HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY

2019, VOL. 35, NO. 1, 3–30

https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1608082

HISTORIOGRAPHY ESSAY

By any other name: early modern expertise and the problem

of anachronism
Eric H. Ash
Department of History, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
The idea of expertise in early modern Europe has attracted significant Expert; expertise; early
attention from historians of science and technology in recent years. modern; modernization;
Some find the term useful in describing the rise of a productive and anachronism
flexible combination of practical and theoretical knowledge, for
which a contemporary word did not yet exist. Others criticize the
term as a pernicious anachronism that not only distorts our under-
standing of the pre-modern past, but also serves to promote a neo-
modernization theory of the history of early industrialization. The
goal of this article is to ask whether an admittedly anachronistic
term such as ‘expertise’ can be a useful and illuminating concept in
studying early modern history; whether it can do so without warping
our view of the past beyond recognition; and whether it can be
decoupled from current versions of modernization theory and
other whiggish historical notions.

There was no such thing as ‘expertise’ in early modern Europe, and this is an essay
about it.1 Early modern expertise is a topic I have explored throughout much of my
career as a historian. I have found the concept useful in helping me to make sense of
certain historical phenomena for which a fully adequate contemporary term did not yet
exist, particularly with regard to the role played by individuals possessing certain types
of technical knowledge in fostering the development of centralized, monarchical nation-
states. I have tried to use the concept thoughtfully, critically, and systematically, though
my understanding of it has certainly evolved over time. Many of my fellow historians
have also made use of expertise in their work, some with deep engagement and others
more casually, in works devoted to studying a wide array issues, times, and places
throughout the landscape of early modern Europe.
In recent years some of my other colleagues have offered a serious critique of ‘early
modern expertise’ as a pernicious anachronism. Since ‘expertise’ did not exist as an
articulable concept in early modern Europe, they argue, its use really reflects the concerns
and biases of present-day historians more than the perspectives or experiences of our
historical actors. Thus it can only distort our understanding of the past, warping it so that
the very people we study would not be able to recognize themselves in it. The resulting
historical fun-house mirror can then be used, they warn, to enlist early modern history in
the service of a powerful modernist agenda, to promote a particular ideology of free market

CONTACT Eric H. Ash [email protected]

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
4 E. H. ASH

economics and a weak regulatory state. The historian of science Peter Dear, who has
wrestled more than most with the potential uses, mis-uses, and abuses of anachronistic
terms, has written that, ‘Anachronism is a form of advocacy, and usually a suspect form, but
advocacy is an integral part of what all historians do, whether deliberately or not.’2 What
follows is a consideration of what sorts of advocacy the anachronistic notion of early
modern expertise has been doing of late, as well as what historical phenomena it has
been helpful in illuminating, and also some suggestions for how it might be more effectively
and appropriately deployed in the future.
The perils of anachronism represent a potential problem for virtually all historians, as
a sort of inescapable paradox. As A. Rupert Hall once wrote, there is no more natural
question for historians (and everyone else) to ask than, ‘How did we arrive at the condition
we are now in?’3 That question must have a satisfying answer if the study of history is to
have any meaning or purpose. Yet if we are guided too strongly by it, we are bound to hark
more to our own concerns and preoccupations than to the subtle and unfamiliar realities
contained in the historical evidence we have at hand. Quentin Skinner addressed this issue
within the field of the history of ideas, arguing that the very ‘models and preconceptions in
which we unavoidably organize and adjust our perceptions and thoughts will themselves
tend to act as determinants of what we think or perceive.’ This is problematic insofar as our
preconceptions will tend to create fixed boundaries for our understanding of history that
have no reference to the historical agents we are studying, so that ‘we understand the agent
to be doing something which he would not – or even could not – himself have accepted as
an account of what he was doing.’ When we seek to make sense of the past with reference to
our own ‘preconceived paradigms,’ Skinner writes, the resulting studies cannot constitute
good history; they ‘might as well be turned into fiction by intention, for they must certainly
be fiction by attainment.’4
Anachronism has long been a particular preoccupation for historians of science and
technology. Since both science and technology are generally premised on the notion of
progress – ever pushing back the boundaries of our knowledge of nature, ever inventing
new and better machines to aid us in manipulating it – the history of those fields is
naturally bound to try and explain that progress. But in so doing we inevitably bring
our own beliefs, biases, and priorities – our ‘preconceived paradigms’ – along with us,
and the task of comprehending and explaining the origins of historical progress can
easily give way to our desire to justify the present state of things. This problem was
famously addressed nearly a century ago by Herbert Butterfield, a foundational figure in
the early history of science, in his Whig Interpretation of History. Butterfield warned his
readers of the tendency of some historians ‘to emphasize certain principles of progress
in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the
present,’ a tendency that has come to be known as ‘whiggish’ history.5 When we seek
ourselves in the past, we usually manage to find just what we are looking for, and are
apt to find it both familiar and attractive.
Especially since the 1980s, historians of science and technology have taken these
critiques of whiggish history very seriously. They have strived to understand the past ‘in
its own terms,’ resisting any easy assumptions of, or references to, notions of ‘progress,’
and emphasizing the importance of privileging the language, categories, and worldviews
of the historical actors themselves, so far as possible. This has yielded some masterful
historical studies, but it has also created some problems and tensions, as many have
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 5

noted. To take just one often-cited example, conscientious historians of science who
specialize in any period before the mid-19th century are supposed to avoid calling their
object of study ‘science,’ or their historical actors ‘scientists,’ since those words either
did not exist or did not acquire their modern meanings before 1850.6
But excising all historical references to early modern ‘science’ and ‘scientists’ has not
been easy, nor has it solved the underlying problem of anachronism. In a 2014 essay
published in this journal entitled ‘Butterfield’s Nightmare,’ Andre Wakefield decried
a growing trend he perceives in recent historiography of science and technology, to
bring other thoroughly modern terms to bear in our investigations of early modern
history to replace the banished ‘science.’ He particularly considered two such terms,
‘economics’ and ‘expertise,’ and he made a compelling case that our incorporation of
these and similar notions in our construction and interpretation of the early modern past
has tended to distort our understanding of that past. Both terms, and others like them,
‘come fully loaded with nineteenth- and twentieth-century baggage. . . they immediately
conjure a host of modern structures, concepts, and assumptions that we project back’
onto an earlier era that cannot support them.7 This tends to give historians a false sense
of familiarity and security, making them think they have a good understanding of what
they believe they see in the historical sources, when in fact they are only bringing their
present-day worldviews back in time with them. It is this historiographical state of affairs
that Wakefield characterizes as nothing less than Herbert Butterfield’s ‘nightmare.’ Nor is
he alone in his critique. The historian William J. Ashworth has noted ‘the inconvenient
truth’ that the term ‘expertise’ did not exist in pre-modern Europe, ‘and thus can be
interpreted as simply an anachronism.’ Even as late as the first half of the nineteenth
century, he writes, ‘It is not possible to point to a single set of benchmarks in this period
and concretely claim this is “expertise” and virtually everyone agrees on it; thus the term
remains slippery, anachronistic and troubling.’8
Neither critic is dogmatic about the issue of anachronism. Ashworth has by no
means condemned outright historians’ use of the concept of early modern expertise,
and indeed he has frequently engaged with it in his own work, if somewhat skeptically.
He acknowledges that ‘there is an ongoing and important debate over the relative values
of empirical experience, proven efficacy, theoretical knowledge and institutional cre-
dentials, in terms of engendering trust, patronage and authority’ in the early modern
period, and that ‘the sense and meaning of these features share a family resemblance to
what we now term “expertise.”’9 And Wakefield insists that he is ‘not urging historians
completely to abandon the use of anachronistic terms. That would be silly; in certain
contexts, anachronisms can have value as analytical tools.’10 Both remain convinced,
however, that even a careful and critical use of anachronisms such as ‘expertise’ can still
do real mischief. In assigning the title of ‘expert’ to some historical actors and not to
others, when the actors themselves never explicitly did so, ‘we valorize certain narra-
tives. . . and neglect others.’ We indulge our own prejudices and priorities, and become
less sensitive to the nuances of the history we study. We risk taking sides in a bitter
historical conflict, or else creating false dichotomies where none existed, naming
‘winners’ and ‘losers’ based primarily on our own modern criteria. We also normalize
the practice, opening the door for others to use anachronistic terms less carefully and
less critically, until finally our collective view of the past is obscured altogether in the
fog of the technocratic present.11
6 E. H. ASH

