Fiscal Chemistry: Uncertain Substances and the Fortunes of Science in the Age of Empire and Industry

In September 1842 a merchant ship called the Countess of Arran docked at the English port of Liverpool. Included in its cargo logged at the Customs House were 18 casks of naphtha – roughly speaking, methanol – being imported from a New York manufactory. Local officials were suspicious of such a low-value import, so they sent a sample down to London. There the chemist and prominent scientific pugilist Andrew Ure subjected it to analysis. Ure’s conclusion was unequivocal: the cargo was not naphtha at all, but a highly alcoholic solution that could readily be distilled to produce gin. Were this kind of fraud to be allowed, Ure warned, then a flood of illicit alcohol would sweep the country, and the government’s revenue, which still relied heavily on excise duties, would suffer a grievous injury. It was an emphatic demonstration of the value of the new profession of analytical chemistry. True “fiscal chemistry,” Ure announced, must take its place as an essential bulwark of the empire’s economic and moral security. Unfortunately for Ure, however, almost no other chemist agreed with him. The ship’s owners were able to recruit a cohort of prominent experts to declare the substance genuine and Ure’s analysis spurious. The ensuing clash spiraled into a scientific conflict that lasted for years, pitting the reputations of individual chemists against each other, but more importantly casting claims of scientific knowledge, objectivity, authority, and even competence into doubt. It did so in some of the leading venues of the emerging industrial nation: parliament, the institutions of science, the law-courts, and the press. The struggle became profoundly consequential for the shaping of a science dedicated to identifying and authenticating the substances on which that industrial nation relied. Because of that, it helped define the place of science in liberal society.