1/2 idea No. 3: Auto UK

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

A book pitch (can be thought of, literally, as an elevator pitch):

National history privileges human agents, whether they be monarchs and politicians of Traditional History or the poor and marginalised of social history. But agency is distributed, and always has been. What would the history of a nation look like if distributed, mechanical agencies were placed at the centre? Auto UK is a long history of mechanised decision-making and rule-following, of things that move, act, decide and change, and together make a place within which we live and work. It would also explain why some people have power and some do not.

What would Auto UK include?

It might start with Matthew Boulton’s invitation to study: “I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER” or with his Albion Mills, the steam-powered flour mill built in Southwark in 1786 and burned to the ground five years later by revolutionary millers; it would take in a long history of automated production, not least the cycles of panics over automated unemployment (1950s, 201os).

It would tell the stories of automated distribution and communication. This 1921 map of telephone repeater stations is an image of one kind of Auto UK coming into being. Each repeater station moves, acts, decides and changes how and where we could talk.

It would discuss automated railway barriers of the 1950s, car license plate recognition systems of the 1970s as well as facial recognition systems of the 2020s.

It would wonder why an automatic door (see picture) installed at the Science Museum in 1933 was opened half a million times.

It would never lose sight of human interests, while not putting them at the centre. Afterall, machines make history but not in circumstances of their own making.

It would channel the spirit of two extraordinary books, Humphrey Jennings’ Pandaemonium and Sigfried Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command, while imitating neither.

It would consider, but reject, the title Autonation.

It would welcome a complementary study of animal agency.