The Machine in Neptune’s Garden: Historical Perspectives on Technology and the Marine Environment

Rozwadowski, Helen M., and David K. van Keuren, eds., 2004, 399pp., illus., cloth bound, and jacketed   For centuries, the sea has been an important site of intellectual exploration, where some of the most important scientific problems of different eras have been investigated. The sea has also been an essential economic resource, as well as the locus of strategic, geopolitical calculations. Not surprisingly, then, it has also been a site of heavily capitalized research. Yet, historians and sociologists of science have, unaccountably, paid relatively little attention to oceanography. This volume goes some distance toward overcoming scholarly neglect. And its subjects also lend themselves to a productive mode of inquiry, blending the perspectives of historians of science and of technology.     “ . . . Each article is individually excellent; together they make an impressive compilation…in bringing together a wide range of interests, technologies, and international and scientific issues,