The history of the computer is entwined with that of the modern world and with the life of one man, the brilliant but troubled Alan Turing. How did the computer come to structure and dominate our lives so totally? In Jon Agar's enlightening story of the `universal machine', we discover how Turing's groundbreaking work not only helped break German codes during the Second World War but also founded the beginnings of the modern computer. Persecuted by the authorities for his homosexuality, and ultimately hounded to suicide, Turing's personal tribulations are as relevant to the modern world as his work on computing, as indicated by his posthumous royal pardon of 2013 and the recent film The Imitation Game, which focuses on Turing's turbulent life.

An examination of technology and politics in the evolution of the British "government machine." In The Government Machine, Jon Agar traces the mechanization of government work in the United Kingdom from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. He argues that this transformation has been tied to the rise of "expert movements," groups whose authority has rested on their expertise. The deployment of machines was an attempt to gain control over state action-a revolutionary move. Agar shows how mechanization followed the popular depiction of government as machine-like, with British civil servants cast as components of a general purpose "government machine"; indeed, he argues that today's general purpose computer is the apotheosis of the civil servant. Over the course of two centuries, government has become the major repository and user of information; the Civil Service itself can be seen as an information-processing entity. Agar argues that the changing capacities of government have depended on the implementation of new technologies, and that the adoption of new technologies has depended on a vision of government and a fundamental model of organization. Thus, to study the history of technology is to study the state, and vice versa.