Depicting Watt: contextualism, myopia and the long view

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Depicting Watt: contextualism, myopia and the long view David Philip Miller: The life and legend of James Watt: collaboration, natural philosophy, and the improvement of the steam engine. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019, 422pp, US$35.00 PB David Philip Miller1

© Springer Nature B.V. 2020

My reviewers have been generous, offering up choice ‘blurbs’ for my publisher: ‘impressive’, an ‘elegant study’ (Stewart); ‘a compelling and often intriguing portrait’ (Lucas); ‘an interpretative masterwork’, ‘exemplary’ (Tomory). So far we are all pretty much in agreement! Otherwise my readers offer some accurate and useful expository interpretation of what my book has to say about Watt, an account of how my previous work fed into and helped build the current study, and, most importantly, a few grounds for criticism, much of it implicit. So, in my response, I will concentrate on their criticisms, trying to make explicit what I take to be implied. I will offer some reflections on the omissions and commissions that have caused concern, puzzlement, and perhaps even disappointment, be it ever so gently expressed. Larry Stewart summarises well many of my central points about Watt as natural philosopher, especially the wrapping of his philosophical excursions in the cloth of improvement and business that saw a promiscuous interchange between laboratory, workshop, and manufactory. He approves one of my key arguments that this was an interchange not a one-way flow—Watt as philosopher found grist for his mill in all these places, and also, as we might put it, ‘mill for his grist’. More generally, Stewart likes my deconstruction of the heroic Watt, of the singular genius, leaving a master craftsman and astute philosopher heavily dependent on ‘Team Watt’, not only collaborators and technical assistants but also members of his family. As in his own work, Stewart would give much more attention to the common craftsmen whose technical and philosophical acumen he regards as a central ingredient of the industrial enlightenment of the eighteenth century. Larry Stewart and Margaret Jacob, in broad alliance with the approach adopted by Joel Mokyr for explaining industrial change, give prominence to vehicles and mechanisms of broader enlightenment that spread scientific and technical knowledge and principles to the wider working population. But for me to engage more fully * David Philip Miller [email protected] 1



Humanities and Languages, University of New South Wales, Kensington, Australia

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Metascience

with that approach would also require consideration of many other forces at work in the British economy, including notably the role of the State, and how Watt’s work might be taken to exemplify or be aided by them. These are complex and difficult debates, not easy to tackle within a biographical framework. I opted, in an already long book, to avoid them, but for a critique of the ‘neo-liberal’ approach’s emphasis on knowledge drivers of industrialisation, a critique that might well be directed at me a