190 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE bridge Scientific Instrument Company line (citing Michael Cattermole and A. F. Wolfe’s history of the company and Horace Darwin’s own 1913 paper) that Darwin was famous for his insistence on kine matic instrument design. She apparently missed the contributions of Darwin’s better-known Cambridge neighbors, Maxwell and Kelvin, who learned the principles of kinematic design from Robert Willis, Jacksonian Professor at Cambridge from 1837 to 1875. Although the author’s approach is open to some question, the book has strengths. For example, for me at least, the documented ex tent of direct government control of “optical munitions” manufactur ing in the United Kingdom during World War I was eye-opening. The apparent tensions over education and infrastructure also strike chords with modern discussions in the precision engineering com munity. In summary, Williams has given us both some new insights into and another perspective on the precision instruments industry. Some of the insights are valuable, but the position from which the overview emerges obscures important characteristics of the object under study. Chris J. Evans Mr. Evans, author of Precision Engineering: An Evolutionary View (Cranfield Press, 1989), is a practicing precision engineer at the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. Civilizing Mission: Exact Sciences and French Overseas Expansion, 1830— 1940. By Lewis Pyenson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Pp. xxi + 377; illustrations, notes, glossary, index. $45.00. Despite the use of the idiom “civilizing mission” in the title, Lewis Pyenson’s most recent contribution to the history of the “exact” sci ences in colonial settings does little to resolve any of the central issues in the current debate over the extent to which contextualist and rela tivist approaches ought to be applied to the study of the relationships between the diffusion of Western science and European overseas expansion. As evidenced by the lively exchange of views in a 1993 volume of Isis, Pyenson’s works on science and colonialism have been at the center of that debate. But in Civilizing Mission he rarely ad dresses directly the important issues that the controversy has raised, even though some of the evidence presented in the study suggests an interplay between scientific inquiry and the larger project of colo nization. Like Pyenson’s earlier works on the exact sciences in the Dutch and German colonial empires, his survey of the roles of science in the French mission civilisatrice is doggedly empirical. He provides only the most abbreviated explicit analysis, and his discussion of the links between science and colonialism is limited mostly to elliptical asides TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 191 and terse introductory paragraphs that often have only the slight est apparent connection to the chapters that follow. General asser tions are often at cross-purposes with the succession of case studies that make up most of the volume. Thus, Pyenson labors in the in troduction to establish that the “pure” or “exact” sciences involve “dispassionate and ‘disinterested’ research for general laws and prin ciples”—research that is “not closely linked to the real world,” readily crosses cultural boundaries, and resists “ideological contamination” (pp. xiii—xv). But a good deal of the case evidence that follows sup ports Pyenson’s parallel theme that the “practical” bent of French science, including physics and astronomy, served “to facilitate exploi tation” (p. 131), to advance the “immediate, direct, and utilitarian application of knowledge” (p. 62), or to advance the “ambitions of the ministry of war” (p. 90) in the colonies. At the same time, his episodic approach provides plenty of what appear to be counterexam ples of physicists and astronomers whose work is “dispassionate” (p. 173) and conducted in relative isolation from the colonial milieu. In the absence of clear definitions of key concepts, such as cultural imperialism and the civilizing mission, and an explicit and sustained analysis of the place of science in French overseas colonization, these contradictions are never reconciled, much less resolved. In fact, they are compounded by Pyenson’s ambivalence regarding the overall im pact of French expansionism, which in some places is seen as an agent for the diffusion of the Enlightenment (p. 31) and in others as a “cancer...