This view is echoed in a recent article by J. Andrew Mendelsohn and Annemarie

Kinzelbach, in which the authors reject expertise as a helpful category of early modern
historical analysis. Using a diverse set of case studies involving the intersection of law,
forensic medicine, and public authority in early modern Germany, they show that while
putative experts such as surgeons were generally consulted and asked to testify in
difficult cases, their testimony was rarely, if ever decisive in settling a case. Rather,
they stress the importance of ‘shared practices of knowing’ among stakeholders both
with and without specialized medical training, all of whom consistently managed to
communicate and contribute from across their diverse backgrounds and perspectives,
with no particular deference shown to the specialized knowledge of the supposed
experts. This suggests not a strict hierarchy of expert and lay knowledge but ‘a history
of common rather than uncommon knowing, of shared empirical rational practices
rather than specialties and interactions, a history that the very focus on “expertise”
tends to obscure.’ In their emphasis on common knowing, collaboration, and consensus
building, they argue that ‘the very idea of expertise is the problem. . . because it
necessarily means special,’ which in turn ‘blinds us to common knowledge’ and ‘disin-
vites investigation of all participants as knowers.’12
If expertise is to be of any analytical use to historians (and others), we need to determine
first the ways in which it may be helpful, the ways in which it is not, and the risk that it may
do more harm than good. Nightmare is rather a strong word; what is it about early modern
‘expertise’ and other such anachronisms that would cause Herbert Butterfield to toss
uneasily in his sleep? What is really at stake here? Certainly, our comprehension of early
modern history is one answer. Anachronisms may sometimes aid the study of history by
allowing us to name and to analyze certain perceptible phenomena for which there was not
yet a contemporary term, or render certain beliefs and activities of previous eras more
comprehensible to our contemporary audience as historians. But they always come at
a price, and they can obscure as well as enlighten. When historians use as historical
explanations ideas that still need to be explained themselves, they transform what should
be important questions into doubtful answers. This, Wakefield writes, ‘is not really history
at all. It is merely the present masquerading as the past,’ so that it can sometimes be difficult
to remember what century one is really talking about.13
But a history warped by presentist concerns is not all that is at stake. Perhaps even
more important is what such a history would mean for our understanding of the
present, and our vision for the future. Wakefield, Ashworth, and others are most
alarmed by the rebirth of a particular kind of warped history, a revival of Cold War-
era modernization theory, as once put forth by Walt Rostow, David Landes, and
others.14 Modernization theorists such as Rostow were trying to explain the origins
of, and reasons for, the rapid rise of technological innovation and economic growth,
starting first in Britain in the mid-eighteenth century and gradually spreading to
France, Germany, the United States, and ultimately to much of the modern world.
But they undertook that historical project in the service of another, more present-
minded mission in the context of the Cold War: demonstrating through history that the
proper conditions for industrial ‘take off’ and the economic prosperity that followed
from it were fundamentally rooted in certain linked aspects of western capitalist culture,
most clearly and fully expressed in modern Anglo-American civilization.
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 7

At the risk of over-simplifying: Classic modernization theory emphasized the power

of individual liberty and rational free expression to unleash the potential for creativity
and entrepreneurial innovation in all people, as a vital ingredient for the sort of
technological leaps and bounds that made the world’s first Industrial Revolution
possible. In this model, anything that fosters personal freedom is good; anything that
inhibits or restricts it is bad; and the various political, economic, and cultural char-
acteristics of a given society are all closely intertwined. Individual freedom of expres-
sion, a liberal democratic political regime that promotes it, free market capitalism,
a weak and benign state regulatory system, Protestant religion, rational Enlightenment-
era philosophy, experimental scientific inquiry, and technological advancement were all
intrinsically linked to one another as cultural elements in the northern European cradle
of the Industrial Revolution. Not unlike the Aristotelian view of the cosmos that began
to unravel in the sixteenth century, each part of this overarching modernization
structure serves to reinforce the others. Only in a weak regulatory state, for example,
can the magic of free-market enterprise function properly; only with freedom of
expression and inquiry can scientific knowledge follow wherever value-neutral experi-
ments might lead; only with scientific advancement and free-market incentives can
entrepreneurial invention and sustained technological innovation be expected.
Together, these political, economic, and cultural factors mix synergistically together,
to foster progress and give birth to the modern western world – politically free and
democratic, economically prosperous, scientifically and technologically advanced, phi-
losophically enlightened, and serving as the ultimate bulwark of prosperity against the
twin threats posed by totalitarianism and communism.
It is a beguiling and attractive theory, not least because it paints its western
protagonists in such a powerfully positive light. Technological progress gave rise to
the modern world and all of its industrial marvels; freedom, capitalism, and science
brought us progress; and this could only have transpired in the freest, most capitalist,
most scientifically curious and advanced civilization on earth for its time, eighteenth-
century Britain, from which it soon spread to the rest of right-thinking western
civilization. And while the Cold War may be over (we very much hope), modernization
theory lives on in a new generation of economic and cultural history, best exemplified
in the work of Joel Mokyr. Over the course of numerous books and articles, Mokyr has
constructed an elaborate theory regarding the early modern origins of sustained
economic growth and industrialization. Sketched very briefly, his theory posits that
certain seventeenth-century ‘cultural entrepreneurs’ including Francis Bacon and Isaac
Newton gave rise to a new paradigm of scientific inquiry characterized by verifiable
experimentation, quantitative analysis, and a deep commitment to inductive, operative
knowledge. This expanded the realm of thinkable thoughts, greatly increasing both the
status and availability of ‘useful knowledge.’ During the eighteenth century, the bank of
useful knowledge continued to grow while the ‘access costs’ to that knowledge were
sharply reduced for the wider public. This, combined with a well-functioning free
market economy and a weak regulatory state – what Mokyr has characterized as
‘economic reasonableness’ – gave birth to an ‘Industrial Enlightenment’ marked by
rapid, sustained technological advances and economic growth.15
The explicit point of Mokyr’s version of modernization theory is to shift the
emphasis in the economic history of the early industrial era away from materialist
8 E. H. ASH

considerations and toward cultural/intellectual ones, ‘to rid ourselves of the relics of
historical materialism.’16 The Industrial Revolution was not the product of abundant
coal or cheap labor, but sprang instead from fruitful ideas – Newtonian science, liberal
economics, entrepreneurial innovation – fostered by a few benevolent institutions. In
concentrating so strongly on certain intellectual currents prevalent among a rarified
elite, the theory tends to ignore (or actively to silence) all else. In all the talk of the
importance of ‘useful knowledge,’ ‘economic reasonableness,’ and ‘cultural entrepre-
neurs’ in promoting Europe’s revolutionary economic growth, little or nothing is said of
chattel slavery, for example, or the brutal exploitation inherent in Europe’s colonization
of so much of the globe. The enormous value created, and the miserable living
conditions endured, by the legions of Europe’s working classes are not adequately
addressed, in the quest to valorize the clever and entrepreneurial inventor. The
British state’s omnipresent efforts to promote and protect nascent British manufactur-
ing interests, in a time of constant and expensive warfare, are ignored or denied, despite
recent historiography that shines a bright light on these issues.17
Deirdre McCloskey has offered a similar cultural argument, albeit with less focus on
the elite pursuit of ‘useful knowledge’ through a mix of science, technology and
innovation, and a more general emphasis on liberal ideas and values. McCloskey has
attributed the Industrial Revolution and its unprecedented economic growth to the rise
of a ‘bourgeois dignity,’ a widespread reappraisal of the social and moral value of
bourgeois trade and entrepreneurialism that took place across northern Europe in the
eighteenth century. ‘The revaluation, called “liberalism”’ was rooted in ‘two levels of
ideas – the ideas in the heads of the entrepreneurs for the betterment of themselves. . .
and the ideas in the society at large about the businesspeople and their betterments (in
a word, that liberalism).’18 Once again, the ‘materialist notions of the nineteenth
century’ had little or nothing to do with it. ‘New ideas from bourgeois commoners
supported by a new liberty and dignity... made the Great Enrichment,’ she writes,
‘Empire did not enrich Britain. America’s success did not depend on slavery. Power
did not lead to plenty, and exploitation was not plenty’s engine. French equality had
nothing to do with it. The real engine was the expanding ideology of the liberal plan of
equality, liberty, and justice.’19
How does early modern expertise fit into all of this? For Mokyr especially, the
‘Industrial Enlightenment’ was rooted in the expansion and increasing availability of
‘useful knowledge,’ which was itself the product of ‘a deep complementarity between
natural philosophers and artisans, between knowledge what and knowledge how.’20
Mokyr has based his theory in this regard partly on the work of some historians of
science, particularly Margaret Jacob and Larry Stewart, who have written extensively
about the spread of Newtonian science in eighteenth-century Europe and its role in
fostering the technological innovations of the early industrial era. They point to
a marked interest in experimental natural philosophy among the artisanal and mercan-
tile classes of northern Europe (especially non-conformist Protestants in England), and
suggest that the pregnant combination of practical shop-floor know-how and more
formal scientific knowledge and experimentation helped to create Europe’s ‘first knowl-
edge economy,’ igniting a rapid, sustained period of technological advancement and
economic growth.21 While some of Jacob’s and Stewart’s causal connections between
Newtonian science and industrial innovation are more speculative than conclusive,
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 9

