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This book examines the role of experts and expertise in the dynamics of globalisation since the mid-nineteenth century. It shows how engineers, scientists and other experts have acted as globalising agents, providing many of the materials and institutional means for world economic and technical integration. Focusing on the study of international connections, Technology and Globalisation illustrates how expert practices have shaped the political economies of interacting countries, entire regions and the world economy.
This title brings together a range of approaches and topics across different regions, transcending nationally-bounded historical narratives. Each chapter deals with a particular topic that places expert networks at the centre of the history of globalisation. The contributors concentrate on central themes including intellectual property rights, technology transfer, tropical science, energy production, large technological projects, technical standards and colonial infrastructures. Many also consider methodological, theoretical and conceptual issues.
List of contents
Chapter 1. Technological Encounters: Locating Experts in the History of Globalisation.- Chapter 2. The Historical Roots of Modern Bridges: China Engineers as Global Actors.- Chapter 3.- Indigenous Resistance and the Technological Imperative: From Chemistry in Birmingham to Camphor Wars in Formosa, 1860s-1914.- Chapter 4. Global Engineers: Professional Trajectories of the Graduates of the École des arts et manufactures (1830s-1920s).- Chapter 5. Re-designing Africa: Railways and Globalisation in the Era of the New Imperialism.- Chapter 6. The Global Rise of Patent Expertise during the Late Nineteenth Century.- Chapter 7. Networks of American Experts in the Caribbean: The Harvard Botanic Station in Cuba (1898-1930).- Chapter 8. Hector Vera: Breaking Global Standards: The Anti-Metric Crusade of American Engineer.- Chapter 9. Statistics as Service to Democracy: Experimental Design and the Dutiful American Scientist.- Chapter 10. The bona fide contracts: An Engineering Company in Wartime Shanghai, 1937-1945.- Chapter 11. Dutch Irrigation Engineers and Their (Post-) Colonial Irrigation Networks.- Chapter 12. Engineers and Scientist as Commercial Agents of the Spanish Nuclear Program.- Chapter 13. Engineers' Diplomacy: The South American Petroleum Institute, 1941-1950s.- Chapter 14. Epilogue: Technology's Activists and Global Dynamics.
About the author
David Pretel is Research Fellow at the Centre for Historical Studies, Colmex, The College of Mexico, Mexico. He specialises in the global history of technology, international economic history and the intellectual history of capitalism, with an ever-increasing interest in Latin American history.
Lino Camprubí is Research Fellow at the Center for the History of Science, UAB Barcelona, Spain. He has been a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany, and a visiting lecturer at University of Chicago, USA.
Summary
- Define 'engineers' more broadly than the narrow definition typical of the present-day profession
- Study all social actors since the mid-nineteenth century with expertise and social authority in technology and science
- Examine the political dimensions of technology
- Offers a history of science perspective on economic globalisation
