Category Archives: postgraduates

PGR Spotlights: Josh Hillman

PGR Spotlights

2nd year PGR

Thesis title: Making the Science(s) of Coal in the British Isles, 1660–1851

Supervised by: Jon Topham and Graeme Gooday

Josh came to Leeds via a BA in History at Warwick, and an MPhil in History and Philosophy of Science at Cambridge.  Before university he represented Britain in a rather strange sport called ‘speed lifesaving’.

Summarise your research in one sentence: I can try! My research explores how the knowledge and expertise of British mineworkers was appropriated and adapted, first by natural philosophers, such as Robert Boyle, and then by geologists, such as R.I. Murchison, roughly between the late seventeenth and mid nineteenth century.             

What led you to that topic? I’ve got a longstanding interest in what might be called ‘working class history’, or more broadly ‘labour history’, and though these labels can’t perfectly be applied to mining and miners for the duration of my period they capture the thrust of what I’m interested in: the agency of ordinary working-people in the development of natural knowledge.

What are the most significant sources you’re working with? Are there key people, key texts, or even key artefacts that are central to your thesis? That’s a good question, and the answer is yes and no. No because nearly all of the people I’m most interested in are nameless – and that’s the ordinary miners. So I have to study them, and try and find their authentic voice, almost, through the work of natural philosophers and geologists – and so some of them have become really quite key to my story. I should say that I’m adopting a kind of ‘episodic’ structure, inspired by Martin Rudwick’s book on the meaning of fossils between the 1500s and 1800s. After all, the history I’m writing is really a history of what I keep calling an ‘epistemic relationship’, although I’m a bit ambivalent about the term to be honest.

So I start of in the 1660s, and the first key figure is Robert Boyle, who writes a programmatic text about what natural philosophers should seek to find out about mines, and this text serves as a referent that directs the epistemic relationship between savants and miners until the end of the first third of the eighteenth century. Then the next episode looks at a Frenchman, Jean François-Clément Morand, who writes a huge multivolume book for the Parisian Academy of Science, and this book then changes how savants approach their relationship to miners, including those across the Channel in Britain. My final three episodes focus on John Buddle as the archetypal mining engineer, some gentlemanly geologists associated with the Geological Society of London, and then Warington Smyth as the lecturer in mining at the Royal School of Mines in the 1850s.

Why does the world need your research? I think the overall focus in the history of geology on social elites has obscured the agency of miners, and just how much knowledge in relation to ores, coal, mineral veins, and also bigger geological units like coal measures, that geologists actually relied on miners for. For instance, Roy Porter’s The Making of British Geology is still pretty much the most well-known account of British geology. And it opens with a brilliant observation that, pre-Porter, historians of geology had accepted the propaganda of Victorian geologists too readily: they accepted at face-value the Victorian geologists’ claims that they were the first to systematically study the earth. Porter then goes on to show that we can trace the genealogy of British geology right back to the seventeenth century, and he suggests that the Victorian geologists deliberately elided the contribution of the earlier natural historians and philosophers that practised, anachronistically but usefully, the earth sciences. So great. The problem though, as I see it, is that Porter still allows himself to be tricked by some different propaganda claims of the Victorian geologists, accepting that practical miners had little role in the development of geology. Now, I don’t want to spin this too far in the other way and say that your illiterate eighteenth-century miner came up with continental-drift theory. But I do think it’s important to show how practical workers contributed to the development of geology in a way that has become more mainstream in the historiography of chemistry, engineering, mathematics, and medicine.

            So, that’s the content-specific contribution I hope my research will make. But I also want to offer a more general case study, and that is to study how once novel practical knowledge becomes reconfigured and normalised in natural-philosophical or scientific practice. It’s not enough, I don’t think, just to argue over the relative importance of artisans and savants in the development of knowledge. We need, I think, a longer term perspective on how knowledge and ideas are appropriated from workers and then accepted, or adapted and accepted. And I think my approach – an episodic treatment of the epistemic exchanges between mineworkers and savants from the 1660s to the 1850s – is one way to do this. I think, or I hope, that it suggests one way that we can respond to a dilemma that Jim Secord mentioned in a famous article: the problem of writing a history of science that appreciates ‘science in context’ while simultaneously seeing ‘science as an act of communication’.

So how are you finding the PhD process so far? With the usual proviso of doing a PhD in a pandemic, it’s an enjoyable process. Leeds is a great place to do a PhD because you really feel at home in the department, and the staff are all very friendly and have a lot of time for you and your professional development. As for the process itself, it’s really interesting to focus on one topic so intensely, and the process of crafting the narrative is fun. There can be frustrating days, though, like when you spend all day reading material that ultimately isn’t much use to you, despite the promising title!

What are you working on right now, and what are your next steps? Well, today I’m aiming to do a lot of background research on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century science periodicals, with the aim of working out which will be most useful on the topic of mining, broadly. Then the next step is to write up a comparison of how mining matters are treated in the Transactions of the Geological Society and the ‘popular’ periodicals, which will hopefully be put to use in my fourth chapter.

How do you find the work life balance as a PhD student? I think all PhD students tend to agree that it can be difficult to switch off. You hear stories about novelists always carrying a notepad and pen with them wherever they go, or sleeping with one of them on the bedside table for when inspiration strikes. I’m reminded of it every time a good idea pops into my head randomly. Having said that, it’s easier to switch off, I think, if you have something else on in the day, be that teaching some undergraduates or researching at an archive or library. Then when you get home, in my experience, it’s easier to feel like you can stop working for the day. That would be my top tip actually for new PhD students – don’t work at home if you can help it. Easier said than done these days.

You’ve anticipated my next question! What advice would you give somebody about to start a PhD in HPS? Okay so what would my second tip be. If it’s history of science, definitely read at least some of the primary material first. My supervisors encouraged me to do this primary source survey first, which I’m glad I did before a big secondary literature review. I had this idea in my head that the literature review was what PhD students always started with, but it definitely helped streamline my thinking to start with the primary sources. And if it’s a philosophy of science PhD my advice would be not to take my advice, such are my deficiencies in that area!

Final question: what in the world is speed lifesaving?! Good question! It’s basically competitive swimming with a twist, and lots of former competitive swimmers, like me, end up doing it for a bit of a change. So one of the events is a 200m freestyle race with two sets of obstacles you have to swim under per length, another is one where you have to swim underwater, and lots of them involve carrying – or ‘rescuing’ – a manikin over a certain distance. It’s definitely quite niche, and I’m far too lazy to do it now!