOOK REVIEWS—ISIS, 105 : 2 (2014) 447 vice to the same fields and journals to which Ayres has done a fine job in bringing together Tansley contributed. Though Ayres clearly ad- new and exciting material about an important mires Tansley, the book is not a hagiography scientist. Shaping Ecology: The Life of Arthur but, instead, a charming account of a scholar Tansley is a valuable contribution to the history actively engaged in the society in which he of ecology in Britain, worth both time and at- lived. Historians looking for a contribution in- tention. spired by philosophy or sociology of science PEDER ANKER will probably be disappointed, as Ayres’s biog- raphy is not informed by a particular method- ological approach. On Barak. On Time: Technology and Tempo- The heirs of Tansley have provided Ayres rality in Modern Egypt. xiii ϩ 341 pp., illus., with new material and oral history, including bibl., index. Berkeley/Los Angeles: University information about Tansley’s extramarital af- of California Press, 2013. $29.95 (paper). fair (though we still don’t know her name). As readers of Isis will recognize, there is often a Time is central to On Barak’s fascinating ac- woman behind a man, and in Tansley’s case count of the cultural history of technology in his mistress—or, more accurately, his guilt colonial Egypt, and yet consideration of modern over having a mistress—propelled him to visit time’s most obvious manifestations—clocks Sigmund Freud in Vienna for psychotherapy. and watches—is delayed until the conclusion Upon his return he wrote his best-selling book and even then amounts to little more than an ever—The New Psychology and Its Relation afterword to a case already made. Instead, he to Life (1920)—which made him a public fig- demonstrates through a wide array of textual ure in Britain. He practiced as a psychologist and visual materials, and from Arabic as well as for about two years before returning to biol- Western-language sources, how various con- ogy. In the 1920s his name was easily recog- cepts of temporality were articulated through nized by academics beyond the closed circle and embedded within the most conspicuous and of botanists and ecologists. For the rest of his emblematic technological innovations of the life he would write extensively about psychol- nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the ogy and Freud, including Freud’s biographical train, tram, telegraph, and telephone. Superfi- memoir for the Royal Society. Tansley drew cially, these technologies, their form and func- analogies between developments of the neu- tion familiar from established histories of Eu- rological systems of the brain and the evolu- rope’s reputed “tools of empire,” appeared to do tion of ecosystems of nature, thus, in effect, what historians have expected them to do: to restating the old biogenetic “law” that ontog- compress time and space and to effect a homog- eny recapitulates phylogeny. enization of the modern world through the uni- Throughout his life Tansley engaged with an versalizing influence of steam and electricity extensive list of scholars and social activists. His and the corresponding curtailment of local pe- friends and contacts read like a Who’s Who of culiarities and prescientific “superstitions.” The the British academic scene in the interwar era. In opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 and its link- addition to all the ecologists, for example, he ages with the technologies of submarine cables discussed philosophy with Bertrand Russell and and overland telegraphs seemed precisely to Robert Collingwood, inspired Virginia Woolf, achieve this desideratum and to reinforce the and hung out with the famed neurologist Charles idea of Egypt as a midway station between an Sherrington, to mention just a few.
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