Governing Systems

Reviewed by: Governing Systems: Modernity and the Making of Public Health in England, 1830–1910 by Tom Crook Leslie Tomory (bio) Governing Systems: Modernity and the Making of Public Health in England, 1830–1910 By Tom Crook. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. Pp. 408. Governing Systems: Modernity and the Making of Public Health in England, 1830–1910 By Tom Crook. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016. Pp. 408. In this ambitious book, Tom Crook, a lecturer in modern British history at Oxford Brookes University, explores the question of modernity and public health in England. His purpose is to "rethink modernity," at least as it emerged in England in the nineteenth century, using systems in public health as the base for his argument. For Crooks, systems in the context of public health encompass two definitions. The first refers to the assemblage of various parts that made up the public health phenomenon including "more specialized systems or subsystems, as they might be styled of sanitary inspection, waste disposal, and statistical classification, among many others" (p. 4). The second refers to efforts involving organization and planning, even if results frequently fell short of the mark. For Crooks, modernity resides, at least in part, in the desire to create order through systems, rather than the actual order attained. After 1800, this new desire emerged: to bring order to newly recognized widespread health problems through systematic solutions with a scope and scale far exceeding premodern systems, including infrastructure networks, public health bodies, the accumulation of statistics, etc. Crook's discussion of the construction and governance of systems is of particular interest to historians of technology. Although he does not engage directly with the historiography of technological networks, he does explore the motivations of the system builders. In the chapter describing Edwin Chadwick's efforts to build sewerage networks, Crooks sees three principal ideological camps competing to influence the development of the systems of public health. Chadwick belonged to a group espousing a technocratic radicalism that claimed leadership in developing systems for the experts, keeping the political influences at a distance. The democratic radicals, typically politicians such as the barrister Joshua Toulmin Smith, resisted centralized control and sought to keep local municipal entities influential in developing and governing systems. The third group was the Whiggish-liberals, exemplified by John Stuart Mill, who argued that the job of the center was to advise local governing bodies. According to Crook, it was this last group that largely prevailed in influencing how public health systems were built. For Crook, Chadwick was not the heroic system builder that earlier historiography had made him out to be. Nor does he see him in Chris Hamlin's anti-heroic Foucauldian terms, as a controller. Rather, Chadwick was one of many agents in the ongoing development of competing visions and proposals for systems of public health. In this sense, Crook is self-consciously less clear cut in the way he characterizes "system builders," as Thomas Hughes labelled them. [End Page 612] This intentional ambiguity is also evident in how Crook sees the governance of systems. He does not see centralization as the sole or even crucial hallmark of modern systems. On the contrary, he believes that the local and the central are constitutive elements. Local authorities had significant importance in many aspects of the public health complex in nineteenth-century England, including in municipal water supply and sewerage, enforcement of public health measures, etc. The local and the central worked together—or sometimes at cross purposes—but fundamentally, the scale and ambition of these systems is what makes them modern, not their centralization. Initially, the construction of public health systems involved shifting governance from local to central authorities via new national laws, but this also reinvigorated the local level, as responsibility for many of the newly created systems was passed back to local authorities, such as with public health boards. One of Crook's aims in the book is quite ambitious. It is to displace the state in modernity. Whereas the rise of the administrative state has been seen as one of the hallmarks of modernity, Crook argues that it was systems that underlaid the new administrative state, rather than the state

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