their work is grounded in an array of primary sources that certainly demonstrate

a marked interest in Newtonian mechanics, deliberate experimentation, quantitative
analysis, and ‘public science’ among some of the early inventors and entrepreneurs of
the industrial era, particularly in England.
The productive interactions, seen not just in eighteenth-century England but
throughout early modern Europe, between those who possessed practical technical
knowledge and those with more academic training in natural philosophy, have long
been a popular area of study among early modern historians of science and technology,
including the present author. In seeking language with which to describe adequately the
various aspects and implications of those interactions, some (by no means all) of us
have described this fluid mix of practical and theoretical knowledge of nature as an
emerging form of ‘expertise.’ And just as Mokyr has made use of some of this work in
the history of science in constructing his ‘Industrial Enlightenment,’ some historians of
science have connected their interest in early modern expertise to his economic history
model. Marcus Popplow, for example, has sought to broaden Mokyr’s term to a more
generalized ‘economic Enlightenment’ (in order to incorporate agricultural improve-
ments as well as industrial technology), and has argued that something he calls
‘artisanal-scientific expertise’ contributed to it in important ways.22 Early modern
expertise, or something very like it, has thus become enmeshed in a neo-
modernization theory of industrialization, part of the ‘missing link’ between the
Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century and the Industrial Revolution of the
late-eighteenth. It was early modern experts, with their uncommon and valuable mix of
practical and theoretical knowledge, who are supposed to have lit the fuse for industrial
‘take off.’ ‘Expertise’ thereby shifts from being something in need of careful analysis and
explanation in its own right, to become a principal explanation of some much larger,
much later events.
A full critique of the current iterations of modernization theory is well beyond the
scope of this essay, and has been undertaken very ably by others, particularly
William Ashworth.23 My goal here is to ask whether an anachronistic term such as
‘expertise’ can be a useful and illuminating concept in studying early modern history;
whether it can do so without warping our view of the past beyond recognition; and
whether it can be decoupled from the current versions of modernization theory and
other whiggish historical notions. If anachronism is indeed ‘a form of advocacy, and
usually a suspect form,’ as Peter Dear suggests, then we need to acknowledge the
sorts of advocacy early modern expertise has been put to. For Wakefield, Ashworth,
and other critics, anachronistic terms like ‘expert’ and ‘expertise’ cannot be seen as
value-neutral analytical tools, nor is using them a harmless historiographical foible.
The terms are actually doing some serious political advocacy, lending credence to
a revived modernization theory in the service of ratifying and glorifying our neo-
liberal, free-market capitalist civilization in the present.24 Such a rose-colored,
whiggish vision of the past, which Wakefield scathingly refers to as ‘Disney history,’
is truly Butterfield’s nightmare.25
And yet, while these concerns are neither wrong nor misplaced, I nevertheless
continue to believe that ‘expertise’ can still be a useful analytical tool for the pre-
modern historian. I still see within the primary sources a new concept emerging in
early modern Europe, a form of knowledge that was not entirely rooted in
10 E. H. ASH

empirical, hands-on experience, nor yet in practical mathematics, nor in a rarified

natural philosophy, but arose instead from a fluid combination of these various
forms of knowing. And I have taken much inspiration from a multitude of fellow
historians who have long been interested in many of the same phenomena, and
have done groundbreaking work in illuminating and trying to make sense of them.
This new form of knowledge is hard to articulate because it was an unstable mix,
ever in flux, always being negotiated, nameless because the name we now use for it
had yet to come into being. I would not identify this new sort of knowledge too
closely with our contemporary ideas of expertise (whatever they may be), nor
would I claim that it was uniformly an agent of progress (whatever that might
mean), or somehow unique to Britain, or even Western Europe. But whatever we
might choose to call it, it certainly shares ‘a family resemblance to what we now
term “expertise.”’26
* * *
In the introduction to the 2010 issue of the journal Osiris that was entirely devoted to
the exploration of expertise in early modern Europe and its empires, I suggested
a preliminary set of criteria for what it might mean to be an early modern ‘expert’:
(1) To be ‘expert’ was to control a body of specialized practical or productive knowl-
edge, not readily available to everyone; (2) Expertise was usually based at least in part
upon empirical experience; (3) Expertise often involved the abstraction or distillation of
theory or generalized knowledge from practice; (4) Experts should be distinguishable
from common practitioners or artisans; (5) Experts did not exist without
a sociopolitical context – expertise required some form of public acknowledgement,
affirmation, and legitimation.27 These criteria were not intended to be definitive or
exhaustive, but were meant to lay the groundwork for a conversation about how this
anachronistic term might be applied usefully by historians of early modern science and
technology – a term made all the more complicated by the fact that we do not always
agree about its meaning or identification even in our contemporary world. I still find
these criteria to be reasonably sound, useful, and satisfying. The historical concepts and
phenomena they describe appear very real to me, even if they’re hard to pin down, and
even harder to name.
I have come to think that perhaps the slipperiness of expertise, the constant need to
negotiate it, may be essential to the concept, so that it can never simply be assumed.
Many historians have done excellent work examining the terms and venues of this
negotiation, richly grounded in primary sources. Pamela H. Smith, in her extensive
explorations of natural knowledge to be found in early modern artisans’ workshops, has
credited artisans with forming nothing less than ‘a new epistemology, a new scientia
based on nature,’ thereby transforming ‘the contemplative discipline of natural philo-
sophy into an active one.’ Practical, hands-on knowledge was not only legitimate and
valuable in the artisans’ new epistemology, it was the only sure path to understanding
the natural world, and on that basis artisans asserted ‘a new intellectual and social
authority for themselves, based on their relationship to nature.’ So successful were they
that ultimately ‘new philosophers in the seventeenth century appropriated to themselves
the artisanal expertise about the processes and powers of nature.’28
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 11

Pamela O. Long has also worked to illuminate the impressive range of intellectual
and practical knowledge to be found in some artisans’ workshops, paying close atten-
tion to historical context. She has suggested that such places should be regarded as early
modern ‘trading zones,’ or ‘arenas in which artisans and other practitioners. . . and
learned men. . . engaged in substantive communication and shared their respective
expertise.’29 The ‘trading zone’ concept is so useful because it stresses the active
engagement of individuals with very different kinds of knowledge, ‘the interchanges
between skilled and learned individuals. . . [that] helped legitimize the value of the
practical and integrate it into the discourse of the learned.’30 Trading zones proliferated
in the sixteenth century especially, Long writes, partly because it was ‘an era before the
development of modern professionalism and its hyperspecialization,’ thus allowing for
more mixing of different knowledge sets. She also notes that not all artisans were
equally likely to participate in them – they were the province of ‘artistically trained
individuals who followed somewhat fluid careers and were not locked into a traditional
craft,’ a group that included engineers, architects, surveyors, and engravers, but not
shoemakers, spinners, or farmers.31 The demand for the knowledge to be found in
trading zones came from political and social elites who wanted access to the operative
power it promised. Influential patrons fostered their development ‘because such zones
promoted the economic interests of their states and territories and were important for
their personal political and social authority and standing.’32 It was no accident that the
most prolific trading zones tended to form in state-controlled venues and institutions
such as arsenals, mines, and shipyards. Throughout, Long stresses the fluidity and
negotiation inherent in the knowledge created in trading zones, and in the careers of
those who created it: ‘Such investigation must be sensitive to the roles, especially, of
those trained as practitioners whose occupations and status were changeable and
changing. At times the categories of “artisanal” and “learned” became blurred as the
skilled acquired learning and the learned acquired skills.’33
Deborah E. Harkness’s fascinating study of the artisanal and natural philosophical
communities in Elizabethan London may be viewed as a wonderful example of Long’s
trading zones in action. In meticulously tracing the careers and the social and profes-
sional connections of hundreds of artisans working throughout the city, Harkness finds
a burgeoning interest in practical mathematics, new mechanical inventions, and instru-
ments of all kinds, as well as a growing demand for the specialized mix of practical and
theoretical knowledge needed to master them. There was, she writes, a great need for
‘teachers. . . who could translate difficult concepts to an audience made up of two
constituencies: the sons of gentlemen with good classical educations but little hands-
on knowledge of how to apply mathematical theories to use an instrument or to solve
a surveying dilemma, and the children and servants of merchants who could keep
accounts and construct mechanical items but were not well versed in abstract mathe-
matical theories and concepts.’ The shared interest in such topics from so many
different directions ‘brought together students and scholars, artisans and apprentices,
into fruitful exchange and collaboration.’ Over time, it even served ‘to move the study
of nature along from its largely theoretical medieval foundations toward something
more empirical.’34
The trading zone model is also evident in the work of several historians who focus
on the early modern Iberian empires. In seeking to conquer, govern, and exploit the
12 E. H. ASH

