Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: "How a Nineteenth-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life"
Nathaniel Bowditch and the Power of Numbers: "How a Nineteenth-Century Man of Business, Science, and the Sea Changed American Life"
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Abstract
Nathaniel Bowditch (1773-1838) was a mathematician, astronomer, navigator, seafarer, and business executive whose Enlightenment-inspired perspectives shaped nineteenth-century capitalism while transforming American life more broadly. His scientific publications and best-selling New American Practical Navigator earned him praise from Thomas Jefferson as a “meteor in the hemisphere,” but it was his broader mathematical vision that inspired his creation of that cornerstone of capitalism, that touchstone of modern life, the impersonal bureaucracy. Enthralled with the precision of numbers and the regularity of the solar system, Bowditch operated and represented antebellum New England's most powerful financial institution as a clockwork mechanism. Elite Bostonians criticized Bowditch as a parvenu when he reformed Boston’s cultural and educational institutions, most notably Harvard University, along the same lines, but ultimately they embraced his approach for its political, ideological, and psychological advantages, and Bowditch himself as a valued cultural ornament. Though ostensibly operating with the impartiality guaranteed by impersonality, in reality these institutions functioned in the context of elite social networks, magnifying patrician power. The book argues for the transformative power of the quantitative sciences on capitalist development and the modern experience, while illuminating how powerful capitalists consolidated their power and confronted the paradox of a republican aristocracy. Bowditch’s life at sea, in science, and among urban elites also illuminates the provincial’s encounter with the exotic, the American’s challenge of gaining entry into the international Republic of Letters, and the patrician’s turn from vertical ties of patronage to horizontal ties of privilege.
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