Guest post - Thinking about expertise

16 Sep 2011

Matthew Paskins of the Department of Science and Technology Studies at UCL came to a project workshop last week and has written this guest post.

Last week's Board of Longitude project workshop, 'All a-Board', raised several significant issues about the relationship between the eighteenth-century British state and expertise. Although it's an unavoidable term, 'expertise' had to be said between gritted teeth: it is not always clear what was meant by this concept in this period. There are significant questions about what exactly is meant by expertise and how to relate it to broader bureaucratic structures. Etymological dictionaries suggest that English did not entertain 'expertise' as such, or a group of people called 'experts', until the mid 1820s at the earliest. The function may have existed, of course, without the precise modern term, but three questions remain: was the eighteenth-century 'expert' an outsider called in by the state for his special knowledge? Was this the only - or even the typical - form of 'expertise' in this period? And what, if anything, does this tell us about the relation between knowledge and the state?

According to recent work by the eighteenth-century historians Julian Hoppit and Joanna Innes, the answer to the first two questions is no, and the answer to the third is complicated. The main complication is Parliament. Hoppit argues that in attempts to standardise weights and measures - one case where we might expect outside expert knowledge to be brought in, early in the process, given the acknowledged need for an agreed set of standards - a relatively small number of activist Members of Parliament were the drivers behind both data collection and legislative reform. Data collection, he argues, aimed to reveal what practices were in place throughout the kingdom; he equates this with John Howard's prison reform, the work of the Board of Agriculture, and Thomas Gilbert's efforts to discover patterns of practice countrywide in pushing for new legislation to provide relief for the poor. In each case regional practice was believed to vary  widely, but to be discoverable. To this we might add the Society of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, which from 1754 sought improvements from throughout the country - not in the belief that there was an expert constituency to which the Society had special access, but as a means of coordinating and encouraging regional work. Although by the 1820s Davies Gilbert - a typical committee man - could consider himself instrumental in the reform of weights and measures, and Henry Kater performed a number of important experiments at the behest of the Royal Society, this followed a long period of collecting and coordinating local knowledge, which did not involve anyone who could straightforwardly be defined as an expert.

In other words, there was a complicated relationship between Parliament at the centre and practice in the regions: local and central, and private and public, were not easy to distinguish, as they often mingled with each other in the legislation, lobbying and investigations of Parliament. Joanna Innes summarises the position as follows:

"The eighteenth-century British central executive was scarcely moribund: it demonstrated an impressive capacity to extract tax monies from British subjects, and to sustain global warfare. Ministers also kept an alert eye on home affairs, monitoring the pulse of the national economy, and noting, in order to contain or crush, signs of discontent or disaffection. But they did not pursue a programme of domestic improvement, nor attempt closely to monitor or direct the activities of local government in county or town, except in times of crisis. Local communities were left very much to their own initiative. The opportunity to obtain local legislation, authorizing actions that would not otherwise have been legal, or putting the coercive force of the law behind local projects, represented one of the most powerful resources available to those striving to exercise that initiative."

That this also makes a significant difference to our picture of the expert can perhaps best be understood in terms of the nature of the expert's authority. Activist MPs were not tied to particular roles, campaigns or precision practices. Instead, they were 'charismatics': campaigns around issues like weights or measures stood or fell with them rather than with the structures to which they belonged. This did change, but it is important not to impose a 'separate spheres' argument on eighteenth-century bureaucracy, or to interpret what was actually individual initiative simply in terms of augmenting bureaucracy and stabilised structures.