Origin and Development of the Pearl Baths

Modern agriculture, which underwent revolutionary progress to achieve its twentieth-century form, can be defined in a single phrase as “petroleumdependent agriculture”. Inexpensive fossil fuels are used to operate large machinery, which enables large-scale cultivation, mono-cropping, standardization and high-volume transport; and the synthesis of fertilizers and agricultural chemicals permits the improvement of soil fertility and simplified management of ecosystems. Until the nineteenth century, agriculturalists were basically forced to engage in stable sustainable agriculture that took maximum advantage of nature’s functions. But during the twentieth century, by taking full advantage of the energy sources provided by inexpensive fossil fuels, “using natural functions” gave way to “applying technology to transform nature”. This form of agriculture is referred to as the modern agricultural revolution because its basic technologies were established at the start of the twentieth century, permitting a great leap in production. The modern agricultural revolution is characterized by (1) the mechanization and increased scale of agriculture, with high-volume transport made possible by motorization using fossil fuels (petroleum) to power internal combustion engines; (2) the management of soil fertility and ecology using chemical fertilizers and agricultural chemicals; (3) the development of high-yield varieties; (4) advanced water management in some regions; and (5) remarkable increases in labour productivity as a result of the first four characteristics. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the basic technologies for motorization through the use of gasoline to power internal combustion engines were established. Also, Fritz Haber and Carl Bosch developed the technology to produce ammonia by fixing atmospheric nitrogen gas. The Haber–Bosch process is a method of producing ammonia using an iron oxide catalyst to trigger a reaction of nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas under supercritical conditions, 300–550°C and 15–25 MPa. Thanks to this process, it is now possible to manufacture the nitrogen fertilizers that play a crucial role in agriculture. In this way, the fundamental technologies for modern agriculture were almost entirely established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. One more important factor in the development of petroleum-dependent agriculture was crop yield improvement technologies based on large-scale fertilization and the breeding of extremely highyielding varieties. These varieties included Norin 10 wheat and Yukara rice, which were bred by Japan in the 1950s and successfully contributed to heavier yields of tropical wheat and rice, an event called the Green Revolution.

Perhaps because, at least since the beginning of the nineteenth century, wealth has played so great a part in class differentiation in Europe, the more indirect effects of educational differences upon the status and functions of various social groups have sometimes been underestimated. In a highly industrialized society, learning does indeed rank far below wealth among the causes of social stratification. In countries which are still passing through the early stages of industrialization, however, the situation may actually be reversed, particularly where a traditional aristocracy retains some of its privileges and where membership in the administrative elite of a bureaucratic monarchy still constitutes an important route of social advancement for non-nobles. Germany is the perfect example. What might be called the 'non-entrepreneurial' or 'non-economic' upper middle class was perhaps the most important and influential social group in Germany until late in the nineteenth century. Higher officials and secondary school teachers, judges and lawyers, doctors and university professors, made up an elite of the highly educated or 'cultivated'. These people had no more in common with the new commercial and industrial classes than they had with the Junkers. Their views on politics, on technological progress, and on socio-economic change differed markedly from all those doctrines which have been thought most typical of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie in the Anglo-American tradition. Some of the peculiarities of modern German intellectual history would certainly seem less puzzling if they were linked with the social history and the ideology of this elite of the highly educated. The institutional history of German higher schools and universities throws much light upon the whole situation of this 'cultivated' group.1 It was of great consequence, for example, that

Driven by technological progress, human life expectancy has increased greatly since the nineteenth century. Demographic evidence has revealed an ongoing reduction in old-age mortality and a rise of the maximum age at death, which may gradually extend human longevity. Together with observations that lifespan in various animal species is flexible and can be increased by genetic or pharmaceutical intervention, these results have led to suggestions that longevity may not be subject to strict, species-specific genetic constraints. Here, by analysing global demographic data, we show that improvements in survival with age tend to decline after age 100, and that the age at death of the world's oldest person has not increased since the 1990s. Our results strongly suggest that the maximum lifespan of humans is fixed and subject to natural constraints.

The scale of Britain’s industrial expansion during the nineteenth century was vast and extraordinary. On the sea, Britain dominated the industrialized world both in tonnage and distance and established the largest shipping lines in the world. With the rapid increase in international trade, Britain led the world in the development of submarine telegraph cable and steamships. Although from the early decades of nineteenth century, Britain was expanding its ascendancy in the Persian Gulf, from 1860s onward, technological developments, mainly telegraph and steamship, led to a significant change in favor of British hegemony in the region. This technological progress had great impacts on the politics and economy of the area and neighboring centuries. The present article is an attempt to examine the process of communication system development in the Persian Gulf and its role in the consolidation of British position in the region.