vast territories of the New World, Spanish and Portuguese merchants, cosmographers,
and crown officials first had to understand those territories, their inhabitants, resources,
and economic potential. When the classical tradition of natural history proved utterly
inadequate to describe the New World, Iberian cosmographers turned instead to
a much more empirical basis for gathering knowledge. María M. Portuondo, for
example, has illuminated the ways in which Spanish cosmographers productively
mixed traditional natural historical learning, practical knowledge, empirical experience,
and mixed mathematics in their effort to comprehend the Spanish empire’s New World
territories.35 Antonio Barrera-Osorio has likewise described the various ‘empirical
practices’ that allowed Spanish cosmographers to collect, organize, and disseminate
practical information about the New World as efficiently as possible.36 Both of them
emphasize the degree to which Iberian systems of knowledge gathering were formalized
and institutionalized through crown-sponsored foundations such as the Casa de la
Contratación and the Council of Indies. Both also point to the strong focus on
utilitarian knowledge; these institutions had clear royal mandates to produce knowledge
in the service of empire, not just for its own sake. But while the shift to empiricism and
the productive melding of traditional cosmology, mathematics, and practical experience
certainly facilitated the governance and exploitation of the Iberian empires, they also
gave rise to new ways of studying and understanding the natural world more generally.
By bringing together what Barrera-Osorio calls ‘communities of experts’ within pur-
pose-built, institutionalized trading zones where they could share their collective
experience and knowledge, the Spanish crown was able to discipline the vast empirical
knowledge it was acquiring from its global empire, to organize and systematize it so
that it might be more fully exploited.37 Importantly, the needs of the empire frequently
called upon various practitioners to address their skills toward solving technical pro-
blems that were outside their prior experience, an important marker of expertise.38
While all of these historians occasionally use the words ‘expert’ and ‘expertise’ in
their work, the concept is not necessarily a central pillar of their analyses – they focus
more generally on the fruitful intermixing of practical and theoretical knowledge. Other
historians have engaged the notion of expertise much more directly. Ursula Klein, for
example, has researched and written extensively about a community of eighteenth-
century apothecary-chemists in Prussia and elsewhere.39 Klein has demonstrated per-
suasively that practicing apothecaries shared a great deal of cognitive and empirical
overlap with more academically-trained chemists of the era. This included experimental
techniques and methods, instruments and other technologies, a similar language, and
an overall theoretical understanding. The two groups may have been trying to answer
different questions, aiming at different outcomes and for different reasons, but they
were still doing and learning many of the same things, and they found one another’s
work compelling and useful. This shared basis in both practice and understanding
blurred the boundaries between the two, and allowed a number of Klein’s apothecaries,
originally trained as apprentices, to move beyond apothecary practice into a more
academic study of chemistry.
If the collected knowledge, methods and skills of Klein’s apothecary-chemists
cannot be labeled as ‘expertise,’ then it is hard to think what else it might be called –
it is not one, easily-named thing, but a fascinating and fruitful mix of many things.
The knowledge in question was technical, specialized, and rare; it involved material/
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 13

practical as well as theoretical/general components; it was capable of producing

tangible, valuable results; and it was in the process of becoming standardized and
systematized. What is more, it was deployed in the service of the state, where it was
cultivated, valued, and protected. Negotiation of roles and exchange of knowledge are
central parts of Klein’s story, and the porcelain manufactory and other venues in
which her apothecaries and chemists interacted are the epitome of one of Long’s early
modern trading zones. Klein’s apothecary-chemists represent a relatively late case
study, at the very end of what we tend to think of as the ‘early modern period,’ but
they are hardly a unique example.
Practical ability and a more general understanding are both constitutive elements of
expertise, though the relative emphasis on each was highly variable, and this degree of
variation partly explains why the concept is so difficult to define with precision. The
Englishman Thomas Digges is a good case in point. When Queen Elizabeth’s Privy
Council sought in the 1580s to rebuild the decaying harbor at Dover – so important for
England, for both trade and naval defense – they struggled for nearly three years to
settle upon a feasible plan for constructing the required seawalls, and to identify an
individual they could trust to oversee the project. After considering proposals from
a number of English and Flemish consultants, they hired two successive directors for
the work, John Trew and Fernando Poyntz, both of whom wasted money and accom-
plished little. Finally, the frustrated privy councilors settled upon one of their own
clients, Thomas Digges, to serve as master surveyor.40
Digges was an interesting choice. He was a gentleman and landowner of Kent, the
county in which Dover is located; he was also an active parliamentary ‘man of business’
in the service of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the queen’s closest advisor; and he was
known and respected as an accomplished mathematician, surveyor, and astronomer by
the early 1580s. But despite his experience as a surveyor he had no known experience in
building seawalls, or in directing such a project. What he did claim to have was a strong
knowledge of practical mathematics; extensive first-hand observations of seawall con-
struction, both in the Low Countries and in his native Kent; personal connections
among the common laborers of the nearby village of Romney, who had ample experi-
ence maintaining the durable seawalls that protected their lands from marine floods;
and an established relationship as a competent, trusted advisor to the Privy Council. On
the strength of all of these claims to authority, Digges was finally tapped to direct the
construction project, and he oversaw the successful rebuilding of the harbor.
It is important to stress that it was not Digges’s prior experience or track record in
managing such projects that gave him credibility with the Privy Council (he had none),
nor was it his eventual success at Dover (which obviously came after he was chosen for
the job). He clearly was not what the historian of technology Steven A. Walton refers to
in another context as an ‘expert-by-practice.’ Nor did Digges have any deeper, abstract
knowledge of the principles of hydraulic construction techniques; he was thus not an
‘expert-by-knowledge.’ It was a mix of different kinds of experience and knowledge,
much of it merely observational, relational, or second-hand, together with his already
being a known and trusted advisor to the Privy Council that made him what Walton
calls an ‘expert-in-context’ – a most apt term in capturing the ongoing need to
negotiate expertise case by case throughout the early modern period.41 Digges’s ultimate
success in rebuilding the harbor is certainly interesting, but equally interesting and
14 E. H. ASH

worthy of study is the Privy Council’s ongoing struggle to identify and get control of the
expertise they required at Dover, in a time before engineering curricula and profes-
sional credentialing had been developed. The complicated and contingent negotiation
of expertise lies at the heart of the story, a negotiation that included the would-be
expert, the crown advisors who sought his services, and also the laborers who would
actually do the work under his guidance.
A similar argument can be made regarding Pierre-Paul Riquet, the French tax farmer
from Languedoc who convinced Jean-Baptiste Colbert that he could construct a canal
across southern France, from the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean, in the middle of
the seventeenth century. Like Digges, Riquet had no known experience in hydraulic
construction techniques. What he had, as far as Colbert was concerned, was a compelling
and plausible sounding proposal and a great deal of confidence in presenting it. Colbert
ultimately entrusted Riquet with the canal project, though he was never altogether com-
fortable trusting him with the vast sums of money needed to build it. He demanded full
accounting and progress reports from Riquet, but he had no way to compel Riquet to satisfy
him, short of cutting off the money and ending the project. He had no one else qualified to
take it on, nor did he ever manage to find a suitable and trusted engineer who could provide
satisfactory oversight. In the end, the canal was successfully completed; but the problem of
overseeing and controlling Riquet, of verifying that he was actually doing what he promised
to do at such massive expense, was a constant source of anxiety for the royal minister who
had commissioned him to do the work.42
So, was Riquet an expert? It depends on what one means by the term. He had no
known prior experience with such a project – though in that era very few, if any, did
have such experience, as Colbert discovered for himself in seeking someone to monitor
the tax farmer. He also apparently knew little about hydraulic construction techniques
in general. So, he was neither an expert-by-practice nor an expert-by-knowledge. What
he did know was where to find the experience and knowledge he would need – as
Chandra Mukerji argues in her excellent book on the canal project, the practical
knowledge in question was in the minds and hands of peasant women living in the
Pyrenees Mountains, who for generations had maintained the system of aqueducts,
originally built by the ancient Romans, that supplied water to their mountain villages.
The canal was thus a fundamentally collaborative endeavor, the product of engineers
and peasants together, each of whom possessed different pieces of the same classical
puzzle.43 Were the mountain women, then, the real experts in the canal project? To my
mind, they were not; they might perhaps be seen as the master builders, but left to
themselves they would never have conceived of building anything like the canal, nor
could they ever have convinced Colbert of their ability to do so. Riquet was the expert,
despite his own personal lack of relevant experience, because he developed a credible
proposal, convinced the hard-nosed Colbert to fund it, and knew where to locate the
knowledge and skill that could make it a reality. He was an expert-in-context, identified
and legitimated as such through a process of negotiation between Riquet himself, the
royal minister who wanted to build the canal, and the skilled laborers who actually
knew how to do it.44
A third example of this sort of expertise-in-context is Cornelius Vermuyden, the Dutch
drainage projector who was commissioned to undertake one of the largest land drainage
projects in early modern Europe, draining the English Fens in the seventeenth century.45
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 15

