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Basic questions The word ‘resistance’ has become unsuitable for use in the context of new technology. The allegation is that it serves mainly to blame those who resist; talking about resistance implies a managerial and technocratic bias. However, in developing the idea for this conference, I was confident that ‘resistance’ would prove ambiguous in meaning and rich in connotations, particularly in the European context. Historians of technology recently rediscovered ‘resistance’ as a ‘force’ that shapes technology which requires an adequate analysis (Mokyr 1990, 1992). For the economist resistance is basically the vested interests of old capital in ideas, skills and machinery. In addition, in the light of the critique of the ‘Whiggish’ historiography of technology (Staudenmaier 1985), it seems reasonable to lift ‘resistance’ from the dustbin of history. Artefacts such as machines, power stations, computers, telephones, broadcasts and genetically engineered tomatoes, and the practice of their production, handling, marketing and use – in other words, technological innovations – are not the only factors of historical change. Technological determinism seems an inadequate account of our history. Various social activities give form to processes and products, facilitate their diffusion and mitigate their consequences. However, technology is not neutral. It creates opportunities and simultaneously constrains human activity. We experience the latter as being paced by ‘machines’ rather than controlling them. The selection of options is not neutral; it is likely to be contested and in need of legitimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The development of a multinational regulatory framework for biotechnology during the past twenty years provides an unparalleled opportunity to study the processes by which technological advances overcome public resistance and are incorporated into a receptive social context. Through the vehicle of regulation, states provide assurance that the risks of new technologies can be contained within manageable bounds. Procedures are devised to limit uncertainty, channel the flow of future public resistance, and define the permissible modalities of dissent. Regulation, in these respects, becomes integral to the shaping of technology. A regulated technology encompasses more than simply the ‘knowledge of how to fulfill certain human purposes in a specifiable and reproducible way.’ Regulation transmutes such instrumental knowledge into a cultural resource; it is a kind of social contract that specifies the terms under which state and society agree to accept the costs, risks and benefits of a given technological enterprise. The passage of biotechnology from moratorium to market in just twenty years exemplifies this process of social accommodation. During this period, biotechnology moved from a research programme that aroused misgivings even among its most ardent advocates to a flourishing industry promising revolutionary benefits in return for negligible and easily controlled risks. The transformation occurred almost simultaneously and with remarkable speed throughout Europe and North America. To facilitate the commercialization of biotechnology, the United States, and the European Community and several of its member states, adopted laws and regulations to control not only laboratory research with genetically engineered organisms but also their purposeful release into the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regulators' attempts to balance conflicting interests and to convert the public's and politicians' feelings about technology into coherent action have fascinated students of industrial policy (Rothwell & Zegveld 1981; Grant 1989). By contrast historians, though in principle sharing such interests, have tended to treat regulators either as external brakes or as lubricants in processes controlled more directly by market forces and technological logic. Thus historians' interest in the chemical industry which gave rise to studies of companies and processes has not engendered a corresponding corpus of works on such regulatory bodies as the FDA or Britain's Alkali Inspectorate (see the still unmatched study of DuPont: Hounshell & Smith 1988). Now, however, with a new interest in technological systems, we are acquiring a few historical case-studies from modern industrial society in which regulators have themselves been considered central parts of the process, acting, so to speak, as components of the engine itself. In particular, historians are now investigating policies which, since the 1930s, and latterly during the Cold War, encouraged the development of such state sponsored technologies as synthetic rubber, computing and semiconductors used by the space and military industries. The support of such academic categories as scientific instruments and cancer research is also being elucidated. Rarely, nonetheless, is regulation yet seen as a whole: promoters of new technology have still been conceptually divorced from those responsible for its constraint and from those responsible for the protection of the public and of workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dunwich had been falling into the North Sea for centuries. By the 1690s, the once bustling borough was a quiet backwater. But Dunwich had a long, proud history of incorporation, and controlling the corporation meant controlling the choice of two members of the House of Commons. For a handful of residents and Suffolk gentlemen, Dunwich politics proved worthy of the most strenuous efforts. Like the ocean eating away at the sandy bluffs on Dunwich's shore, events of the 1680s crashed again and again on the corporation, leaving nothing but wreckage behind by late 1688. Though the corporation decided to fight the quo warranto brought against them in 1684, they soon thought better of it and surrendered their charter to Charles II and gained a new one not long after he died. According to the power given him by that charter, James II purged most of the new body in 1688. Then, because Dunwich's was one of the few surrenders enrolled in Chancery, it did not benefit from James's proclamation of October 17, 1688, which restored most of England's corporations to their earlier condition. Instead, in one of his last acts as King, James made a special order for Dunwich, dismissing those he had appointed there earlier in the year, and commanding the pre-surrender corporation to reconstitute itself. This they did, and by year's end, it looked as if Dunwich had recovered its fragile status quo ante. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Berwick endured a more painful reincorporation than most. Military leaders in that strategic border town, eager to enforce the laws against dissent with more severity, had long sought to control the corporation. Hopes of doing so by a quo warranto or a commission of association in 1681 and 1683 had come to nothing. But by October 1684, it looked as if local garrison commanders had won over enough of the corporation to gain their ends, though many still resisted, as Chief Justice Jeffreys learned from his informants there: “[They are] resolved to stand trial with the King about their charter; but forty-five of the most loyal of them will by Colonel Widdrington, our lieutenant governor, petition your Lordship to speak with his majesty that since they have always protested against and opposed the factious party, they may not be involved in the common name.” To help “the loyal party,” the attorney general served quo warranto to compel the intransigent to join them in surrender. Still, a majority voted defiance; these “dissenters” then prepared to answer the King's information, taking counsel with none other than London's lawyer, Henry Pollexfen. But he and John Holt, another prominent lawyer, advised conceding their charter as it would certainly be lost by the quo warranto, with worse consequences. Again the corporation voted, now capitulating by a majority of six. The mayor lay the charter at Charles's feet and kissed his hand on January 23, 1685. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]