The Invisible Hand of Innovation Showing in the General Purpose Technology of Electricity

In the nineteenth century, the dominant theory of the state restricted the latter's activity to external and domestic defence and the provision of an adequate law of contract by reference to which disputes between individuals could be settled. The theory, however, never represented much more than an ideal. In the twentieth century, it became necessary to abandon even the ideal. Already, before the turn of the century, technological progress had created problems which could be solved only by state action. The demand of organized labour for a measure of security and improved working conditions produced others. Still others resulted from the concentration of capital and mass production. These and other factors forced the state to intervene in spheres which had been traditionally reserved for private enterprise. With the war came even greater problems; and the state became more and more involved. In 1918, a vain effort was made in some countries to return to “normal” conditions; but for the most part the evolution continued unabated though not always in the same tempo or in the same angle of direction. In a few states it produced collectivism, in others a “new deal,” in others fascism; but in none did laissez-faire survive.

The phrase ‘technological change’ does not appear in the index of Marshall's second major book, Industry and Trade, nor does it appear in the index of that of his first major work, Principles of Economics. Yet the nature of the contents of the second book, Industry and Trade, indicates that technological progress is part of the analysis, with special reference to Marshall's discussion of the industrial leadership secured by England during the nineteenth century, and the claims thereto by France, Germany and the United States (Book I, chapters III–VIII). Causes of technological change, and its impact on the size of firms were discussed by Marshall in Book II (especially chapters II and III), while the matter is also treated in the context of changes in business organisation (Book II, chapters X–XII). This paper, in its various sections, therefore acts as a reminder of the fact that Marshall's Industry and Trade was primarily concerned with ‘the origins of modern industrial technique and business organisation’, as he put it himself in the introduction.

Leo Marx and others have argued that the reception of technology in the United States during the nineteenth century was conditioned by the ‘technological sublime’. John F. Kasson defined this as a ‘powerful emotion, utility, and moral purpose’, suffused with the conviction that the health of the republic was indicated and improved by technological progress. This article provides different perspectives on the American technological sublime, as well as an exploration of its transference to radio and then television. Although there was no shortage of enthusiasm for radio, and for its potential to reconfigure the republic, its reception was not as uncomplicated as the idea of the technological sublime suggests. Interwar hopes for broadcasting and its potential social effects spoke as much to American insecurities as to their dreams; deep fears about social cohesion, cosmopolitanism and pluralism underpinned promises of a new age of radio culture and citizenship. Most Americans did not need to be persuaded of the benefits of radio and later media technologies, but those who identified with the cultural and political establishments needed to be reassured that their position and values would not be threatened by it. More than forty years ago, Leo Marx argued that an impulse to primitivism had conditioned reception of technology in the United States. Americans, Marx argued in The Machine in the Garden, sought to reconcile technology and the pastoral ideal by striving for the ‘middle landscape’ in which the machine did not desecrate the garden. This unlikely reconciliation was, Marx thought, distinctively American and initially propelled by the high priests of the American literary renaissance. American conceptions of the environment firstly as a pristine wilderness and then as an orderly garden were affronted and then adapted to accept the place of technology within them. Marx was an avowed American exceptionalist, arguing that the formation of a middle landscape was a peculiarly American literary, cultural and then national achievement (Marx 1964: 195). Marx’s conception of a middle landscape gave birth to an American ‘technological sublime’, which transferred the earlier sense of awe and 129 RJ–ISBAM 6 (2&3) 129–143 © Intellect Ltd 2008 Keywords