Vermuyden designed, lobbied for, and oversaw the construction of a series of English
drainage schemes, the two largest being the Hatfield Level drainage in the late 1620s, and
the much larger Great Level drainage in the early 1650s, the largest such projects ever
undertaken in England at that time. Vermuyden was a consummate example of negotiated
expertise-in-context. His claim to expertise began with his country of origin – by the late-
sixteenth century, Dutch drainage engineers were known throughout northern Europe,
working on a number of drainage projects in France, northern Germany, Scandinavia, and
England. Vermuyden came from a long line of land drainers on both sides of his family, and
apparently had some personal experience with such projects by the time he arrived in
England in the early 1620s. He also claimed to know enough about land drainage techni-
ques in general that he could adapt his prior experience to the different circumstances of
England’s wetlands, which being above sea level, did not require the same intensive
techniques that were employed in the Low Countries. At first glance he was an obvious
choice to manage any drainage project, especially in England where the relevant experience
was rare, and he soon won the trust and patronage of King James I, and also of his son and
successor, King Charles I.
From the start, however, Vermuyden’s activities in England were controversial, and
of questionable success. His first undertaking in the country, attempting to rebuild an
important dike along the River Thames in the county of Essex, resulted in a protracted
dispute with local officials, who accused him of gross incompetence and mismanage-
ment. His drainage project at Hatfield Chase appeared to be more successful, but some
serious design flaws in his original plan resulted in unprecedented flooding in neigh-
boring communities. The crown eventually ruled that some expensive additional works
must be constructed, at the expense of the Dutch investors who were funding the
project. The investors lost a great deal of money as a result, and took Vermuyden to
court in a case that dragged on for years.
When the English investors in the much larger, more complicated, and vastly more
expensive Great Level drainage sought a director for their project in 1649, they were
deeply reluctant to hire Vermuyden. By that time he had collected an impressive array
of critics and enemies, including the Dutch investors who refused to entrust him with
any more of their money, the English drainage overseers who insisted his Dutch
methods were inappropriate for the conditions of England’s wetlands, and the inhabi-
tants of those wetlands who had suffered from his previous undertakings. The negotia-
tions with Vermuyden stretched on for months, and the Great Level investors
considered a parade of alternate candidates; but in the end they hired Vermuyden
anyway, not because they wanted to, but because he was still the most credible
candidate available for the job. Even with his deeply troubling track record, no one
else in England came close to matching Vermuyden’s claims to empirical experience
and general knowledge. He was something of an ‘expert-by-default.’ And having hired
him, they soon found they had no way to control him. Just as Colbert could not find
anyone to provide adequate oversight of Pierre-Paul Riquet in the same period, the
Great Level investors found it impossible to question or gainsay Vermuyden’s decisions,
even when he ignored their instructions and usurped their authority. If they wanted
their Fens drained, this dubious expert-in-context was apparently the only one in
England who could do it, and they had little choice but to trust him.
16 E. H. ASH

Once again, what makes Vermuyden so compelling is partly his success in draining
the Great Level (if only temporarily), but it is also the complex and messy process of
negotiating his expertise – the published claims and counter-claims, the vital questions
impossible to answer, the risky trust required even from those who were loathe to grant
it, the futile efforts of inexpert investors and overseers to control the expert director
who was supposed to be working for them. The terms and methods of the negotiation
are at least as important as its eventual outcome, and that would be true to some degree
whether Vermuyden had succeeded in draining the Great Level or not. While the
modern end-point to this broader story involves engineering colleges, professional
credentials, peer review, legal definitions, state licensing, and so forth, the negotiation
of early modern expertise is so fascinating precisely because all of these modern
markers were still very far off. There were as yet few clear methods for weighing claims
or settling disputes, so that the entire process was much more open and ad hoc. Early
modern expertise had to be (re)negotiated anew, every time it came up.
* * *
So where does all this leave us, as historians of early modern expertise (if so we may be
called)? If it is true that anachronism is threatening to becloud our historiography and
obscure our understanding of the early modern past, it is equally true that something
that looks and sounds and acts very much like an inchoate version of modern expertise
existed in the early modern world – something that cannot be categorized simply as
‘experience,’ or ‘craft knowledge,’ or ‘natural philosophy,’ or ‘mixed mathematics,’ or
any other contemporary term. In the spirit of offering a very preliminary set of guide-
lines, I’d like to suggest a few possible ‘best practices’ for going forward.
(1) Early modern historians need to be more judicious in our use of the term ‘expert’; it
has to mean something distinct. If there is another term that is historically contemporary
and that captures the sense of what we mean to talk about, then we should probably use
it. The word ‘expert’ is too often deployed without much thought or engagement with
what that anachronistic word might mean in an early modern context, when the
historians in question might just as easily have substituted a different term that
would have been more straightforward and perhaps more useful. If the historical
actor in question can be accurately and satisfactorily identified using a contemporary
term such as natural philosopher, artisan, alchemist, surgeon, surveyor, engineer, or
architect, just to name a few examples, then perhaps that is what they should principally
be called. All of these terms were contemporary in the early modern period, and so can
provide an adequate descriptor without introducing an unnecessary anachronism. Some
of them also carry modern baggage and no longer mean exactly what they once did in
previous centuries, such as ‘surgeon’ and ‘engineer,’ and so are complicated by some of
the same problems of anachronism; but because they are contemporary terms their
early modern meanings are still easier to discern.
We should also be mindful of collaborative knowledge communities and ‘shared
practices of knowing,’ phenomena which ‘expertise’ may tend to render less visible. As
Mendelsohn and Kinzelbach demonstrate in their case studies, just because experienced
surgeons were called upon to inspect a body and offer their putatively ‘expert’ opinion
about a cause of death, that did not mean their ‘expert’ testimony was definitive or even
especially privileged over that of other witnesses who had no specialized medical training or
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 17

experience.46 Knowledge could be common and collaborative as well as specialized, and if

early modern expertise can be said to have existed at all, it was only one part of a complex
topography of knowledge. We may find that the term ‘expertise’ is most useful for
historians as a sort of meta-category that encompasses a host of more tangible contempor-
ary terms, not so much a label in and of itself as it is a process that one participates in, less
descriptive than analytical. That is to say, simply calling a given historical actor an ‘expert’
may well obscure more than it illuminates, but exploring how that actor asserted and
negotiated their putative expertise might be more enlightening.
Moreover, the word ‘expert’ should not be a default label for ‘someone who is
unusually good at something.’ The areas in which ‘expertise’ is even an appropriate
category of analysis, as opposed to someone having ‘experience’ or ‘talent’ or ‘proven
ability,’ is a matter of debate no matter what era we are talking about.47 But if the term
is to have any meaning, it must encompass more than the capacity to do something
well. Anecdotally, most people probably would not consider today’s truck drivers or
bank tellers to be ‘experts,’ even if they do their jobs very well, though we are more
likely to think of medical doctors and engineers that way. Likewise, historians of
expertise do not usually describe early modern woodworkers or stonemasons as
‘experts,’ though we are more likely to think of architects and engineers in such
terms – and the distinction is not only a modern one, even if the term itself is. These
various crafts did not all have equivalent knowledge sets, training regimens, social
status, or patronage opportunities in their early modern contexts, which is why
historians also feel the need to make a distinction between them.
Pamela Long addresses this in her conceptualization of trading zones and those who
participated in them – they were the province not of all skilled artisans, but only those
in certain newly emerging and non-traditional crafts, those areas in which theorizing
the knowledge in question was an aspiration for many, and especially those of particular
interest to elite patrons.48 In contrast, when Marcus Popplow suggests that ‘many useful
ideas about growing plants remained hidden in one village or another, as expertise was
held individually or only in small collectives,’ or that the knowledge of ‘peasants and
landowners’ was ‘limited to local expertise,’ he seems to me to misuse the term.49
Insofar as expertise implies some claim to abstract, generalizable, and adaptable knowl-
edge, it cannot refer to purely local knowledge, and thus it should not be used with
reference to uneducated and locally-bound peasant farmers, however skilled and
experienced they may have been at working their own fields. In this case, a term such
as ‘experience’ would be more accurate and more helpful.
Finally, one case in point regarding the need for greater discretion is where and how
to distinguish between early modern experts and ‘projectors,’ or those who conceived
and proposed all manner of innovative technical projects to patrons and investors,
seeking the resources and authority to carry them out. Projectors have received a lot of
historical attention in recent years, and unlike ‘expert,’ the term was widely used in
early modern Europe. It also carried more than its share of early modern baggage:
depending on one’s point of view, projectors could be seen as exciting visionaries
seeking to advance the wellbeing of mankind, deluded and benighted fools who
squandered all the resources entrusted to them, or contemptible frauds who deserved
only censure and punishment.50 ‘Projector’ nicely captures the notion of one who
possessed (or claimed to possess) a rare and valuable operative knowledge (if not
18 E. H. ASH

always a knowledge of nature), as well as the sense of innovation and entrepreneurial

