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"Governing Systems is an ambitious, original, and stimulating book on a central subject of modern British history, indeed of modern history: the forces creating 'modernity.' Crook gives equal attention to local detail, variation, and contingency and to general principles and dynamics of social and administrative change. In sum, this is an important book that will spark debate and leave its mark on the subject."—Frank Trentmann, author of Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, from the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First
"Governing Systems is an absolutely excellent book: sophisticated in conception, tightly argued, brilliantly researched, highly polished, and beautifully written. It is restlessly unreductive in its analysis of government, technology, and health, and it makes much of the work in this area seem simplistic by comparison. It achieves this level of subtlety by being simultaneously empirical, theoretical, and synthetic—a rare combination. It truly captures the sense of government as something multiple, dynamic, frustrating, and contingent, by focusing on the mundane, daily, nitty-gritty acts of trying to get people (and technologies) to behave in particular ways to achieve certain ends."—Chris Otter, author of The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910
List of contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
1. In Search of Hygeia: Systems, Modernity, and Public Health
2. A Perfect Chaos: Centralization and the Struggle for National System
3. Numbers, Norms, and Opinions: Death and the Measurement of Progress
4. Officialism: The Art and Practice of Sanitary Inspection
5. Matter in Its Right Place: Technology and the Building of Waste Disposal Systems
6. Stamping Out: Logistics, Risk, and Infectious Diseases
7. Personal Hygiene: Cleanliness, Class, and the Habitual Self
8. Conclusion: Systems, Variations, Politics
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
About the author
Tom Crook is Lecturer in Modern British History at Oxford Brookes University.
Summary
When and how did public health become modern? This book offers a fresh answer to this question through an examination of Victorian and Edwardian England, long considered one of the critical birthplaces of modern public health.
Additional text
"A fascinating proposal of how to study technological systems in the nineteenth century."
