The ghost of Francis Bacon, Elizabethan courtier and champion of experiment over experience, haunts most accounts of the first British Empire. While Bacon once proclaimed the “leveling of wits” in his New Organon, this was a tentative reach into the public realm so much explored of late by historians and sociologists. In this fine book, Erich Ash now reveals in Bacon's dictum the creation of an empire of expertise that would ultimately make a “reformed philosophical method” available to all (204). In the adventure of the Elizabethan experiment with sixteenth-century imperial power, Ash sees a new universe of experts and expertise laying adits in mines, dredging harbors for defense of the realm and trade, and, in aid of empire, making mathematics accessible through new navigational apparatus. This is a tale that emphasizes the mechanic arts for many a project in which the stakes were high, perhaps none higher than when English ships would literally sail circles around Spanish threats. Even the Spanish recognized the dangers in challenging an upstart enemy unless, as a Spanish officer once wrote, “God helps us by a miracle” (5). There would be no miracle but a Protestant wind.

As Ash nicely reveals, the English Privy Council might take heart from a nation in which the cultivation of technological expertise could make much new of flooded mines, silted harbors, and old techniques of navigation. Of this Ash provides ample evidence, retelling the tales of English difficulties in assaying ores, resorting with mixed success to the import of Dutch entrepreneurs and German skill. In a key to his tale of the growing mediation between political power and technical achievement, Ash leads us carefully through the maze of conflicting adventures, of new joint-stocks and the apparent inability of early English entrepreneurs even to manage expertise. This is a tale of distant central administration and of local knowledge, mediated by a growing class of experts who ultimately allowed wealthy patrons greater control of ventures than they otherwise either had the knowledge or capacity to assert. Thus, Ash has drawn a direct link between the growth of administrative power in the Elizabethan state and the reach of government into regions no more remote than the fens or the harbors. Indeed, it was the harbors especially that were crucial to the strategic defense of the crown. Here we find practitioners of the stature of Thomas Digges, MP, who proved to be an essential mediator between the Privy Council and the rebuilding of Dover harbor. It is significant that Digges was able to call upon his expertise “in all other artificial harbors … as well beyond the seas as at home.” Experience, he claimed, was “the most assured teacher” (77), and this alone could ground appropriate advice for a government in London. Ash argues that the rhetorical claims to knowledge were being recast, especially then by Digges who refused any salary as master surveyor, and moreover apparent bribes, to shore up the objectivity of his views on the restoration of Dover harbor, which soon proved so essential for defense against the troublesome Spanish Empire.

The evolution of experts and mediators, as these cases reveal, were part of the general assertion of state-sponsored expertise that would be celebrated by Bacon in the New Atlantis. But, even more generally, the emergence of early modern capitalist ventures relied on growing proficiency in management, mechanics, and mathematics. Bacon tied these elements together in a culture of experience made widely available and useful to patrons. Thus, this was not simply a matter of the application of knowledge in administration of exploration and exploitation. It was, more importantly, about what Bacon called the Advancement of Learning, wherein would be celebrated not blind adventures but “industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries” (195). Philosophy would thus become a collaborative process wherein “natural philosophical experts … alone could hope to speak with the voice of nature itself ” (205).

It is Ash's treatment of navigation and exploration that best provides the evidence for the link between mathematical virtuosity and skill in seamanship upon which the English would depend. In the rapid growth of empire, the critical necessity of moving beyond the old navigational “rutters” and sea charts was increasingly transparent. Experience along the European or Mediterranean coasts was hardly sufficient. Indeed the abstraction of latitude and the knowledge of astronomical navigation were increasingly essential and became more and more systematic and abstract. The Spanish at the Casa de Contratacion in Seville provided the best example of navigational technique, and the English had much to learn and imitate. English pilots needed to master new mathematical skills, and they needed to learn how to navigate with new instruments of the kind promoted by Stephen and William Borough or Martin Frobisher. The real necessity was to provide broader training in mathematics of the kind embedded in navigational instruments. It was a common nostrum in the sixteenth century that mathematics was for mathematicians. But instruments were really mathematical devices, and through them mathematical complexities would overcome the inaccuracies and guesses of mariners that actually magnified the dangers at sea. Instruments were, therefore, liberating—both for the seamen who learned to use them and for the companies who wished to extend their reach beyond European waters. Ironically, this also served to increase the intellectual divide between seamen and mathematicians. This leads Ash to question the utility of a much-used historical category like “mathematical practitioner.” Instead, he proposes that there was a community of mathematical arts that was complex and full of tension. In such a world, abstraction was actually a tool that expert mediators could use to differentiate themselves from mere practitioners. Hence, Bacon becomes the voice of generations that promoted expertise as the key to a utopia—where “the furthest end of knowledge” (207) was guided by natural philosophers in the service of the state.