vision that such knowledge allowed, and does it with a contemporary term that early
modern actors would have recognized (if not always approved of). But it is also a very
broad category, one that included the widest possible spectrums of practical experience,
abstract knowledge, assumption of risk, and the putative ability to carry out one’s
proposals. A great many could never perform what they promised, which was why
projectors were held by many of their contemporaries in such ill repute.
The distinction between experts and projectors is often unclear, and depends to
some extent on how one defines each term. It might be argued, for example, that Digges
and Riquet were not really ‘experts’ at all but rather projectors – proposers of elaborate
technical projects they did not personally have the ability to carry out, and who
therefore hired other, more experienced and knowledgeable people – the real experts? –
for the actual building work. I would argue that however they are defined, the two
categories overlap significantly, but not perfectly: Not all experts were entrepreneurial
visionaries who proposed elaborate and innovative projects, though many of them
surely did; and not all projectors even claimed to possess anything like what we
might call expertise, though some of them surely did as well. Both groups need further
study, and care should be taken in defining, explaining and distinguishing each concept.
But while ‘projector’ is attractive as a contemporary term that might free us from the
perils of anachronism, it is not an early modern synonym for all that ‘expert’ implies.
(2) If no contemporary term quite captures what it is we are talking about, then we
should use the term ‘expert’ with confidence, but not without defining and explaining
what we mean by it. If there really are certain historical phenomena in which something
like early modern expertise can be discerned and analyzed, and which an anachronistic
term like ‘expertise’ might prove most apt in describing, then we need to think about
how we might deploy the anachronism without unduly distorting our historical under-
standing. Anachronisms should never be used without careful consideration, nor
should they be used without some effort to explain what one means by them, and
what analytical work (or even advocacy) they are doing in our research. Put another
way, ‘expertise’ cannot be an explicans for us, a concept we use to explain something
else, until we have first engaged with it as an explicandum, a concept that needs to be
explained in its own right. When such terms shift from needing an explanation to
simply becoming an explanation, they can easily start to seem much clearer and more
straightforward than they should in what is still the very foreign context of the pre-
modern past, and this opens the door to bringing too much of the present back with us
in trying to make sense of it. Mendelsohn and Kinzelbach argue similarly that ‘only by
revising our outlook will a general history of expertise become possible, a history that
does not presume what it ought to explain’ and that neither encompasses all forms of
specialized experience nor shrinks into ‘the history of competing claims to such
experience.’ But while they urge that the category of expertise ‘needs a rest’ rather
than a rethinking, I believe it needs a more deliberate and nuanced effort at definition.51
Articulating precisely what we mean by early modern ‘expertise’ is always tricky
because the phenomenon it is meant to capture was still very much in flux, an emerging
and flexible concept rather than a well-defined one (see point #3 below). It is all the
more difficult since we do not always agree about what the word means even in our
own time and place. On the other hand, given how much good work has already been
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 19

done in trying to flesh out the possible criteria and parameters for expertise in both
modern and early modern contexts, one need not start from scratch. And historians of
science have long wrestled with how to make use of complex anachronistic concepts
(such as ‘science’) in a considered and conscientious way when discussing the pre-
modern world, and their work provides an excellent basis from which to start.
Peter Dear, for one, has argued forcefully that, ‘Not only is it strictly impossible to
avoid using our own categories in understanding the past; it is often undesirable.’ While
one must always remember that anachronism is ‘a form of advocacy,’ he reminds us
also that ‘advocacy is an integral part of what all historians do, whether deliberately or
not.’52 Avoiding anachronism altogether cannot be, and should not be, our primary
goal; we must rather find a way to use it judiciously, as an analytical tool and not a lazy
crutch. Dear responds to Quentin Skinner’s concerns by pointing to Skinner’s own
approach to studying the history of political theory. While Skinner rejected the notion
that any political concepts could be timeless, with the same issues and understandings
in play at all times independent of historical context, he nevertheless insisted that there
must be ‘some criteria and rules of usage such that certain performances can be
correctly instanced, and others excluded, as examples of a given activity.’ Without
any such criteria, there would be no possible means for creating or even positing any
‘histories of recognizable activities at all.’53 Skinner’s solution, in other words, was
simply to ‘assert historical continuities and hope that others will be convinced.’ By
leaving the ‘criteria and rules of usage’ that might define a ‘recognizable activity’
unspecified, Skinner ‘in effect claimed that you recognize them when you see them.’54
Though this approach may beg the question, and leads to the obvious problem of
deciding who gets to determine what criteria make a past activity sufficiently ‘recogniz-
able,’ it offers at least a potential remedy for intellectual paralysis. Dear argues that this
approach can be used in helping to guide our study of early modern ‘science,’ and
I believe it can be applied to ‘expertise’ as well.
Nick Jardine has also argued that ‘conceptual anachronism is indispensible for the
purposes of historical interpretation and explanation,’ and that ‘historians. . . can and
should seek to understand past agents better than those agents could understand
themselves.’55 His basis for such a claim is the belief that the historical significances
of some deeds and works ‘are not confined to the significances that were (or could have
been) attached to them at those times and places.’ Not all uses of anachronism are
helpful or benign, of course, and Jardine works to distinguish between analytically
useful or ‘legitimate’ anachronism and what he calls ‘vicious anachronism,’ which he
defines as a ‘historically incoherent interpretation of past deeds and works.’56 The
minimum criterion for a legitimate use of anachronism, he argues, is that it must not
be so much at odds with the historical actors’ understanding of events that the two are
mutually incomprehensible. This is a much lower bar to clear than that apparently set
by Skinner’s flat denial that ‘an acceptable account of an agent’s behaviour could ever
survive the demonstration that it was itself dependent on the use of criteria of descrip-
tion and classification not available to the agent himself.’57 And it once again raises the
question of who gets to decide when a historical actor might find one’s anachronistic
interpretation of his or her actions ‘incoherent.’ But it nevertheless offers a rough guide
for following what Michael S. Mahoney told me long ago, and that I still believe is
sound advice for studying history: Stay true to your sources, and stay true to yourself.
20 E. H. ASH

(3) In trying to grasp and articulate what ‘expertise’ might mean in an early modern
context, we must accept that the concept was both contentious and evolving, and so any
definition will necessarily be fluid, contextual and contingent, varying across time and
space. In analyzing the modern concept, Harald Mieg has written that expertise is
always rooted in an interaction, an exchange of information – indeed, what Mieg calls
‘the expert’ is essentially constituted in the interaction itself, rather than in any single
person participating in the interaction.58 While I do not wish to follow him quite so far
is disembodying ‘the expert,’ I have come to believe that expertise is less an ontological
reality, something we can point to and possess, than a process of negotiation and
legitimation, one that is always contextual and ongoing. Even modern expertise has
‘slowly evolved through a continual negotiation between different interests and compet-
ing criteria for authority,’ as William Ashworth has written.59 The modern terms of that
negotiation are greatly aided by certain institutions created for the purpose, such as
accredited engineering colleges, peer review, and professional credentialing, though
even these do not always yield perfectly clear, consistent, or satisfying answers.
In the early modern world, before those modern institutions had yet been developed,
the negotiation of expertise was much more vague, contingent, and open to differing
interpretations and agendas. It certainly did not take place on the same terms, or come
to the same resolution, in every time and place; whatever early modern expertise might
mean, it was certainly not the same in the sixteenth century and the eighteenth, in the
Venetian Arsenal and Casa de la Contratación in Seville and the Jesuit Collegio
Romano and the Royal Society of London and the court of Louis XIV at Versailles.
Just as there is no single, universal understanding of what ‘expertise’ means in our
contemporary world, there can never be a single ‘expertise’ that holds throughout the
early modern world. In trying to comprehend what constituted expertise and who may
or may not be considered an expert in all manner of early modern contexts, from mines
to shipyards to alchemical laboratories, those who concentrate on historical context, the
exchange of knowledge, and the process of negotiation are likely to be most successful.
The excellent work of Pamela Smith, Pamela Long, Deborah Harkness, and Antonio
Barrera-Osorio I have already mentioned. Steven Walton’s concept of ‘experts-in-
context’ offers a most intriguing third option for thinking about expertise beyond the
limited dichotomy of ‘expert-by-experience’ and ‘expert-by-knowledge.’60 Though he is
not so concerned with expertise per se, Larry Stewart’s masterful study of public science
in the Newtonian era describes the myriad ways in which natural philosophers,
engineers, mechanics, and projectors (often the same people) constantly negotiated
new roles for themselves in a burgeoning commercial marketplace, filled with investors
struggling to evaluate the merits of improvement projects they ill understood.61 These
studies, and others like them, are inspiring models to help us grapple with the wide
range of what expertise might mean throughout early modern Europe.
(4) We must avoid cascading anachronism. In his vision of ‘Butterfield’s nightmare,’
Wakefield asserted that the most serious problems arise when anachronistic terms are
‘piled on top of each other, leading to a wholesale superposition of our conceptual
worlds onto the early modern past.’ This ‘cascading anachronism,’ as he called it, ‘is not
really history at all. It is merely the present masquerading as the past.’62 I can only
concur. Anachronistic terms and concepts can potentially help us to transcend the
sometimes-limited historical perspectives of those we study, but we must also recognize
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 21

