Science, Culture, and Modern State Formation [Hardcover]

This highly original, groundbreaking study explores the profound relationship between science and government to present a new understanding of modern state formation. Beginning with the experimental science of Robert Boyle in seventeenth-century England, Patrick Carroll develops the concept ofengine scienceto capture the centrality of engineering practices and technologies in the emerging mechanical philosophy. He traces the introduction of engine science into colonial Ireland, showing how that country subsequently became a laboratory for experiments in statecraft. Carrolls wide-ranging study, spanning institutions, political philosophy, and policy implementation, demonstrates that a number of new technological developmentsfrom cartography, statistics, and natural history to geology, public health, and sanitary engineeringreveal how modern science came to engineer land, people, and the built environment into a material political state in an unprecedented way, creating the modern state. Shedding new light on sociology, the history of science and technology, and on the history of British colonial projects in Ireland from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, his study has implications for understanding postcolonial occupations and nation-building ventures today and on contemporary dilemmas such as the role of science and government in environmental sustainability.

Patrick Carrollis Associate Professor of Sociology and a member of the Science and Technology Studies Program at the University of California at Davis. He is author ofColonial Discipline: The Making of the Irish Convict System.

InScience, Culture, and Modern State Formation,Patrick Carroll presents a new explanation of what is 'modern' about the modern state. He provides, and lays out in rich detail, the historical development of a modern state rooted in a new 'engineering culture' that emerged in the 17th-century, and demonstrates the inextrilc,