The Society of Arts for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (later the Royal Society of Arts) may not often occupy centre stage in historical accounts, but historians of British science are likely to have come across it in some form or other. My own encounters have been in its first decades and the award of premiums for scientific and navigational instruments and other technologies. But what this new history makes clear is how much broader and more changeable the society's activities have been over its lifetime.

Anton Howes structures the account into thirteen chapters, each taking us through key periods of activity, change and occasional crisis. As becomes clear, the mutable nature of the society makes it hard to pin down, although it can be broadly characterized as ‘Britain's voluntary, subscription-funded, national improvement agency’ (p. xi). Founded from the efforts of the apparently introvert William Shipley and the more socially astute and well-connected Stephen Hales, the original intent was to do public good by using members’ subscriptions to fund premiums as incentives to solve problems. After a slow start, once the idea took off the society was soon giving out over one hundred premiums annually for ‘a staggering and seemingly incoherent variety of things’ (p. 27).

A commercial emphasis emerged through premiums to help replace imports through the domestic production of dyes and other materials for luxury goods, alongside premiums for planting trees (to support the navy) that saw more than 60 million planted over the next century. There was also a drive to make commodities such as beeswax, leather and beef cheaper, hence a premium for a turnip cutter to produce improved cattle feed. Importantly, for its first century the society avoided competition with the patent system, instead aiming to encourage things that would not otherwise have been done. ‘It operated at the margins, and only at the margins’, says Howes (p. 73). That said, the society participated in the development of art exhibitions in Georgian London and thus in the creation of the Royal Academy, while also becoming a place to which one might turn to tackle problems such as the production of forgery-proof banknotes (in which it failed).

In the nineteenth century, however, the organization sought to become something akin to a learned society (which it has never been, Howes makes clear) as competition for members grew with the foundation of specialist societies. The Society of Arts became less democratic too, with power focused on its council, allowing individuals rather than the wider membership to dictate its course. Henry Cole became its leading light in the mid-century, steering the society further towards the organization of exhibitions and drumming up support for the Great Exhibition. Cole's society became a platform for systemic change (e.g. of patent and copyright law) and turned its efforts to public education and creating the first externally assessed examinations.

But there were periods of crisis. In the decades around 1900, the society lost direction as it began to accumulate prestige for its own sake. It became the Royal Society of Arts in 1908 (six decades after the grant of a royal charter) and in 1914 began to call its members fellows. By the mid-twentieth century, the RSA was firmly in thrall to the past. Howes takes us through the decades of reform that followed under Arthur Roberts. A new role developed as a forum for discussion and coordination, through active involvement in planning and nature conservation. Further change took place over the last decades of the century, when under Christopher Lucas the society shed its formal (and lucrative) examinations functions and focused instead on design, vocational education, environment and business reform. The resulting financial crisis has led to moves to re-engage and expand the membership. The future remains unclear.

This makes for an engaging story under Howes's guidance. The nature of the RSA means that it's never predictable how events might unfold and one is left with a story still in the making. And while the book's title indicates that Howes is pitching at the general reader, it is thoroughly researched and fully referenced. With so much to cover, the narrative can feel breathless, but Howes has an eye for pleasing details. I warmed to William Shipley as a man so taciturn that fellow customers at Slaughter's Coffee House suspected he was a Jacobite spy, and enjoyed the bewildering range of schemes supported, from hand-mills to fish transport to signalling and so much more. Howes has successfully avoided a purely internal history by looking to broader themes, such as the play-off between mercantilism and free trade in the society's early decades or Henry Cole's utilitarian ideals, to contextualize its development. Whether the RSA really did change the nation remains an open question, since what was or was not the work of the society itself is sometimes ambiguous, necessarily so at times. Nonetheless, Howes is open about his approach and, to his credit, does not confine his account, which is all the richer for looking to the broader picture.