that the use of anachronism always comes with risks and costs attached. Every time we
ignore actors’ categories in our historical analysis, even if we do so for the best of
reasons, we are inevitably doing some small measure of violence to our historical
understanding. Stacking one anachronism on top of another compounds that violence,
making it ever harder to define precisely what we mean by each successive term. At
best, it is not very helpful. At worst, it imposes our entire expert-laden, technocratic
culture on an early modern past that cannot support it, indeed would be utterly
incapable of imagining, recognizing, or comprehending it.
Some of the more striking examples of this kind of cascading anachronism with
regard to expertise may be found in the work of Ursula Klein. Though much of her
work is compelling in its exploration of knowledge exchange and the negotiation of
credibility among apothecary-chemists and bureaucratic mining officials, she has not
been content with trying to articulate and explain ‘expertise’ as such, but has instead felt
the need to further modify the term, publishing articles on ‘hybrid experts,’ ‘artisanal-
scientific experts,’ and so forth.63 Such terms do more to confuse than to illuminate
whatever ‘expert’ might mean by implying the existence of myriad different sorts of
expert, without defining most them. If ‘expertise’ can be taken to mean some combina-
tion of practical and abstract/theoretical knowledge, then a far better term for ‘artisanal-
scientific experts’ would be, simply, ‘experts.’ Or else, one is compelled to ask, did there
also exist simply ‘artisanal experts’ and ‘scientific experts,’ in contrast to the hyphenated
variety? If there are ‘hybrid experts,’ then there must surely be ‘purebred experts,’ and
so what might that mean? The additional complexity introduced by such piggy-backed
terms is unnecessary and unhelpful, and it should be avoided.
(5) We must acknowledge and take seriously the ‘failures, frauds, and losers’ of the past
in order to avoid positivist history. It is easy to tell a positivist, teleological story,
sometimes without even meaning to. But if we focus too hard on the origins of our
present time in the past, we are likely to overlook history’s instructive dead ends and
paths not taken. The many would-be experts from throughout the early modern period
who tried and failed to assert, demonstrate, or legitimate their expertise may well be as
informative and compelling as those who succeeded. How, indeed, can we ever gain
a full sense of the critical negotiation of early modern expertise without studying the
many cases in which that negotiation resulted in disappointment and disillusionment?
The most fascinating element of Andre Wakefield’s extensive study of eighteenth-
century cameralists is not that so few of them succeeded in delivering the miracles
they promised to achieve. Rather, it is how and why they were able to convince so many
intelligent, powerful, and even skeptical patrons to believe in them, again and again –
indeed, how it is that their promises continue to sound so compelling today.64 Similarly,
Cornelius Vermuyden’s drainage career in England is not interesting because he
obviously knew how to drain wetlands effectively, but because his abilities in that
regard were not clear at all, and yet he kept convincing powerful patrons to pay for
his dubious services.65 Ambiguous cases like these can tell us much about the terms and
conditions of the complicated negotiation of early modern expertise.
The unnecessary preoccupation with history’s success stories is apparently strong
enough to have enticed some historians to insist on finding ‘success’ even where there is
little or no material evidence of it, in the service of a larger positivist narrative of
historical progress. This is most evident in some forms of economic and cultural
22 E. H. ASH

history, as practiced especially by Joel Mokyr and Marcus Popplow, with their theories
regarding the ‘Industrial Enlightenment’ and the ‘economic Enlightenment,’
respectively.66 In this interpretation, certain individuals (deemed ‘cultural entrepre-
neurs’ by Mokyr) may have had little or no direct impact on the technological methods
and practices of their own era, but their contemporary material failures are unimpor-
tant. What really matters is that they expanded the menu of thinkable thoughts. Their
efforts eventually worked to create ‘cultures of innovation’ that bore fruit in the distant
future, leading ultimately to the sustained economic and technological growth of the
Industrial Revolution, so that what initially seemed a failure is ultimately shown to be
a foundational success.
On this basis, for example, Marcus Popplow has argued that cameralist agricultural
modernizers in mid-to-late eighteenth-century Germany may have failed to improve
agricultural practices in their own time, and indeed stopped even trying to talk to actual
farmers about the subject. Yet in helping to create ‘cultures of innovation,’ they can
nonetheless be cast as cultural pioneers, a cornerstone of the ‘economic Enlightenment’
that came to fruition decades later in the mid-nineteenth century. Popplow has also
criticized Andre Wakefield for his treatment of the cameralists, on the grounds that ‘his
general approach is too narrowly conceived,’ his criteria for scientific ‘success’ too
unrealistic for the era. Indeed, Popplow accuses him of ‘applying anachronistic yard-
sticks’ for measuring their real contribution, and wonders ‘what would positively
qualify as “successful science” for Wakefield.’ But since Popplow himself concedes
that ‘there is surely nothing wrong with Wakefield’s analysis of the dubious character
of his protagonists,’ and bases his argument not on their putative contemporary
achievements but only on their alleged long-term cultural legacy, surely one might
equally wonder what would positively qualify as ‘failed science’ for Popplow?67
Ursula Klein takes a rather similar approach in her introduction and essay in the Annals
of Science volume devoted to ‘Artisanal-Scientific Experts.’ While Klein demonstrates
convincingly elsewhere that her apothecary-chemists were well known and respected
among their more academically trained chemist colleagues, in her Annals of Science essay
on ‘Savant Officials in the Prussian Mining Administration,’ she concedes that Carl
Abraham Gerhard was all but ignored by practicing miners when he tried to reform their
mining practices. But this does not matter, she claims, because Gerhard helped to instill
a culture of experiment and practical knowledge, part of a ‘centuries-long process’ that
ultimately bore fruit in a more scientifically-informed modern mining industry.68
To be clear: Popplow’s agricultural cameralists and Klein’s savant mining officials are
certainly compelling examples of attempts to negotiate expertise, even if they had little
immediate or direct impact on actual practices. Their specific proposals for practical
innovation were far less influential in most cases than was their systematic approach
more generally, which did eventually help to shape curricular reform in many European
universities. But it remains a stretch to argue on this basis that they were ‘successful’ in
their efforts at practical innovation, and they need not be defined that way. In re-
labeling contemporary failures as future triumphs in a ‘centuries-long process’ of
scientific and technological advancement, we write a positivist history, allowing the
modern era to refract and obscure what came long before it rather than looking at what
the past itself actually has to tell us. Historians need to recognize the value of studying
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 23

(and labeling) history’s ‘failures’ on their own merits, rather than making them appear
too effective, too modern, and too soon.
Regarding the significance of history’s ‘losers,’ when studying the rise of early modern
experts we must never lose sight of the fact that, for nearly every new expert on the scene,
someone else lost out. As new techniques and technologies were deployed, new industries
promoted and monopolies granted, new claims to authority put forth and legitimated,
someone was usually on the losing end, whether it was practicing ship’s pilots who were
forced to defer to armchair cosmographers, master builders who lost intellectual and social
status to architects and engineers, or English fenlanders who saw their common lands
seized and awarded to unwelcome drainage projectors.69 Expertise is fundamentally about
authority and power, and it was often a zero-sum game where one person’s gain came at
someone else’s expense; valuable skills, property, patronage, status, and livelihoods were at
stake, and they were hotly contested. This, too, is the story and the legacy of expertise, and
we do well to remember it in the past as well as in the present.
* * *
What is really at stake in all of this for historians? There are at least two important
reasons why early modern historians need to be careful and conscientious in our
handling of experts and expertise, beyond our basic quest to get the history right.
The first is that we do not need a new or revived modernization theory. For one thing,
it is not good history, insofar as careful attention to historical sources and contexts has
shown that the ‘take-off’ of the Industrial Revolution was not merely the product of
a weak regulatory state combined with free market capitalism and a culture of oper-
ationally-minded scientific experimentation. It is not a question of whether scientific
practice, technical knowledge, and an entrepreneurial ‘culture of innovation’ played any
role in early industrialization – of course they did. But by elevating science, technolo-
gical innovation, and ideology as the sole causes of industrialization, modernization
theory aggressively elides so many other, less convenient or less savory material factors,
such as state-enforced trade barriers, labor exploitation, slavery, imperialism, and so
forth. It is one thing to argue that ideas of progress mattered in the early advent of
industrialization. It is quite another to boldly claim that ‘words and ideas “caused” the
modern world – perhaps with some good luck and good institutions thrown in,’ or that
‘New ideas from bourgeois commoners supported by a new liberty and dignity... made
the Great Enrichment. . . The real engine was the expanding ideology of the liberal plan
of equality, liberty, and justice.’70 This matters greatly today because many powerful
and influential people, in government and in business, are still convinced that free
market capitalism, entrepreneurialism, and the technological innovation they inspire
are the only right answers to every question, the only possible solution to every crisis.
To name but one example, this attitude partly accounts for the stubborn libertarian
opposition, particularly in the United States, to the federal government’s efforts to
introduce meaningful limits on greenhouse gas emissions, or to engage in collective
international efforts in that regard.71
The second reason is that expertise matters; we absolutely need it as a concept to help
guide our democratic, pluralistic, capitalist societies in addressing many real and
pressing problems, and it is therefore vital that we have a good understanding of
what expertise is, where it came from, how to identify it, and what it can and cannot
24 E. H. ASH

