Schrepfer, Susan R., and Philip Scranton, eds. Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History, Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture.

• Author: Morris, Terry R.
• Position: Book Review

Sehrepfer, Susan R., and Philip Scranton, eds. Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History, vol. V, Hagley Perspectives on Business and Culture. New York: Routledge, 2004. v + 275 pp. Paper, $24.95.

Industrializing Organisms employs a multi-disciplinary approach to American cultural history as it has been shaped by science, technology, and business. In particular, this volume of the Hagley series, based on detailed archival research, argues that we utilize plants and animals no less than machines as technological instruments for profit as well as for social benefit. The editors also see themselves as inaugurating a new, and perhaps controversial, discipline that combines environmental history with the history of technology, one they call "evolutionary history." In the "Introduction," Edmund Russell defines the sub-discipline as one which "stresses the malleability and transformations of organisms to suit human purposes ..." (p. 6), and suggests that distinguishing between macro-biotechnology (human intervention on the whole organism) and micro-biotechnology (human intervention on the cellular level, as with genetic engineering) is essential to this approach.

This work grew out of a conference at Rutgers University in 2002 on the topic "Organisms as Technology." Its contributors, all presenters at the conference, include younger scholars (some just completing their Ph.D.'s) along with more established scholars. In addition to the "Introduction," the book contains nine chapters, four dedicated to plants, five to animals, and an "Afterword."

The chapters on the industrialization of plants deal with horticulture, wheat, sugarcane, and trees. Susan Lanman recounts the career of Peter Henderson who made his fortune developing the technology to mass produce plants and seeds for home gardens of the new nineteenth-century American city dwellers.

Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhodes make a case for the evolution of advanced wheat production before the 1940s. Farmers throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were constantly experimenting with new varieties of wheat to combat the effects of climate, pests, and disease.

Mark Smith recounts the technological evolution of sugar-cane production in Cuba in the same period. The sucrose in cane peaks abruptly and begins to decline rapidly. Getting the crop to the factory in a hurry and being able to harvest it quickly and completely presented challenges which producers met through...