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sistently to downplay diversity and division within it. Leaders might construct an imperial
discourse, but how far did it resonate within the church’s many subcultures? Furthermore,
like many other analyses of religion and empire, Strong’s tends to conflate the empire and
the larger world into a single construct. While Strong argues that prior to the 1830s there
was far more unity in an “orthodox” Anglican middle ground than later in the century
when battles between high and low churchmen raged, it is unclear how far this extended
and to what degree empire mattered outside the SPG fold. So at what point did nation,
empire, and world divide in importance in the minds of Anglicans? What were their relative
weights? And with the rise of critical Anglican evangelicalism, to what degree can we speak
of “Anglican paradigms” of empire?
Ultimately, Strong’s insistence on a large measure of Anglican unity on these matters feels
forced, particularly given that evangelical Anglicans founded the CMS precisely to transcend
the bounds of empire and the constraints of episcopal control, deploring that despite the
over 600 clergymen the SPG sent to serve North American colonists, the talk of missions
to “heathen” peoples had materialized into only limited, largely failed efforts. Most evan-
gelical missions, of course, also collaborated with imperial power in many ways, but they
had a distinctly different ethos. The fact that evangelical support for missions rapidly dwarfed
that of the SPG (which had an income in 1839–40 only one-third as large as the CMS
alone) suggests both a variant discourse and that the driving force of voluntary religion that
necessitated changes by the Anglican leadership and the SPG came as much from within
the Anglican fold as from outside of it.
Strong has assembled a valuable analysis of mainstream Anglican thinking on religion,
the state, empire, and missions, but, as he himself acknowledges, this represents at best a
minority view. How large a minority, and among what groups it prevailed and grew, it is
difficult to tell. Only a muted sense of the diversity within the Church of England comes
through here, particularly reflections of those who leaned toward evangelistic voluntary
activism, increasingly feminized humanitarianism, and populist emotional religious culture.
Undoubtedly virtually all Anglicans, and most all Dissenters as well, viewed the empire as
providential. But to what ends? This book is a welcome contribution to the scholarship on
religion, nation, and empire. However it represents only one strand of a much larger move-
ment that by 1840 was dominated not by higher churchmen, but by their Dissenting
competitors whose impulses were anything but patrician.

Steven S. Maughan, College of Idaho

ANITA MCCONNELL. Jesse Ramsden (1735–1800): London’s Leading Scientific Instrument

Maker. Science, Technology and Culture, 1700–1945. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. 318.
$99.95 (cloth).

