Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century by David Cressy, and: English Atlantic 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community by Ian K. Steele

Abstract

682 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE It need hardly be said that the inspired ideas of Humboldt and others could not have been realized without the highly skilled instrument makers in England, Germany, and New York. In fact, since the instruments were so highly specialized, there was a close interaction between the scientists and the makers, producing a miniature science-based industry. The special instruments involved include the magnetometer, earth inductor, variometer, and dipneedle or inclinometer. The catalog places, rather than describes, fifty-six items, about half in the 19th century and half in the 20th. They come mostly from the U.S. Coast Survey, the Carnegie Institute, and the U.S. Navy, while a few are from universities. Nearly all are illustrated. There is scarcely any literature devoted to the history of such instruments. They are also very complicated to describe fully, as is generally the case for modern instruments. Robert Multhauf and Gregory Good have adopted an arrangement for dealing with this. There is a four-page list of the principal information a user requires, namely, catalog and figure numbers, name, type identification, date, source, and museum number. This is followed by photographs of each instrument, with a note of its source and use, comments on its design success, and a reference. With a three-page bibliography and the historical introduction, a satisfactory impression is given of an intriguing group of instruments that are too often disregarded because they look unfamiliar, are obviously fiddly to use, and are incomprehensible without some sort of guide. Multhauf and Good are to be thanked for having provided such a guide, which will help save from destruction some superbly crafted instruments of our pre-chip past. It would be comforting to think that the Smithsonian Institution Press, having published a useful work, would market it vigorously. I have had the experience that too many people remain utterly unaware of these Smithsonian Studies in History and Tech­ nology, which is a great shame. Gerard L’E. Turner Dr. Turner is professor of the history of scientific instruments at Imperial College, London. His last book was Nineteenth-Century Scientific Instruments, and he has completed a catalog of the physical cabinet at Teyler’s Museum, Haarlem. He is currently working on the instrument trade in Elizabethan England. Coming Over: Migration and Communication between England and New England in the Seventeenth Century. By David Cressy. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. Pp. xiii + 324; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $39.50 (cloth); $10.95 (paper). TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 683 English Atlantic 1675—1740: An Exploration of Communication and Com­ munity. By Ian K. Steele. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. xiii + 400; figures, tables, notes, index. $34.00. Until quite recently, many Anglo-American historians, and virtually all textbook writers, characterized long-distance communications in the preelectronic era as slow, infrequent, hazardous, and unchang­ ing. When such communications are compared with the telegraph, telephone, and radio, they have a point. But is this the relevant comparison? Neither David Cressy nor Ian K. Steele thinks so, and in two finely crafted and eminently readable books they have gone far toward dispelling many of the myths that have come to bedevil historians of communications, especially those who customarily view the world from a postelectronic perspective. Cressy’s Coming Over takes as its theme the continuing relationship between England and New England in the 17th century. Stressing that the Atlantic Ocean could serve as a bridge as well as a barrier, he describes in meticulous detail the many ways in which New England retained close ties with the Old World. Politically, Cressy speculates, New England’s leaders on the eve of the English Civil War may well have been better informed about English politics than were their counterparts closer to the scene. Economic ties also remained close. So many New Englanders inherited land in Great Britain that, at the end of the century, speculators found it worth their while to cross the Atlantic to buy them out. From this perspective, New England history seems quite a bit less “exceptional” than many American historians have been wont to admit. Cressy seeks not merely to repatriate early American history...