Here's the book as a one-page graphic. Centre is an exam script by the twenty-four year old Poynting from his finals in 1876. He’s working in real time, making mistakes, making knowledge before our eyes. It's how he learned his craft.
Around the paper is Poynting's world – his maths coach, Edward Routh, books of past exam questions, the models of what a research problem is and how it’s solved. Class teaching on a blackboard, competitive, written examinations in silence against the clock – quite unlike the public disputation in Latin of the past five-hundred years. Team sport as manly competition, the coach was first a maths tutor. Exam results published in the national press, an incitement to heroism or fear of humiliation. Women were thought unsuited to a system that pushed men to mental breakdown – until 1890 when Phillipa Fawcett informally beat the highest scoring man.
Historians are less interested in technical expertise in the sciences these days, but if you'd like to see a cultural or constructivist account of how these resources led Poynting to the eponymous Vector, check out my YouTube videos, A Cultural History of Physics ... with Equations?
When Isaac Newton published the Principia in 1687, few had the technical skill to read it. Much the same was true in the eighteenth century as rational mechanics then physics was born. But from around 1800 new training regimes appeared – first in Paris and Cambridge – which multiplied technical skill, eventually going global.
Every old way once was new
Our ways will be old ways too
History is me ... and you.
Marginal jotting in Hyder Khan's Journal (from the Bengali), June 1857
Historians have histories too. I started out wanting to know how science works, how it gives such unlikely and counter-intuitive insights into the natural world. Was it method, genius ... getting in touch with reality?
Images of Argument
Here's an answer in a Graphic. The Cambridge mathematician William Thomson showed a transatlantic telegraph cable was possible and helped design one. By the 1860s telegraphic news was part of Imperial management, and shaping investment in global markets like Indigo. The Money Market Review on the left shows how mathematics and popular capitalism were linked. Indeed, the Poynting Vector was soon used by electricians to accelerate telegraphic traffic around Britain's Imperial network (shown in red circa 1900).
I wanted to write about the place of science in global history, but wouldn't that mean technology and medicine too? And what about race and gender and capital? How to tackle a topic that big? At that time British academics were being pressed to do something called 'public engagement,' make their work accessible to non-experts.
My organic portrait of undergraduate study in Cambridge, united the history of mathematics with that of institutions, sport, science, the body, education and examination. It appeared as Masters of Theory, with University of Chicago Press in 2003.
How did Poynting join the club? I took an idea from the sociology and anthropology of scientific knowledge: science isn't beyond culture, it's a culture of its own. I wrote a history to show what kind of culture it was, how it made technical expertise
That was the early 1980s when my field – history of physics – could be caricatured like this: a monument to the Enlightenment; an archive of concepts and equations celebrating special European men. Here is an example, J.H.Poynting deriving his eponymous Vector in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1884. It's a neat proof for initiates, incomprehensible to anyone else
Maybe I'd square both circles by writing a series of thrillers where the central character lived the history I wanted to portray. Could pulp-fiction be an historical method, a different take on Imperial history? I'd need a fresh voice. Thanks to the work of Ranajit Guha, I found the Santal people and their rebellion - what they called the 'Hool' - against British misrule in India in 1855. Here was an alternative to a history told almost entirely by the Imperial rulers, the British East India Company.
The Company used history to justify its rule, as shown in William Hunter's Annals of Rural Bengal of 1868. Hunter, a Company magistrate, criticized its failures and told the story of Bengal's native people rather than imperial leaders. As he put it, "The silent millions who bear our yoke have found no annalist." He wrote the first account of the Santal's customs and language, and of the 1855 Hool led by Sidhu and Kanhu Murmu.
Hunter's criticism of Company failures was actually a defense of its right to exploit other cultures. He described the nomadic Santal as a 'driven out' people, 'lapsed' from a higher state, nothing but a 'pest' until they farmed for Company profit. When they rebelled, Hunter said this 'half-tamed highlander' returned to his 'savage nature'. No matter Company soldiers slaughtered ten thousand Santal archers with Enfield rifles.
In 2016 when a Bangladesh sugar mill took some of their land by force, the Santal fought armed police with bows and arrows as they had in 1855. As the Bangladesh Daily Star reported in 2020, three were shot dead, their homes torched and the land fenced off with barbed wire. A similar event occurred over the border in India in 2018 to build a power station.
The Santal have fought to preserve their traditional way of life against the industrializing world of free-trade capitalism championed in the British Empire. The profound tensions between these visions the past, present and future, animate the imagination and adventures Hyder Khan. With a foot in both camps he's caught in the crucible of our modernity.
