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Methods/Theory
and the pursuit of economic growth and economic pro-
ductivity in the postWorld War II era (Charles Maier),
though unfortunately Philipsen does not directly engage
or cite any of these scholars.
Though few of his criticisms are new, his volume nicely
summarizes and articulates GDPs flaws. Philipsens
book, however, raises questions for historians. For one, a
key claim of Philipsens book is that GDP has spanned
the world and reshaped how societies define and pursue
their development. But Philipsens historical analysis
largely ends with the standardization of national income
accounting in the 1950s. So, how did GDP take off across
the world? The author might have examined how GDP
shaped specific development strategies and the extent to
which thinking in terms of GDP translated to actions on
the ground. Moreover, there were many critics of GDP
and its use from the metrics inception. Philipsen ac-
knowledges Kuznetss early warnings, but from the 1940s
onward there were extensive international conflicts about
how to standardize national income accounting, what
GDP should include, and whether non-Western coun-
tries should rely on GDP. Why did GDP, as currently de-
fined, triumph in those conflicts? In addition, Philipsen
criticizes the logic of GDP, which is a vague way of im-
puting tremendous power to a metric. At times, it seems
he argues against much more: the economics discipline,
economic reasoning, neoliberalism, rising inequality, and
economic growth based on fossil fuels, to name a few.
Thinking in terms of GDP (the logic of countries trying
to raise GDP) may exacerbate each of these separate is-
sues, but Philipsen might have done more to connect and
explain how GDP relates to the origins and evolution of
these other trends.
In sum, this book nicely summarizes the many critiques
of GDP. Philipsens knowledge of economic theory, sta-
tistics, econometric accounting, and history is impressive.
It is hard not to conclude after reading the book that
there are very serious flaws in the way that many people
measure, define, and seek to pursue economic growth.
While it would have benefited from greater historical
analysis of the post-1945 world, it offers many insights
that should encourage undergraduates to rethink many
basic assumptions about contemporary economic life and
better understand why reliance on the big little number
should worry us all.
STEPHEN MACEKURA
Indiana University, Bloomington
ORIT HALPERN. Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and
Reason since 1945. (Experimental Futures.) Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. ix, 342. Cloth
$99.95, paper $27.95.
How has a rhetoric of beautiful (elegant in the mathe-
matical sense as well as the graphical) data come to have
potent ideological force in the last sixty years? Orit Hal-
pern suggests that aestheticization has played a crucial
role in legitimizing data visualization and graphical
modes of reasoning since 1945. She argues that techno-
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
537
logical transformations have changed vision research as
artificial intelligence altered our conception of bodies,
brains, and the management of culture. She attributes
these changes in part to the proliferation of intellectual
activity built on diagrammatic and schematic visualiza-
tion across a wide variety of disciplines (cybernetics, de-
sign and systems theory, computational processes, and
statistical thinking).
Halpern selects an array of figures in city planning,
government data management, and other activities to
consider the general shift in the relationship between the
terms vision and reason in her subtitle. The examples
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are indisputably significant. Charles and Ray Eames
were crucial to mid-twentieth-century design (broadly
understood as a set of analytic principles, not merely im-
plementation techniques). Their canonical works are still
cited as approaches to thinking about issues of scale, pat-
tern, project, and form. They extended the early-twenti-
eth-century formalist language of graphics (with their
roots in abstract art and later applied aesthetics epito-
mized by the Bauhaus curriculum in the 1920s and
1930s) into broad theoretical and practical application.
Norbert Wieners wartime research in cybernetics had a
widespread impact on the development of feedback
mechanisms integral to smart systems in many do-
mains. In the 1940s, Warren S. McCulloch and Walter
Pitts engineered the first experiments in neural networks,
which were meant to bootstrap responses in electrical cir-
cuits into emergent capacities. In second-order cybernet-
ics their work has been incorporated into the design of
complex systems. These figures contributed research that
combined new models of intelligence with engineering
capacities augmented by computational systems to pro-
duce the systems that are an integral part of constructing
(intellectually as well as literally) our contemporary
world.
The book begins with a chilling description of the city
of Songdo, Korea, designed from the ground up as a
data-driven and data-producing environment. In a land-
scape where bandwidth and sustainability are fantasized
as organizing life through a proliferation of interfaces to
the point of ubiquity a government-corporate partner-
ship monitors every aspect of existence: traffic flows,
changes in atmosphere, every social and financial trans-
action, streets, windows, homes, and smokestacks (4). As
Halpern points out, the promotional rhetoric of such
projects is shot through with valorizations of this fully
intelligent system as an elegant solution to manage-
ment and control in the twenty-first century. Her obser-
vation of Songdo leads to a crucial question: [H]ow did
perception, understood as a capacity to consume band-
width, come to reorganize life itself? (5).
As studies in reformulation of observation and knowl-
edge (17), Halperns chapters examine four aspects of
current culture as outcomes of the historical connections
between technical developments and artistic practices
(both broadly construed). Her first study concerns cy-
bernetics and temporality; the second, attention and dis-
traction conceived in relation to visualization; the third,
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538 Reviews of Books
rationalization of cognition; and the last, a notion of
biopolitical governance tied to statistical and data man-
agement. Halpern puts many concepts into play. She
qualifies both vision and reason as areas of research,
of lived physical perception, and of studies in cognition,
and as metaphors for the organization of knowledge.
