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Résumé
This dissertation is a comparative-historical analysis that critically examines the factors shaping the origins and development of scientific capacity in the United States and Great Britain. As the pace of scientific discovery accelerated in the nineteenth century, the resource demands of scientific research fundamentally changed. Despite a growing recognition of the importance of science for a nation's continued development, the state's assumption of the responsibility for pushing science forward was not automatic. It was the United States federal government that became the leading patron, organizer, and graduate school of the nineteenth century, while the British Government continued to follow liberal principles of limited government action. The main question that guides this dissertation is, "How did the nineteenth-century patronage state develop a robust scientific policy agenda and erect a complex organizational structure that became the model for the world?" The organizational structure and scientific success of the United States, I argue, was the result of scientific administrators in the federal government who used uncharacteristically high levels of autonomy and independent policymaking power to construct a network of public-private connections to scientific actors and institutions around the nation. In Great Britain, by contrast, scientists operating in the bureaucracy were relegated to low positions with little policy influence. Science policy in both the United States and Great Britain confronted significant resistance to centralized and purely public undertakings, and it was only in the United States that scientists in the bureaucracy had the strength to independently develop a robust policy agenda. The cases examined are the United States Coast Survey, the United States Geological Survey, the Geological Survey of Great Britain, and various scientific activities in Great Britain that correspond to the primary duties of the United States Coast Survey.
