This volume, the fifth in Brill's Scientific Instruments and Collections series, presents studies of the movement of scientific and medical instruments to their various markets in Europe and the Americas between the eighteenth century and the First World War. Here scientific instruments are commodities marketed and sold through an array of strategies that changed over time as different media became available.

The volume begins with Alexi Baker's study of George Willdey, an eighteenth-century ‘toyman’ (loosely speaking, a seller of trinkets for adults), whose trade in optical instruments was central to his business, for which barter and subcontracting were routine practices. This was high-volume trade at a time when instruments were never, Baker stresses, purely scientific. Staying in Britain, Josh Nall and Liba Taub argue for the value of ephemeral evidence such as trade cards and catalogues. Drawing together examples from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, they show some of the strategies firms have deployed: the use of a famous name such as Charles Darwin's, trumpeting honours from an international exhibition, and active collaboration with research scientists. Alison Morrison-Low also looks at how ephemera can help historians understand scientific-instrument manufacturing, in this case during the Industrial Revolution, when firms from regional centres such as Sheffield and Birmingham became increasingly important, even for instruments marked as London-made. It was only later in the nineteenth century that makers beyond the capital began to trumpet the true place of manufacture.

Other chapters look beyond Britain. Paolo Brenni surveys the prices of physics instruments in France, Germany, Britain and the USA in the nineteenth century, a period in which similarities of design allow meaningful comparisons. Within Europe, he argues, there was considerable stability and homogeneity (with British prices normally slightly higher), meaning that considerations other than just cost must have influenced buyers. The comparison with the USA throws up more questions than it answers, however, with much higher prices and considerable variation in the increases in costs suggesting the need for further research and explanation. Peggy Kidwell looks at world's fairs between 1851 and 1904 as points of exchange for instruments and knowledge about them. These gatherings played a role in the improvement, diffusion and internationalization of the material culture of mathematics, including calculating machines, cash registers, drawing instruments and models of mathematical shapes. Looking also at trans-national questions, Gloria Clifton examines connections between British, Irish and American makers, whether through migration or the establishment of branches and agencies. Again, her analysis is heavily indebted to ephemeral sources.

While most of the chapters are quite concise, two substantially longer ones (together comprising over a third of the volume) focus on the USA. Sara Schechner looks at surviving objects, including archaeological finds, to discuss the appearance and use of European pocket sundials in colonial North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Drawing on physical evidence, she makes some suggestions regarding users, style choices and usage. She also discusses the ways in which imperial agendas became manifest on these instruments, notably through the choice of place names and the labels given to native peoples. Richard Kremer, by contrast, presents and analyses a provisional census of American makers before 1801, drawing on sources including advertisements to think about the growth and nature of the trade in its first decades. He concludes that American makers adopted different strategies from British counterparts (using advertisements far less frequently, for instance) and includes a useful appendix of 180 makers identified as active in the period. Finally, Laura Cházaro discusses the trade in medical instruments between Europe and Mexico. Cházaro resists diffusionist models to think about the ways in which instruments such as the sphygmograph were adapted to local contexts and politics, for instance through modification for the adequate study of Mexican (rather than, say, Parisian) populations.

While the series of which this is part explicitly aims to focus on examination of scientific instruments as historical evidence, this volume shows the diverse range of additional sources that can be brought to bear on such studies, including business archives, trade literature, advertising, court records and newspapers. What is also clear, as the editors point out, is the extent to which digital resources have changed this field of study in recent decades.

As is usual for the series, this volume is well illustrated, including colour plates, and presents a set of useful case studies around its chosen theme. It also calls us to question what exactly we mean by the term ‘scientific instrument’, given the variety of contexts of retail and use on offer here. Bearing in mind the prosaic title, I did feel there was scope to think about other ways in which instruments have changed hands: the reworking and repurposing of instruments or the lively trade in second-hand instruments, for instance, each of which was significant in the periods discussed. Nevertheless, this is a volume that helps to broaden our understanding of the complex nature and status of what for convenience we call scientific instruments and to think about them as consumed commodities.