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Excursions in Identity: Travel and the Intersection of Place, Gender and Status in Edo Japan (review)

After Thompson, the next target for revision is Dava Sobel, whose 1995 best-seller Longitude appears naïve and misleading in matters horological. Sobel’s subtitle is The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time, and she presents John Harrison, the perfecter of the chronometer, as an outsider, remote from the business of clocks and clock-making. Part of the drama of Longitude depends on its hero coming from nowhere. Glennie and Thrift, however, in a chapter of fresh research and bravura speculation, relocate Harrison within the culture of time awareness, clock familiarity, and general horological competence that they have been at pains to describe. Harrison’s achievement is by no means lessened, but it is given a much more plausible social context. He too belonged to communities of practice, involving clock use, clock repair, and clock design, and he intersected other communities with scientific, maritime and commercial interests. The later transformation of time-awareness that E.P. Thompson observed also emerged from a complex and deeply-rooted context, that this book goes some way to reveal.