This book traces the rise of modern science and national states, from the sixteenth century through the early Cold War. Intended for students and general readers as well as scholars, Science and the State provides a compact survey of the subject, along with a helpful bibliography. Author John Gascoigne weaves his material together with an uncontroversial central claim: modern states and modern science grew in tandem, in a complementary fashion.

Gascoigne provides a solid, synthetic institutional history, focused on five national states: Britain, France, Germany, Russia, and the United States. In most chapters, each of these states is considered in turn, in separate sections. The book proceeds chronologically, starting with a discussion of court patronage in the years of the Scientific Revolution. Much of the rest of the book offers a thorough accounting of the emergence of key organizations, starting in the 1660s with the establishment of the Royal Society of London and the Académie des Sciences, in Paris. Gascoigne's account of the nineteenth century emphasizes the importance of German universities. In the early twentieth century, the United States distinguished itself in its reliance on private institutes funded by wealthy business titans such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, whereas the infant Soviet Union became the national state most thoroughly devoted to science. However, during World War II, national differences faded, as the state-science nexus tightened across the globe, with a new emphasis on military utility. This militarization extended into the Cold War, which Gascoigne treats briefly in an epilogue.

By organizing the book along national lines, Gascoigne begins to offer readers some valuable comparative perspectives, showing that the specific mechanisms of state-science relations could vary considerably from place to place, even if the overall trend may have been toward convergence. However, the book's organizational scheme, which highlights national states instead of scientific fields or individual scientists, carries the considerable cost of underemphasizing the transnational and global aspects of the story. There is relatively little discussion of scientists’ cross-border migrations, international conferences, and communications. This is surprising, given Gascoigne's own expertise on the subject of science and empire and given the considerable attention that historians of science have devoted to these matters. The book's coverage of science in non-Western states, such as China and Japan, is insufficient.

Historians of business will appreciate Gascoigne's attention to the role of industry in the advancement of science. Here the book emphasizes developments in late nineteenth-century Germany, where companies such as Bayer and Siemens set up their own in-house laboratories and also underwrote public technical institutes. Similar patterns emerged in the United States, whereas in France—and, of course, especially in the Soviet Union—the central state was more dominant. By sketching these contrasts, Science and the State suggests some provocative questions about the relationship between science and different national styles of governance and political economy. But this discussion never goes very far, in part because Gascoigne takes for granted crude traditional stereotypes about the nature of the national states instead of using the history of science to complicate them.

Although the book provides an epilogue that takes the story beyond World War II, it does little to consider developments after the 1950s. This narrative choice provides concision, but it means that Gascoigne misses an opportunity to make the book more appealing to a wider audience. As science has become partially demilitarized in recent decades, what have been the most important consequences for scientists and states? Has science gained or lost influence in the halls of government, boardrooms, and the public sphere over the past half century? What are the most important recent developments in the relationships between science and the states? Some readers of Gascoigne's book will be inspired to ask such questions, but they will need to look for answers elsewhere.

Gascoigne has written a solid, up-to-date survey of a vast and fascinating subject, with an emphasis on institutions in the major Western national states. This means that Science and the State will be useful to students and scholars for years to come. The book would have been even more valuable had it done more to offer a truly global perspective and if the author had engaged more deeply and directly with some of the most interesting big questions in the lively field of the history of science, including debates about revolutions versus continuities, about science and gender, and about the sociology of knowledge.