Capital Científica: Práticas da Ciência em Lisboa e a História Contemporânea de Portugal [Scientific capital: Science practices in Lisbon and the contemporary history of Portugal] ed. by Tiago Saraiva and Marta Macedo (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Capital Científica: Práticas da Ciência em Lisboa e a História Contemporânea de Portugal [Scientific capital: Science practices in Lisbon and the contemporary history of Portugal] ed. by Tiago Saraiva and Marta Macedo
• M. Luísa Sousa (bio)

Capital Científica: Práticas da Ciência em Lisboa e a História Contemporânea de Portugal [Scientific capital: Science practices in Lisbon and the contemporary history of Portugal] Edited by Tiago Saraiva and Marta Macedo. Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2019. Pp. 410.

This volume brings together contributions from eleven authors in ten chapters, based on research carried out over the last twenty years, and reflects the development and maturity of the field of STM history in Portugal. The editors hope that it will serve as a model for urban histories of STM in other territories. Covering the period from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century, the authors focus on eighteen scientific institutions to analyze how urban problems inspired the framing of STM problems and how the knowledge they produced shaped the city materially, socially, and symbolically (and vice versa). The book is in Portuguese, but parts of it have been published in English, some in this journal.

In this volume, "science" is understood in a broad sense, including technology and medicine (p. 28). More than a simplification, this reflects another methodological and historiographical contribution: it goes beyond the monodisciplinary approaches more common in urban histories of STM by bringing together different disciplines and looking at urban scientific institutions such as laboratories; technical workshops; industrial, bacteriological, and biomedical institutes; astronomical observatories; formal and informal universities; and hospitals. Analyzing the blueprints of these buildings shows how STM practices constructed spaces within and around STM institutions and changed the form (and spread) of the city.

The interest in interweaving the making of Lisbon as a political and scientific capital is present in the way the book is structured: it has three parts, divided chronologically according to the periodization of political regimes in contemporary Portugal. The first part, covering roughly the period from 1837 to 1910, has two chapters (1 and 4) that deal with the influence of Saint-Simonianism in technical education at different levels (from artisan to engineer) in three institutions (the Polytechnic School, the Army School, and the Industrial Institute), as well as the importance of the development of credit systems, capitalism, dreams of social emancipation, and romantic sensibilities, all seen through the lens of the place-based practices of STM. The development of disciplines such as astronomy and geology, and their services and practices, are discussed in chapters 3 and 4, which show their contribution to the design and government of the nation's territory and infrastructures. If the period of the "Regeneration" governments (1851–65, part of the Constitutional Monarchy, 1820–1910) was a period dominated [End Page 750] by engineers, through a policy of "material improvements" based on infrastructures, in the First Republic (1910–26)—dealt with in the second part of the volume—doctors were the dominant experts, with their agendas to reverse what was perceived as the "degeneration" of the country through the treatment of the people's bodies and minds, asserting the importance of laboratories for republican values (chs. 5 and 6). The extension projects to bring STM to the people, developed during the First Republic through the Popular and Free Universities (ch. 7), couldn't resist the authoritarian and state-corporatist drive of the Estado Novo dictatorship (1933–74). The third part of the volume deals with this dictatorship and shows how experts (engineers, doctors, and scientists) and the regime mutually benefited from each other, as demonstrated in studies of the National Laboratory of Civil Engineering and the Laboratory of Physics and Nuclear Engineering (chs. 8 and 10), and in the buildings and STM practices of the Technical Superior (Engineering) and the Portuguese Oncology institutes (chs. 8 and 9).

The volume highlights the importance and methodological advantages of crossing STM and urban histories: the coproduction of space and knowledge; how urban problems channeled resources to develop STM solutions (also applicable to the nation); and capturing lesser-known histories of STM in "peripheral" cities...