Concepts this large can be unwieldy, and hard to link to
specific historical events. For instance, at the beginning
of chapter 3, Halpern suggests that the postwar realiza-
tion that rationality was not reasonable has vanished
from the cultural record (148). But has it? The intellec-
tual traditions of skepticism on which she draws have
long and persistent histories. In the last half century, sus-
picion of reason and rationality has long been the norm
in communities of critical design practice, poetics, aes-
thetics, visual art, digital media studies, and cultural stud-
ies, especially among the scholars who provide Halperns
intellectual framework (e.g., Michel Foucault, Lisa Gitel-
man, N. Katherine Hayles, Brian Massumi, etc.).
The books main argument, however, focuses on
changes in cultural values and ideology. For example, she
proposes that the cybernetic reformulation of reason
produced new forms of measurement and methods in the
social and behavioral sciences, encouraging a shift toward
data-driven research adjoined to a valorization of visual-
ization as the benchmark of truth, and as a moral and
democratic virtue (148). In a move typical of Halperns
approach, she claims this chapter is not a theory of psy-
chosis but rather a historical investigation into the cyber-
netic relationship to temporality that suggests that cyber-
netic concerns with how time would be organized in
circuits was fundamental to the reformulation of intelli-
gence as rational and produced a new epistemology of
pragmatic behavioralism, embodied and affective logic,
and nonliberal agents that continue to inform contempo-
rary practices in fields ranging from neuroscience to ma-
chine learning to finance (148). This is a lot to juggle.
Causal connections between technological innovation
and cultural change are hard to prove. The connection
between data-driven research and the development of di-
agrammatic instruments for intellectual work in sche-
matic visual documents for planning, design, or other re-
search is neither direct nor instrumental. The schematic
drawings used for circuits, traffic flows, organizational
systems, or data structures were not invented in the post-
1945 period any more than statistics and political arith-
metic. They all have long histories. Despite very few in-
novations in graphical expressions in the last decades, the
interest in visualizing processes and making non-visible
aspects of cultural experience legible through graphic
form has expanded exponentially. The consumability of
eye-candy-like, data-driven visualizations that appear in
public art, private galleries, and published compendia is
evidence of their seductive success as ideological instru-
ments. Halpern wants us to reflect upon the implications
of such aesthetic legitimation and ways we might resist
the force of data displays that are integrated into the
management infrastructure of technologized culture.
JOHANNA DRUCKER
University of California, Los Angeles
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Cadmus A
COMPARATIVE/WORLD/TRANSNATIONAL
PEDRO MACHADO. Ocean of Trade: South Asian Mer-
chants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 17501850. New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. xv, 315.
$79.00.
Pedro Machados Ocean of Trade: South Asian Mer-
chants, Africa and the Indian Ocean, c. 17501850 is an
in-depth study of the commercial world of the Bania
(Vaniya) maritime merchants of Diu and Daman (ports
on the Gujarat coast) in a period that is generally under-
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stood in the literature as that of European imperial and
commercial domination and in which indigenous South
Asian networks of trade were greatly undermined by or
subordinated to a European-dominated capitalist world
economy. Divided into five chapters, an introduction that
sets the historiographical context for this study, and a
brief conclusion summing up the main arguments, the
book challenges this conventional view and calls for a
more nuanced understanding of the history of the Indian
Ocean world economy and the interaction of colonial-im-
perial and indigenous structures of trade within it. Ma-
chado explores the dynamics of the flourishing Bania
maritime trade between Diu and Daman and Mozam-
bique from 1750 to 1850. This trade was based on the ex-
change of Gujarati textiles for African ivory and slaves.
The book underscores the centrality of Bania merchants
and Gujarati textiles in the Mozambique-based maritime
trade of the southwestern Indian Ocean. Cotton textile
from Gujarat, Machado argues, served as a currency in
the East African economies, and all commercial transac-
tions were mediated by it. What contributed to the pre-
dominance and success of the Banias in this trade was
their access to textile production centers of Gujarat, es-
pecially Jambusar, and to the capital and credit markets
of Surat. By controlling the supply and distribution of
Gujarati textiles in coastal East Africa and the hinter-
lands, the merchants played a crucial role in the regions
export trade, and also secured supplies of ivory and
slaves, for which there was a substantial demand in Guja-
rat and western India. Machado examines the nature and
structure of GujaratEast Africa trade and highlights the
role of family and community networks and contracts
and partnerships with the African and Portuguese mer-
chants in the successful commercial enterprise of the
Banias. The Banias predominance in this trade, how-
ever, ended by the 1840s when the slave trade declined
and a shortage of tusk reduced the ivory trade. Moreover,
the role that the Gujarati Bania merchants of Diu and
Daman had formerly played was then taken over by
another group of merchants, the Bhatias of Kuchh and
Kathiawar in north western Gujarat.
Ocean of Trade is as much a book on East Africa and
its maritime trading world as it is on Gujarat and the
Banias. About half of the book (especially chapters 4 and
5) is devoted to East Africas export economy. Here again
the author examines the complex web of coastal and
trans-regional trade and the involvement of American,
Portuguese, African, Arab, and Gujarati Bania merchants
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