Stalwart GiantsMedical Cosmopolitanism, Canadian Authorship, and American Publishers Jennifer J. Connor (bio) “Nationalism,” declared Dr. William Osler in 1902, “has been the great curse of humanity.” For this internationally revered Canadian physician, the profession of medicine transcends borders: it is a “sort of guild or brotherhood, any member of which can take up his calling in any part of the world” and can find identical language and methods. Philadelphia-based Lea Brothers, publisher of Osler’s 1907 edited collection, Modern Medicine, echoed his many statements on this theme: “A new era has come in medicine, the age of cosmopolitanism,” they wrote in a preface. “As in finance and trade, the world has become a single country.”1 Indeed, medical book publishing itself had long—perhaps always—targeted a borderless market. At the same time, however, American medical publishers clearly dominated the market by the late nineteenth century. For, as the prominent medical editor Dr. George M. Gould observed in 1897, although “science is cosmopolitan; medicine is most patriotic when least selfish; we know naught of geographic limits or national boundary lines; [and] our colleagues over sea are our brethren none the less because miles of water lie between us,” American books raised nevertheless “a pardonable patriotism in which we may indulge.” Of all the methods to counter a reported condescension among “foreigners” toward the American medical profession, Gould asked, “what one is more effective than the creation of a good book?”: “Now I think no one will deny the assertion that we Americans have a marked superiority to some other nations in the art of scientific and artistic book-making. Every book of superior professional and typographic excellence we send across the water raises us as a profession and as a nation in the eyes of our transatlantic colleagues.”2 This superiority of production, and a lucrative specialized trade in medical books, in fact made American medical publishers attractive to authors. Philadelphia was the main center for this trade, and as will be discussed [End Page 209] here, it was central not just for the United States, but for the North American continent. Anglo-Canadian physicians, trained in elite British and Canadian medical schools (which, unlike the situation in the United States, generally were university-based or -affiliated from their establishment in the early nineteenth century), gravitated to the northeast part of the United States to lead and participate in the new research culture in medicine at the end of the nineteenth century. The medical profession then was mobilizing: professionalizing, specializing, researching, writing, publishing, and organizing libraries. The most significant Canadian expatriate was Dr. (later Sir) William Osler, who in 1893 helped to found what was to become the model for medical schools at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and who would move on to Oxford in 1905, exemplifying the cosmopolitan physician in the Anglo-American world par excellence. Consequently, although Osler publicly decried nationalism, he and his fellow Canadian expatriate authors knew well that a large Canadian influence was exerted on American medical publishers, and they quietly applauded it. Publishers knew it well, too. “The United States is often said to be a chauvinist country,” observed a centennial history of the (Philadelphia-based) publisher, Saunders Company, but in its use of textbooks in the basic medical sciences it has been above all else eclectic. For many years the Grant Atlas of Anatomy, the Best and Taylor Physiology, and Boyd’s Pathology, all by Canadian authors, were stalwart giants that every publisher wanted to topple from their lofty place, but none could. There are other Canadian texts too of profound influence on medicine everywhere, and Saunders has had the good fortune to publish more than its fair share of them. They include the Fraser and Paré Diagnosis of Diseases of the Chest, the Thompson and Thompson Medical Genetics, the Leeson and Leeson Histology, Bates, Macklem and Christie on Respiratory Function in Disease, the Cherniack and Cherniack Respiration in Health and Disease and Moore’s The Developing Human.3 These connections between Canadian authors and American publishers thus invite fuller investigation, not just to understand contemporary notions of nationalism and continentalism, but also to shed new light on the...

WHEN THE AMERICAN SOCIOLOGIST Daniel Bell was asked to give the Hobhouse Memorial Lecture at the London School of Economics in 1977, he chose as his title, The Return of the Sacred?. Significantly, he placed a question mark at the end of that provocative title. In this lecture Bell discussed what he saw as a dramatic resurgence of religious belief in modern culture, and he quoted the great German sociologist Max Weber, who wrote at the end of the nineteenth century: With the progress of science and technology, man stopped believing in magic powers, in spirits, and in demons. He's lost his sense of prophecy, and above all, he's lost his sense of the sacred. Reality, Weber wrote, has become dreary, flat, and utilitarian, leaving a great void in the souls of men which they seek to fill with frivolous activity. But as Bell went on to note, the inexorable'progress of science and technology shifted sharply in the twentieth century. Man's reason did not prevent the Holocaust or the mushroom-shaped cloud, and the flatness and dreariness of the wholly utilitarian and secularized society of which Max Weber wrote taken its toll on the human spirit. Today we are rediscovering that the sense of the sacred is inextricably interwoven with the most basic of human impulses, the most primal human experiences of birth and growth and death. George Steiner, in reflecting on the Holocaust, captured this spirit when he wrote: We now know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he

The ubiquity of fiction by the late nineteenth century suggests the decline of poetry from its central cultural status as a public discourse and masculine preserve of "a man speaking to men." 1 A standard explanation for the decrease in verse publication and the rise of the novel during the course of the century has been that science and technological progress replaced poetry as the discourse that captured the public imagination, while the cultural critic came to overshadow the poet as the aristocrat of public intellectuals. However, this account fails to register the paradoxical nature of poetry's cultural status in Victorian times: literal marginalization in the marketplace was often translated through aesthetic appreciation into the social prestige of "high" art. 2

