This issue features three articles that, in different times and locales, examine the relationship among the nation state, its placement in larger global economic and political structures, and expertise, primarily technical and scientific. Samuel Martland’s ‘Standardizing the State while Integrating the Frontier: The Chilean Telegraph System in the Araucanía, 1870–1900,’ looks at the role of the telegraph in creating the Chilean state – in a geographic sense, in terms of its imagined community (to draw on Benedict Anderson’s phrasing), in the role of technical expertise, and, not least, in seeing the new communications technology as vital to Chile’s participation in international circuits of trade. His article highlights two vectors in this process. One was the subjugation of the indigenous Mapuche people in Araucanía region by the Chilean military, in which the deployment of the telegraph played a prominent role; the other, in the same time period, was a struggle within the Chilean government as to whether military or civilian experts would control the telegraph, with the latter eventually triumphant, in part because of the implications for participating in international markets. James Sumner’s ‘Defiance to compliance: visions of the computer in postwar Britain’ takes up a related complex of issues in examining how in the years after World War II Great Britain sought to define and present its technical and scientific strengths vis á vis its international position with the US and Europe, using developments in computing as focus. He suggests that a rhetoric of ‘defiance’ – a commitment to a view of Great Britain’s distinctive capacity to meet challenges through technical and scientific advances and thus exert a dominant role on the international stage – shaped the early Cold War years then yielded to a more nuanced view of the nation’s place in a Western order dominated by US capacities and a re-built Europe. Hyungsub Choi’s ‘Emerging opportunities: Nanoelectronics and engineering research in a South Korean university’ explores the how a relatively small nation state sought to compete and thrive in the context of 1990s economic globalization, in which innovations in the high-technology areas of electronics and computing were seen as critical. This context spurred the creation of a close collaboration between the South Korean state and Seoul University to push the state of the art in nanoelectronics, an arrangement that departed from the usual practice of focusing such research in Korean corporations.
This issue also includes a historiographic essay by Philip Scranton on the ‘project’ as phenomenon with a long (and increasing) historical presence and as methodological category. In looking at this form of activity – distinct from more socially-enduring and historically-examined entities such as institutions and corporations – Scranton asks in what ways the project as lens might recalibrate the historical questions we ask as well as our framing of historical periods. Included in this issue, too, is an Images, Technology, and History essay by Hanna Rose Shell, ‘Shoddy Heap: A Material History between Waste and Manufacture,’ exploring, through images, the discarding and re-use of ‘shoddy,’ typically the waste wool derived from textile manufacture. She examines, from the nineteenth century to the present, how shoddy waste heaps have been integrated into the landscape and shoddy material entered into pathways of consumption, usually as clothing.
Smithsonian Institution
[email protected]