For geologists and antiquaries of the late 1850s debates over ancient stone tools were frustrated by a lack of accepted criteria. The artefacts were hard to interpret. It was not self-evident how to judge whether they were ancient or modern, natural or man-made; or indeed whether stone tools could pre-date the use of metal tools at all. Antiquary and papermaker John Evans provided a system that offered to resolve these issues. His criteria and his use of re-enactment, making his own stone implements, gained acceptance among flint experts across fluid disciplinary boundaries and enabled authoritative interpretations of the underdetermined objects. This paper explores how Evans drew on the concerns of his industrial culture to make sense of prehistoric artefacts and support his claim to access the past through his own actions. Situated industrial concerns provided the resources for his flint work: from a patent dispute with astronomer and fellow industrialist Warren de la Rue, through his role in the Victorian arms trade, to the struggle to displace skilled manual labour in his factories. Evans is remembered for pioneering the techniques and classificatory system of modern Palaeolithic archaeology and as one of the founders of the re-enactment science of experimental flint knapping. His work played a significant role in helping reconceive the antiquity of man, yet the system of proof for this grand claim was deeply situated in his industrial culture. This paper explores how the industrial resources of a Victorian papermaker made human history.

In the stores of the British Museum are three exquisite springs, made in the late 1820s and 1830s, to regulate the most precise timepieces in the world. Barely the thickness of a hair, they are exquisite because they are made entirely of glass. Combining new documentary evidence, funded by the Antiquarian Horological Society, with the first technical analysis of the springs, undertaken in collaboration with the British Museum, the research presented here uncovers their extraordinary significance to the global extension of nineteenth century capitalism through the repeal of the Corn Laws. In the 1830s and 1840s the Astronomer Royal, George Biddell Airy; the Hydrographer to the Admiralty, Francis Beaufort; and the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, collaborated with the virtuoso chronometer-maker, Edward John Dent, to mobilize the specificity of particular forms of glass, the salience of the Glass Tax, and the significance of state standards, as means to reform. These protagonists looked to glass and its properties to transform the fiscal military state into an exquisitely regulated machine with the appearance of automation and the gloss of the free-trade liberal ideal. Surprising but significant connections, linking Newcastle mobs to tales of Cinderella and the use of small change, demonstrate why historians must attend to materials and how such attention exposes claims to knowledge, the interests behind such claims, and the impact they have had upon the design and architecture of the modern world. Through the pivotal role of glass, this paper reveals the entangled emergence of state and market capitalism, and how the means of production was transformed in vitreous proportions.

By the early decades of the nineteenth century, with surveys established as the weapon of choice for the fiscal military state, their instrumentation provided a focal point for radical attacks on political establishments. This paper considers a notorious dispute over mastery of iron in the instrumentation of magnetic surveying that took place in the 1830s between an Admiralty committee and the Reverend William Scoresby, a whaler-turned-clergyman. Scoresby staked his claim by drawing on the labour law of the whaleboats, a culture peculiarly preoccupied with the properties of bone and blubber, ink and skin, parchment and iron, where magnetism was forged in the ‘combinations’, as Scoresby put it, of such specific materials. The enterprises of his most avid reader, peer and fellow labour rights activist, Herman Melville, showcase the salience of Scoresby's struggle with Admiralty authority. The eminent Australian scholar Greg Dening's approach to ethnohistory proves the appropriate instrument with which to analyse such an encounter between traditions, negotiated through material forms. In the fraught exchange between whaler and maritime state, the combination laws that helped prompt the threat of revolution in early nineteenth-century Britain were translated into Scoresby's iron. Extant material and archival collections in Greenwich and Whitby offer traces of a battle between ways of knowing this protean metal: ‘not down in any map; true places never are’.

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