The article considers M. M. Khvostov's attitude to the concepts of «evolution» and «progress», and the peculiarities of their application in his scientific works. It is noted that, unlike many of his colleagues who abandoned the use of the concept of «progress» at the end of the XIX century, Khvostov did not replace it with a stricter concept of «evolution» and continued to apply both concepts, replacing one concept with the other, considering them equivalent, on the assumption that both concepts refer to the strictly directed movement of society forward, from the lowest to the highest, from the simple to the complex, from the primitive to the «more cultural». In relation to Ancient Greece, M. M. Khvostov emphasizes the faster pace of the emergence of new cultural achievements from century to century, and the desire of the Greeks themselves for constant aesthetic self-improvement. Recognizing the existence of obstacles (military actions, «revolution», conservatism of certain strata of society, etc.) on the path of the continuous evolution of ancient societies, M. M. Khvostov, however, did not dare to «improve» the sociological doctrines of O. Comte, J. S. Mill, G. Spencer, remaining faithful to the speculative constructions of his great predecessors. It is noted that M. M. Khvostov did not show interest in N. I. Kareev's arguments about the essence of evolution and progress, that not every evolution can be considered progress, that the idea of progress is a representation of an evaluative nature, therefore it is subjective, incompatible with the ideals of an accurate, objective evidence-based science, that is, positivism. The authors emphasize that M. M. Khvostov, about a decade after his colleagues, also began to avoid using the concept of«progress,» preferring the concept of «evolution with a general progressive orientation. He did so under the influence of new beliefs, including the recognition of E. Meyer's concept of the cyclical development of Ancient nations. It is noted that over time the concepts of «progressive ideals,» «progressive views» became associated more with political activity; the concepts of «progress in science,» «progress in technology,» «progress in the economy,» and progress in a certain branch of culture – with successes and achievements in the social, economic and cultural spheres of society

This chapter discusses the technological progress in the Industrial Revolution, usually dated between about 1750 and 1830. It notes that although Britain is frequently thought of as its locus, a large part of the new technology was the result of work done in other European countries and, later, in the United States. The chapter observes that the fruits of the Industrial Revolution were slow in coming, and that although per capita consumption and living standards increased little initially, production technologies changed dramatically in many industries and sectors, which prepared the way for sustained Schumpeterian growth in the second half of the nineteenth century, when technological progress spread to previously unaffected industries. It examines the technological changes during this period occurring in four main groups, namely: power technology, metallurgy, textiles, and a miscellaneous category of other industries and services.

THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF JOSIAH WEDGEWOOD (1730-1795) to the improvement of ceramic technology are well known, but his experiments on the improvement of glass have remained a secret. Yet, for a period of at least seven years, Wedgwood performed a series of studies, traceable in letters and laboratory commonplace books, culminating in a hitherto unpublished paper recommending processes for removing the cords or striae in optical flint glass. The genesis of his interest in the problem, his remarkable experiments and conclusions, and the ultimate sterility of his efforts combine to form a story which brings to light a significant new document in the history of glass technology, illustrates Wedgwood's methods and ability, and re-demonstrates the harmful effects of British fiscal policy on technological progress in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. For these reasons it has seemed worthwhile finally to publish Wedgwood's paper, with some editorial introduction and comment.'

Henry George (1839–1897) rose to fame as a social reformer and economist amid the industrial and intellectual turbulence of the late nineteenth century. His best-selling Progress and Poverty (1879) captures the ravages of privileged monopolies and the woes of industrialization in a language of eloquent indignation. His reform agenda resonates as powerfully today as it did in the Gilded Age, and his impassioned prose and compelling thought inspired such diverse figures as Leo Tolstoy, John Dewey, Sun Yat-Sen, Winston Churchill, and Albert Einstein. This six-volume edition of The Annotated Works of Henry George assembles all his major works for the first time with new introductions, critical annotations, extensive bibliographical material, and comprehensive indexing to provide a wealth of resources for scholars and reformers. Volume II of this series presents the unabridged text of Progress and Poverty, arguably the most influential work of Henry George. The original text is supplemented by notes which explain the changes George made during his lifetime and the many references he made to history, literature, economics, and public policy. A new index augments accessibility to the text and key terms. The introductory essay, “The Rhetoric and the Remedy,” by series co-editor William S. Peirce, provides an overview of the historical context for George’s philosophy of economics and summarizes the argument of Progress and Poverty within the framework of the economic theories of his day. It then looks at some of the early reactions by leading economists and opinion makers to George’s fervent and eloquent call for economic justice. Henry George wrote Progress and Poverty in order to identify and resolve the great paradox of modern industrial life. How was it possible for abject poverty, financial instability, and extreme economic inequality to co-exist with rising productivity and technological progress? He analyzed and rejected the widely held beliefs that poverty inevitably followed from the laws of economics or from a Darwinian struggle for survival of the fittest. George concluded that at the heart of this dilemma was how society treated natural resources, especially urban land. He did not succumb to the panacea of arbitrarily confiscating property or taking from the rich to give to the poor. George argued that taxes on productive labor and capital should be drastically reduced. His “sovereign remedy” declared that public goods could be adequately funded from the returns to land and other natural resources. The activities of society as a whole give land its value. It is therefore both equitable and efficient for the community to tax or recapture land values to support the activities of government.