Governing Systems

"The value of the book lies in its impressive command of detail."  * Journal of Modern History *

"Crook has done much... [his] fine book gives me hope that historians will come back to (or, more properly, discover for the first time) a kind of research immensely important to the understanding of the present and the recent past, and long neglected."

* Reviews in History *
"This book should inspire a good debate in the urban history and the public health subfield over Crook’s argument for a revolutionary discourse of systems." * American Historical Review *
"Crook presents a sophisticated new interpretation of the English route to modernity... this is a very stimulating book that takes a series of traditional urban history debates and casts them in a very different light, both renaming and re-thinking many of the old problems." * Social History of Medicine *
"Tom Crook has produced something of a tour de force, finding an original take on a subject already much traversed by accomplished scholars such as Anne Hardy and Christopher Hamlin. The result is a pleasure to read: the writing lyrical and lucid, and the text moving easily between theoretical frames and rich empirical exposition." * Cultural and Social History *

"A fascinating proposal of how to study technological systems in the nineteenth century."

  * Technology and Culture *