Jesse Ramsden was a superb instrument maker—one of a kind, unmatched in England and
continental Europe in the late eighteenth century. For instance, when the director of the
Paris Observatory, Jean-Dominique Cassini (Cassini IV), visited Ramsden’s workshop in
1787 to order a large transit, he was surprised by Ramsden’s extensive knowledge in all
matters of instrument making as well as in geometry, astronomy, mechanics, optics, and
physics. After two or three conversations with the London virtuoso, Cassini “became dis-
couraged to realise that we would never have such a consummate artist in France. . . . This
man is an electrical machine which has only to be touched to emit sparks” (142).
Everyone who commissioned an instrument from Ramsden knew he had no equal. All
knew, however, that they would also have to be extremely patient with him, because repeated
delays were Ramsden’s second most famous hallmark: “That wretched Ramsden is really
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making me wait for the circle which he promised me so many years ago” (113). One
considered Ramsden an “arch-liar,” while another thought him “sluggish in the making of
instruments” (77). Thomas Hornsby, Savilian professor and astronomer at the Radcliffe
Observatory near Oxford, penned his frustration to the Duke of Marlborough: “Is there
no news from the sieur Ramsden? I believe I must go and beat up his quarters myself”
(77).
This “love/hate” relationship with Ramsden is recurrent throughout the book. It exhibits
well the pride and anxieties in ordering an instrument designed and made by such an
obsessive perfectionist. Interestingly, the real protagonists in Anita McConnell’s story are
the instruments—the dividing engine, astronomical circle, geodetic theodolite, transit, sex-
tant, balance, and much more—rather than Ramsden himself. Owing to a lack of sources—
there is a complete absence of personal or business papers on Ramsden and his successor,
Matthew Berge—a standard biography of Ramsden is impossible. McConnell’s great strength
in this book is having been able to reconstruct Ramsden’s prominent career mostly through
the scientific instruments he made and from those who commissioned them. McConnell’s
scholarship is remarkable. She masters the technical details of these complex machines as
well as the wealth of contemporary sources and correspondences she unearthed dealing with
Ramsden’s life and business.
The book is roughly chronological, starting with Ramsden’s early years in London’s
Haymarket and his close relationship with the Dollonds, a family of famous opticians.
(Ramsden married the youngest daughter of John Dollond in 1766.) In 1773 Ramsden
moved to 199 (and later added 196) Piccadilly, adjacent to St. James’s churchyard, the
home and workshop where he stayed the rest of his life. In chapter 3 we learn about
Ramsden’s pivotal instrument, the dividing engine, that made him the successful instrument
maker he soon became. This machine was designed and used to accurately engrave the
circular graduated scales on small measuring instruments—especially sextants, of which
Ramsden and his assistants made around 1,450 between 1760 and 1800. The larger in-
struments of more than two feet in radius, such as the great astronomical circles found in
observatories, were still engraved by hand. To help him, Ramsden enrolled an army of
assistants that reached between forty and fifty individuals, something highly unusual even
for the second half of the eighteenth century. Chapter 4 describes life in Ramsden’s work-
shop—the strict rules and regulations, salaries, tools and materials—and the specialized
workforce (apprentices, journeymen, and simple workmen) hired from the British Isles as
well as from the Continent. This chapter is unquestionably the most useful to the broader
community of preindustrial economic and social scholars.
The next two chapters focus chiefly on the special commissions received by Ramsden to
furnish European astronomical observatories. (Also briefly mentioned are the instruments
embarked on scientific expeditions—including captains James Cook’s, Jean-François Galaup
de Lapérouse’s and George Vancouver’s). The dividing line chosen by McConnell is 1786,
the year Ramsden was elected a member of the Royal Society. Each section gives the history
of an observatory, the instruments ordered, and the (often difficult) dealings with Ramsden.
Some famous observatories (Paris, Palermo, Dunsink, Brera, Greenwich) as well as private
ones are described in various degrees of detail. Chapters 7–9 offer next short accounts of
an assorted set of instruments—thermometer, barometer, micrometer, microtome, precision
balance—made in Ramsden’s workshop. In particular, we learn about Ramsden’s great
geodetic theodolite, which was used to measure with great precision degrees of longitude
for cartographic purposes. Thanks to the harsh accusations made against this instrument by
General William Roy, who was in charge of the Paris-Greenwich triangulation on the English
side, we are in possession of precious documents describing Ramsden’s design and con-
struction of this important machine. The last part of the book deals with Ramsden’s final
years and his successor, Matthew Berge.
The book has a strong scholarship and is a must-read reference to Ramsden and his time,
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one I will often go back to. Yet I did not enjoy reading it. The overall prose is somewhat
ungraceful, episodic, and telegraphic. Part of the text appears pieced together as if the author
did not really know where or how to properly introduce certain individuals and institutions.
The short interludes on J. H. Magellan, Gianntonio Rizzi Zannoni, Samuel Réhé (or Rhee),
and the Specola Caetani are specific examples. In a few cases the descriptions of events start
at one place in the book and are fully concluded later (e.g., the Dunsink Observatory,
113–17 and 257–58). Some insights are fascinating, such as how weather affects the pro-
duction of instruments, while the few accounts of political events are mostly irrelevant. It
is not a book I would recommend reading in entirety. Nevertheless it is an important
contribution to the specialized field of scientific instruments. By carefully picking the relevant
chapters and sections, this book also expands our understanding of the rise of scientific
entrepreneurship in preindustrial Europe.

Jean-François Gauvin, Harvard University

GEORGE BOULUKOS. The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century

British and American Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. 288.
$95.00 (cloth).

The grateful slave of George Boulukos’s title performs a good deal of hard cultural labor.
This important contribution to the growing body of work on the relationship between
sentimental writing, slavery, and conceptions of human difference in the eighteenth century
focuses on the ubiquitous figure of the grateful slave whose thankfulness and devotion can
never measure up to the master’s kindness. Often understood as serving the cause of anti-
slavery in its attention to African suffering in the colonies, the grateful slave, Boulukos
argues, generates arguments for amelioration rather than emancipation, for racial difference
rather than human likeness. Thus although the trope at first glance seems to register the
common humanity of slaves (in recognizing their suffering and their capacity for emotion),
the grateful slave instead plays a critical role in the elaboration of concepts of racial hierarchy,
as the immoderate and misplaced gratitude of the slave is shown to signal the irrational,
dependent, and passionate nature of the African: the slave’s unreadiness for freedom. The
grateful slave thereby bridges “a transatlantic gap in racial consciousness, between the practice
of white supremacy in the middle passage and the colonies and the metropolitan discourse
insisting on the unity of humankind” (38). Reversing recent claims made about the hu-
manizing power of sentimental figures to create belief in human commonality, Boulukos
argues that the grateful slave trope inculcates insidious lessons about racial difference that
metropolitan readers would find unpalatable in more overt form.
In Boulukos’s account, sentimental images of enthusiastically submissive slaves offer the
metropolitan public a more palatable vision of colonial practices, enabling them to support
the broader system while deploring its structural effects as unfortunate excesses. The self-
serving fiction that Africans may be made not only to accept but also voluntarily to embrace
their subjugation enabled an ideological return to a precontractual patriarchal social order
grounded in obligation and paternalistic benevolence at the same time as it advanced ar-
guments for ameliorative reforms that left the broader system intact and even augmented
production under a new, ostensibly humane, disciplinary regime. Inasmuch as the slave’s
humanity is tested and confirmed through expressions of gratitude toward benevolent mas-
ters, it exists only in and through the conditions of their continued subjection.
The book’s six chronologically ordered chapters trace the evolution of the grateful slave