Scenes from the National Museum of Scotland, Part the First

18 July 2012, 1500 EDT

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I didn’t find it terribly surprising that Scotland’s National Museum presents the industrial revolution as an important component of Scottish national identity. After all, what better way to combat the anti-Pict stereotypes peddled in such racially insensitive works as Brave than to present the Scottish people as industrious and innovative by nature? Because that in no way would ever contribute to offensive stereotypes, now would it?

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Still, the museum’s example of a Jacquard Loom blew me away. It employs what are recognizable as punchcards to weave a pattern. Indeed, a cursory internet search makes clear that such devices are precursors of modern programming; their punchcards directly influenced Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine. Fiat Steampunk!

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.