Scale and Skill in British Print Culture: Reading the Technologies, 1680–1820

Abstract

Scale and Skill in British Print Culture: Reading the Technologies, 1680–1820 Jon Klancher (bio) In the long eighteenth century, a technology was something to read—a printed treatise or manual of skills that encompassed the whole range of what were then called the mechanical arts. The OED marks this meaning of the word as obsolete after 1860 (sense 1), but it flourished far and wide before then. Some of these works hewed closely to the ground of traditional artisan labor, like Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises (1683). Others deployed sophisticated idioms of mathematical measuring, like Benjamin Martin’s Logarithmologia (1740), and later, more spacious versions like Thomas Martin’s The Circle of the Mechanical Arts (1813) began to register the impact of steam technology on older and newer kinds of British skilled labor. At least one special case, Jeremy Bentham’s Chrestomathia (1816), would raise the level of these print technologies to an influential mode of social theory and a mapping of emergent disciplines of modern knowledge.1 Such works can be hard to read today (and are often not easy to find), but for us they have a two-fold importance. On the one hand, they speak to the new forms of modern work that were emerging in the long eighteenth century in what recent economic historians classify as lower, medium, and higher-skilled British labor, kinds of skill about which the print technologies [End Page 89] could teach readers during the early industrial revolution. Such books did not tell their readers about the wider theory of the division of labor adumbrated by Adam Smith, nor did they offer any critical (let alone radical) perspective with which to measure the increasing inequality of labor and rewards put in place by 1800 (fig. 1). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The third 1703 edition of Joseph Moxon’s Mechanick Exercises focused on six occupations, ECCO; Thomas Martin’s 1813 The Circle of the Mechanical Arts explored sixty-six fields of labor, GOOGLE. But with their microscopic attention to the rapidly shifting skills being empowered or disempowered by new technologies and capital investments, these books offer a rare inside look at the language of vocation and practice. This language did not provide the high-minded sense of vocation now usually associated with a calling to one of the modern professions, but the gritty vocabulary now customarily assigned to vocational schools and to everything beneath what colleges and universities have, since the nineteenth century, been calling the arts and sciences. The discourse of mechanical arts largely fell out of this latter category by the mid-nineteenth century, but it was robustly at the center of arts and sciences during the long eighteenth century.2 [End Page 90] Meanwhile, these print technologies were among the first to adapt an old word to a new modern usage: scale. Today we grapple with complex questions of scale in such realms as the digital, with its problematic of scalability in computing and visualizing; or in globalization, with what cultural geographers have called a “rescaling of social life.”3 With the advent of the Anthropocene, there is also the sense of scale-shock we experience when trying to grapple with the implications of climate change, pondering with Dipesh Chakrabarty the challenge to “think human agency over multiple and incommensurable scales at once” (earth’s history, human history, industrial history).4 This essay uses early-modern print technologies to begin to answer a more preliminary question: where did we get the modern language of scale from in the first place? And what did this language have to do with problems of scale posed by emerging disciplines in the nineteenth century, or by capitalist modernity more broadly? From the Latin word scala (or ladder), scale or scales had once denoted a fixed and balanced order of things: the great scale of being, the immutable scales of justice. Our historical print databases show the rise of a new and different sense of scale from the seventeenth- to the mid-nineteenth century: to measure weight, then space, then time. For natural philosophers of the Royal Society, there was little possibility of experiment without using a scale...