History and Technology最新文献

{"title":"Editors’ note","authors":"A. Slaton, Tiago Saraiva","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1695444","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1695444","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue represents the first half of a collaboration between History+Technology and the Journal of the History of Biology. JHB co-editor Karen Rader has guest edited this issue of H + T, and in the coming months we will in turn present a set of articles in a special issue of JHB. The editors of both journals are excited to test the possibility that challenging familiar topical commitments can bring new criticality to all. As we see it, this collaboration does more than historicize the engineering/science binary. Rather, it suggests that these two categories themselves enact historical projects like resource extraction, capitalism, socialism, the making of states, the making of life. When practical endeavors generally seen as ‘engineering’ are demarcated analytically from conceptual processes seen as ‘scientific discovery’ or ‘-research’ those historical projects, and their social origins and impacts, are easily obscured. To make histories of technology and biology–in all their institutional, political, material and corporeal expressions–accountable to one another is, we think, to make them accountable to history more generally. Finally, not least among our reasons for swapping editorial labor in this way: we are thrilled to bring the readers of H + T a sampling of JHB’s ambitious analytical reach, and later, to introduce JHB readers to the historiographic aims, and disruptions, ofH + T. We hope to see these two special issues shared widely within and beyond their familiar disciplinary homes, yielding new audiences, and new questions, for both.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73343430","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Trypanosomiasis, tropical medicine, and the practices of inter-colonial research at Lake Victoria, 1902-07","authors":"M. Webel","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1680151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1680151","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT As sleeping sickness appeared in epidemics across Africa c. 1900, it stimulated a race among colonial medical personnel and Europe-based scientists to discover its causative pathogen, its mode of transmission, and, ideally, a cure. Scientists circulated between hubs of research in Europe and key field sites in Africa, monitoring each other’s progress and often maintaining long-term relationships colored by collaboration and competition. The Lake Victoria littoral was an epicenter of both significant mortality and important research before WWI. This article explores the intellectual implications of colonial connectivity at local scale, focusing on changing ideas about sleeping sickness, the communication of research strategies and methods, and the circumstances of life and research in this imperial hinterland and colonial borderland in eastern Africa. Exploring research dynamics around Lake Victoria illuminates the inadequacies of colonial scientific and medical capabilities and both the generative and limiting aspects that the contingencies of colonial research created.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90827345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Prison, plantation, and peninsula: colonial knowledge and experimental technique in the post-war Bataan Rice Enrichment Project, 1910–1950","authors":"T. Ventura","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1680153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1680153","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The 1946 Bataan Rice Enrichment Project illuminates the intimate connections between Euro-American empire, scientific nationalism, and post-war demonstration in the Philippines. The project was conducted by former American colonial chemist turned philanthropist Robert R. Williams, who sought to prove the efficacy of synthetic-thiamine fortified rice in the fight against beriberi. Yet by willfully exposing half of Bataan’s food scarce residents to beriberi, Williams effectively recreated the prisons and asylums that Euro-American researchers had used as living laboratories to induce beriberi in unwilling subjects. These ‘carceral laboratories’ were highly contested by the people imprisoned within and by nationalist Philippine physicians who understood deficiency disease as a symptom of colonialism. Returning the carceral laboratory to the making of nutritional science explains the post-war Philippine rejection of mandatory rice fortification and is a reminder that the Asian countryside was a creation of colonial modernity and a contested space long before the Cold War.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90756356","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Empires of knowledge: introduction","authors":"A. Jansen, J. Krige, Jessica Wang","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1680141","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1680141","url":null,"abstract":"From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the mobilization of knowledge as an adjunct to modern state power became essential to imperial projects worldwide. As traditional empires consolidated colonial rule by backing administrative legal structures with coercive policing and military force, they found that legitimacy also called for legibility. The gathering and creation of information about local custom and habit, indigenous structures of power and productive practices that could be ‘improved’, resources that could be exploited – such forms of knowledge facilitated governance, whether by engaging local elites in the colonial project, displacing and supplanting existing structures of political authority, extending systems of surveillance and control, or otherwise expanding the reach of imperial rule. Empires combined hard with soft power, producing a cohort of trained imperial agents in metropolitan institutions – universities, foundations, and, in the post-WorldWar II period, international organizations, think tanks –whose fieldwork aided the projection of power abroad. Our mutual interests in science, nation-building, the movement of knowledge, and the global dimensions of power (whether in national or colonial contexts, or the blurred boundaries between the two) have brought the editors of this special issue together to reflect upon the twentieth-century history of knowledge and empire. In particular, we take inter-imperial collaboration as our organizing theme, in order to explore the extent to which the global project of empire rested upon, and even required, interchange and joint action among colonial powers. As Anne L. Foster has noted, studies of imperialism have generally confined themselves to the colonizer-colonized dyad, and the scholarly literature has only just begun to consider the forms of collaboration between empires that shaped the age of high imperialism. This volume foregrounds inter-imperial relations as a framework for understanding global movements of science, technology, and expertise. It moves beyond our earlier concerns with nineteenth-century US nation-building, and twentieth-century nation-building worldwide, to engage in an ongoing reassessment of the place of the Cold War in our historical imagination, this time focused on the production, circulation, and inter-imperial sharing of expert knowledge at diverse sites from the late nineteenth century into the 1960s. Multiple forms of inter-imperial collaboration operated in tandem with the political rivalries that so often marked the Age of Empire. Imperial governments found that they","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86145816","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Advance agent of expanding empires: George F. Becker and mineral exploration in South Africa and the Philippines","authors":"Mark Hendrickson","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1680148","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1680148","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the late nineteenth century, American mining engineers and geologists fanned out to potential or existing mines around the world. This paper examines the work of George F. Becker—a forty-year veteran of the United States Geological Survey—in South Africa and the Philippines during the 1890s. Becker’s work on the world above and below ground provided a diverse audience with direct observations of attempted empire building underway and helped to reorganize the world of American imperial imagination in a way that used British experience in South Africa to explain and justify U.S. efforts to displace Spain in the Philippines. He derived his authority both from the knowledge he generated about minerals and geological formations underground and from the experience he garnered as one of the only Americans to observe these two empire building projects underway on two continents in this critical period of economic, political and foreign policy upheaval.