Description: The essays in this collection explore our reliance on experts within a historical context and across a wide range of fields, including agriculture, engineering, health sciences and labour management. Contributors argue that experts were highly aware of their audiences and used performance to gain both scientific and popular support.
Review Quotes:
"There is a great deal of useful information to be found in this volume, and I hope that it will find its way to scholars who can make good use of it."
- William Thomas, The British Journal for the History of Science
"...the volume offers a valuable and varied picture of what expertise has looked like in modern Europe. (...) This volume represents an important development in the history of expertise as we move from studies promoting the topic's importance to a bigger picture based on constructivist analyses of expertise in different regions, periods and political systems."
- Don Leggett, Department of History, Philosophy and Religious Studies, Nazarbayev University, Astana, Kazakhstan in Annals of Science, 2016