do for us. Much has been written about the potential for a modern technocratic culture
of expertise to undermine or subvert democratic debate, imposing policy solutions that
a population of lay non-experts and their elected officials are ill equipped to understand,
assess, or critique.72 But the other extreme is a populist society in which everyone is
deemed equally qualified to weigh in on any complex technical issue, regardless of
experience, training, or knowledge. Mendelsohn and Kinzelbach may have a valid
concern that the very idea of expertise ‘disinvites investigation of all participants as
knowers.’73 But inviting and accepting all participants as knowers of equal value and
validity carries its own very real problems in an increasingly technical and technological
age when the knowledge and experience of experts is under sustained populist assault.
This, too, is a pervasive problem just now in the United States federal government, as the
expertise of professional scientists, diplomats, and civil servants is being systematically
attacked and discredited as just so many partisan positions, a threat to the free market that
should be trusted to solve all our problems. It is reflected at the most senior levels of
government, not least in a series of cabinet secretaries with little or no experience or
knowledge of the departments they are tasked with running, and in some cases with
a marked antipathy to the very missions they are charged with overseeing. It is reflected
most of all in a President of the United States who manifests a consistent and deep-seated
contempt for expertise of all kinds, who prefers to act according to his ‘gut’ instinct and who
systematically casts doubt on all bases for objective truth and decision making.74 Expertise,
in short, is both precious and more fragile than we perhaps imagined. In order to give it the
respect and deference it deserves (no more, and no less) we must first have a sound
understanding of its history. This is precisely where historians have something of real
contemporary value to contribute.

Notes
1. With apologies to Steven Shapin, Scientific Revolution, 1.
2. Dear, “Science is Dead,” 52.
3. Hall, “On Whiggism,” 54.
4. Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 31, 48–9 (original emphasis).
5. Butterfield, Whig Interpretation, preface.
6. However, Deborah Harkness has offered an interesting defense of ‘science’ as very much
a contemporary term and concept in Elizabethan London, though she continues to reject
‘scientist’ as an anachronism. Harkness, Jewel House, xv-xviii.
7. Wakefield, “Butterfield’s Nightmare,” 235.
8. Ashworth, “Expertise and Authority,” 103 and 113.
9. Ibid, 113.
10. Wakefield, 243 (original emphasis).
11. Andre Wakefield, personal communication with the author, 27 September 2017; William
Ashworth, personal communication with the author, 29 September 2017.
12. Mendelsohn and Kinzelbach, “Common Knowledge,” 261, 277–8.
13. Wakefield, “Butterfield’s Nightmare,” 243.
14. Rostow, Process; Rostow, Stages; Landes, Unbound Prometheus; and Landes, Wealth and
Poverty.
15. Mokyr has published very widely, but for a chief overview of his theories see: Mokyr, Gifts
of Athena; Mokyr, “Intellectual Origins”; Mokyr, Enlightened Economy; Mokyr “Cultural
Entrepreneurs”; and Mokyr, “Culture.”
16. Mokyr, “Culture,” 40.
 HISTORY AND TECHNOLOGY 25

17. Ashworth, Industrial Revolution. Ashworth, “Manufacturing Expertise”; and Ashworth,

“Intersection.”
18. McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality, xi-xii. See also McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues; and
McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity.
19. McCloskey, “How We Became Rich,” 35–6.
20. Mokyr, “Culture,” 44.
21. Jacob, Scientific Culture; Jacob, First Knowledge Economy; Jacob and Stewart, Practical
Matter; and Stewart, Rise of Public Science.
22. Popplow, “Knowledge Management.” See also Popplow, “Economizing.”
23. Ashworth, “British”; Ashworth, “Ghost of Rostow”; and Ashworth, Industrial Revolution,
chap. 8.
24. It should be noted that free-market capitalism is not the only modernizing ideology that
early modern “expertise” has been used to advocate for. Given its emphasis on material
and technological progress and the productive mix of practical and theoretical knowledge,
Marxist materialists have found the concept equally compelling. See Keller,
“Deprogramming.”
25. Dear, “Science is Dead,” 52; and Wakefield, “Butterfield’s Nightmare.”
26. Ashworth, “Expertise and Authority,” 113.
27. Ash, “Introduction,” 4–11.
28. Smith, Body of the Artisan, 238–9; my emphasis.
29. Long, “Trading Zones,” 842; my emphasis. For a more extensive consideration of early
modern trading zones, see Long, Artisan/Practitioners, esp. chap. 4.
30. Long, “Trading Zones,” 844.
31. Ibid., 842–3.
32. Long, Artisan/Practitioners, 125.
33. Long, “Trading Zones,” 845.
34. Harkness, Jewel House, 118, 141, and 217. For an exploration of London’s eclectic com-
munities of artisans, natural philosophers, and entrepreneurs over a more extended period,
see Iliffe, “Capitalizing Expertise.”
35. Portuondo, Secret Science; and Portuondo, “Cosmography.”
36. Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature; and Barrera-Osorio, “Knowledge and Empiricism.”
37. Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature, esp. chap. 3.
38. Barrera-Osorio, “Experts.”
39. Klein, “Chemical Expertise.” See also Klein, “Apothecary’s Shops”; and Klein, “Blending.”
40. Ash, “A perfect.” See also Ash, Power, chap 2.
41. Walton, “State Building,” 76. See also Mieg, Social Psychology, chap. 3.
42. Mahoney, “Organizing Expertise.”
43. Mukerji, Impossible Engineering.
44. For a strikingly similar case of a diverse array of technical experts, local inhabitants, and
central administrators collaborating around a large hydraulic engineering project in the
Spanish colonial capital of Mexico City during the late sixteenth century, see Barrera-
Osorio, “Experts.”
45. Ash, Draining, chaps. 5 and 8.
46. Mendelsohn and Kinzelbach, “Common Knowledge,” 278.
47. See, for example, Collins and Evans, “Third Wave”; Collins and Evans, Rethinking
Expertise; and Collins, “Introduction.”
48. Long, “Trading Zones,” 842.
49. Popplow, “Knowledge Management,” 424; and Popplow, “Economizing,” 263.
50. The literature on projectors is long and growing; see Thirsk, Economic Policy; Novak, Age
of Projects; Keller and McCormick, “Toward”; Ratcliff, “Art to Cheat”; Yamamoto,
“Reformation”; and Yamamoto, “Distrust.”
51. Mendelsohn and Kinzelbach, “Common Knowledge,” 277–8.
52. Dear, “Science is Dead,” 52. See also Dear, “What Is”; and Dear, “Towards.”
53. Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 48, original emphasis.
26 E. H. ASH

54. Dear, “Science is Dead,” 52–4.

55. Jardine, “Whigs and Stories,” 128.
56. Jardine, “Uses and Abuses,” 252. See also Jardine, “Etics and Emics.”
57. Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding,” 48.
58. Mieg, Social Psychology, esp. chap. 3.
59. Ashworth, “Expertise and Authority,” 113.
60. Walton, “State Building.”
61. Stewart, Rise of Public Science.
62. Wakefield, “Butterfield’s Nightmare,” 243.
63. Klein, “Hybrid Experts”; and Klein, “Artisanal-Scientific Experts.”
64. Wakefield, Disordered.
65. Ash, Draining, chap. 8.
66. Mokyr, “Cultural Entrepreneurs”; Popplow, “Economizing”; and Popplow, “Knowledge
Management.”
67. Popplow, “Knowledge Management,” esp. 431–3. See also Popplow, “Nightmares.”
68. Klein, “Savant Officials,” 373. See also Klein, “Artisanal-Scientific Experts.”
69. Sandman, “Educating Pilots”; Sandman, “Controlling Knowledge”; Barrera-Osorio,
Experiencing Nature, chap. 2; Walton, “State Building”; Ash, Draining; Ash, Power.
70. Mokyr, “Culture,” 40; and McCloskey, “How We Became Rich,” 35–6.
71. O’Neil, “Free Market”; Adler, “Warming”; and Cook, “Paul Ryan.”
72. Collins and Evans, “Third Wave”; and Collins and Evans, Rethinking Expertise; Turner,
“What Is.”
73. Mendelsohn and Kinzelbach, “Common Knowledge,” 277.
74. Friedman, “E. P. A.”; Gabriel, “Trump Chooses”; Davenport, “Rick Perry”; Zernike,
“Trump’s Pick”; Harris, “Diplomats”; and Irwin, “Donald Trump.”

Acknowledgements
My thanks to William Ashworth, Andre Wakefield, Vera Keller, the participants in the Group for
Early Modern Studies at Wayne State University, and the anonymous reviewers for their many
helpful suggestions for improving this essay. An earlier, shorter version was presented as the
keynote address at the conference “Limits of Expertise? Practice and Spaces of Knowledge,” held
at the Georg-August-Universität in Göttingen, Germany, in October 2017. I am grateful to
Dr. Marian Füssel for inviting me to speak at that venue.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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