This handsome volume is published to celebrate the centenary of the foundation of the British Academy in 1902. It brings together contributors from a range of disciplines to reflect upon ‘the organisation of knowledge’, a theme that seems to have become increasingly fashionable in recent years. Historians of science will immediately notice the presence of essays by John Pickstone (an overview of the big changes in the sciences, drawing upon the structure set out in his Ways of Knowing, Manchester, 2000), Jim Endersby (on the practice and status of taxonomy) and Sam Alberti (on the foundations of and justifications for the civic colleges). But the real interest of this volume to historians of science will surely lie in learning about other disciplines and how they weathered the nineteenth century. Martin Daunton's valuable introduction draws heavily upon scholarship in the history of science, but also brings in illustrative examples from other disciplines. It should be stimulating reading for all historians of science, with its strong hints that we would benefit from taking a broader view of intellectual endeavour in Victorian Britain. Lack of state support for scholarly subjects was, after all, entirely typical in Britain's mixed economy, and seeing how other subjects dealt with that situation might make us rethink the gloss we put on science's new rise to prominence. Rather than seeing the sciences in Britain as under-funded and under-supported – and thus deserving of the increased state support that eventually went their way – we might instead see the sciences as unusually successful in attracting support, funding and cultural authority.

Daunton's introduction also reflects upon the problems of defining knowledge – how to distinguish it from ignorance, and how to distinguish between popular and esoteric knowledge. More questions are raised than answered, but it is thought-provoking nonetheless. Unfortunately, the volume itself concentrates only on what Daunton terms ‘academic, official and legitimate knowledge’ (p. 9), justified by the assertion that we cannot begin to study ‘unofficial’ knowledge until we know what ‘official’ knowledge is. This seems to me to be taking the easy way out, by accepting the late nineteenth century's privileging of the ‘official’ over the ‘unofficial’, rather than continuing to question such distinctions. For all that, the restricted focus clearly makes the editor's job easier and allows the volume to deal essentially with knowledge in the university. And this is, of course, appropriate for a volume in honour of the British Academy.

The key group of chapters, therefore, discuss the ways in which particular disciplines became acceptable university subjects in the late nineteenth century. There are essays on the social sciences (Lawrence Goldman), economics (Keith Tribe), mathematics (Daniel Cohen), classics (Frank Turner), history (Michael Bentley) and English (Josephine Guy and Carol Atherton). Historians of science will notice that many of these stories are implicitly set against the backdrop of the equivalent processes in the sciences. The history of the professionalization and specialization of the sciences seems to act as a yardstick against which to measure other disciplines. This is perhaps because research in the history of science is at a more advanced stage – one certainly gets the impression that the histories of other disciplines have become subjects of study relatively recently, and that they tend to be studied by practitioners within those disciplines. It is a salutary reminder to us of how unusual it is that history of science has become a discipline independent of science.

Although the sciences typically provide the context for other efforts to secure the status of a university discipline, we should not fall into the trap of assuming that all other subject areas followed the same path as the natural sciences. It is timely to be reminded that classics already had significant social status and cachet at the start of the nineteenth century, and that its proponents were fighting to retain that status rather than to gain it. Where the classicists managed to justify their importance by using their texts to inform contemporary debates (particularly about political leadership), other disciplines sought to demonstrate that their practitioners possessed esoteric knowledge requiring specialist skills. The two essays on English studies illustrate how difficult it was for some subjects to meet those criteria, and shed light on why philology, rather than literary criticism, was the most successful form of university English studies in the late nineteenth century.

Since the British Academy did not exist in the nineteenth century, it is generally absent from the bulk of the volume. It is therefore a shame that Richard Drayton's closing essay is relatively short. Drayton outlines the history of academies in Europe from the Renaissance onwards, and asks what it was about the English mindset which meant that, for centuries, there seemed no need for a national humanistic academy. Historians of science will be familiar with part of this discussion, from the scholarship on the foundation of the Royal Society, but, as with the volume as a whole, this is another instance where our understanding of the history of science will be enriched by a better grasp of what was going on in other scholarly areas. Drayton ends with a very brief account of the eventual foundation of the British Academy, and a plea for humanistic scholars to mimic Thomas Huxley and his latter-day descendants by being more actively engaged in campaigning for their disciplines.

I am not convinced that this volume tells us much that we did not already know about ‘the organisation of knowledge’, in its broadest sense, in Victorian Britain. But it will be a good place to start for historians of science who are interested in making potentially fascinating comparisons between the sciences and English, history, classics or economics.