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78569978","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"In search of El Dorado: U.S. experts and the promise of development in the Guayana region of Venezuela","authors":"Fred Schulze","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1694250","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1694250","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT When urban planners from MIT and Harvard University began to design a new city in Venezuela in 1961, euphoria soon gave way to a skeptical appraisal of urban planning. Unrealistic ambitions, inadequate implementation, social tensions, and diverging interests by US American und Venezuelan experts complicated the building of Ciudad Guayana. The evolving city did not live up to initial expectations and remained a work in progress. Tracing the many voices involved including critics within the American team, helps understand the dynamics, challenges, and limitations of knowledge transfers in 1960s modernization programs. Scientific planning knowledge proved an unstable and less powerful commodity than Americans had expected. Problems on the ground took the gloss off the Western hegemonic scientific repertoire. They led to an appropriation of knowledge by Venezuelan experts who harnessed their US American counterparts to advance their own political aims.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73545270","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Plants, insects, and the biological management of American empire: tropical agriculture in early twentieth-century Hawai‘i","authors":"Jessica Wang","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1680143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1680143","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In the early Twentieth Century officials from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s experiment station in Honolulu and the territorial government’s Board of Commissioners of Agriculture and Forestry contemplated the agricultural tasks that they faced, they sought nothing less than wholesale biological management of the islands. Seed and plant introductions represented efforts to oversee botanical possibility, while quarantine and inspection regimes sought to contain the threat of issnvasive species. When unwanted insect travelers thwarted human oversight, the territorial government dispatched entomologists to distant places, particularly in other colonial regions of the world, to gather parasites that might combat insect pests. The different efforts to manage the island ecosystem in Hawai‘i reflected not just the biological basis of territorial rule, but also its embeddedness in intra-imperial, inter-imperial, and international relationships.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85660736","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Streams of knowledge: river development knowledge and the TVA on the river Mekong","authors":"V. Lagendijk","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1680156","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1680156","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article revisits how plans for the development of the Southeast Asian river Mekong took the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) as a template. Existing literature focuses on the role of the United States administration, seeing their TVA-related activities as an internationalization of New Deal policies. This article, however, argues that the role of regional actors like the Mekong Committee, and of international organizations (IOs) such as the United Nations and the World Bank, was also essential. It shows that both regional actors as well as IOs cross-fertilized American knowledge with indigenous and colonial knowledge in plans for developing the Mekong.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90072272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The categorisation of hearing loss through telephony in inter-war Britain","authors":"Coreen Mcguire","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1652435","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1652435","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The telephone in inter-war Britain was an important tool in both the identification and categorisation of individual hearing loss. Between 1912 and 1981, the British Post Office had control over a nationalised telephone system. Linkage between telephony and hearing has long been noted by historians of sound and science, and Post Office engineers in the inter-war period had considerable expertise in both telecommunications and hearing assistive devices. This article first demonstrates how the inter-war Post Office categorised different kinds of hearing loss through standardizing the capacity of its users to engage effectively with the telephone, and secondly investigates how successful it was in doing so. By utilising the substantial but little used material held by BT Archives, we can trace the development of the Post Office’s ‘telephone for deaf subscribers’ and explore how it was used to manage and standardise the variability of hearing and hearing loss within the telephone system.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"85226331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Towards a telephonic history of technology","authors":"G. Balbi, Christiane Berth","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2019.1652959","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2019.1652959","url":null,"abstract":"This special issue aims to start a new phase in the historiography of the telephone. This medium has been approached narrowly both by scholars in media studies and technology and, when studied, mainly with a national, mono-medial, and mono-usage perspective. Significantly, histories of the telephone have been narrated as a series of national histories and so many transnational, regional or local histories were not considered. Although telephone networks were mainly controlled and regulated at the national level, transnational exchange always existed, for example through the activities of engineers’ networks, multinational firms, and international organizations. As well, while global history approaches have been applied to the history of the telegraph, for the telephone a similar debate is still missing. Geopolitically, telephone research has remained limited to Europe and North America. There is a scarcity of works dealing with Asian, African or Latin American experiences and a small number of studies on multinational companies and international experts’ networks. Secondly, the majority of telephone histories have focused on the telephone per se, without considering other media or technologies which were affected by and have affected the development of the telephone. There are of course exceptions; the work of Jon Agar on the history of the mobile telephone remains one of the best books on this subject, where the development of the mobile is located in a broader perspective in which the landline telephone, broadcasting and even rising digital media like the computer are included. Similarly, the telephone has been often seen as a tool to communicate at a distance from one point to another (a one-to-one medium) and this mono-usage perspective has obscured other, alternative histories of the telephone (this is what we call a mono-medial perspective). Indeed, the telephone has been also used as a one-to-many form of communication and, with the so called ‘circular telephone’, listeners could access information, entertainment and different genres via the telephone even before the spread of radio broadcasting. As well, histories of technologies-in-use have shown that social networks, tinkering, resistance and imagination changed both technologies and the character of social life. For example, the historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan introduced a focus on consumers’ perspectives and preferences. According to Cowan, consumers’ decision-making on technologies is embedded in a network of social relations, which she termed the ‘consumption junction’. In fact, this special issue demonstrates how numerous actors decided for or","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2019-04-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72812272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}