This issue, completing volume 34 of History and Technology, is exemplary of the historiographic interventions central to the journal’s mission by testing new concepts and exploring underrepresented periods and spatialities. It opens with an essay by Helmuth Trischler and Robert Bud who building on a critique of the concept of ‘public science’ put forward the notion of ‘public technology’, inviting scholars to approach technologies as publicly shaped societal entities. The authors revisit the case of nuclear energy demonstrating the value of ‘public technology’ for the production of narratives in the history of technology as accounts of ‘community experience’ able to replace the too familiar ‘folk history of the engineer’. The essay nicely resonates with our ‘Images’ feature – Emma Perkins’ rich exploration of Tycho Brahe’s credibility-building, audience-pleasing scientific illustrations. Perkin’s text deals with a period – the early modern – which certainly needs more attention by historians of technology. More importantly, it highlights the rewards of writing history of science by focusing on the technologies of knowledge production. It is not just a question of calling attention to the importance of instruments in Tycho Brahe’s renewal of astronomers’ practices, but of exploring as well the detail of instruments’ illustrations as elements of scientific authority. Making use of Trischler and Bud, we might say that Perkins offers a reinterpretation of Tycho Brahe’s instruments as ‘public technology.’
Two additional articles complete the current issue. In ‘The Emergence of Baltic Moorkultur’, Esa Ruuskanen echoes provocations offered by Sverker Sorlin and Nina Wormbs in our last issue (‘Environing Technologies’, History and Technology vol. 34, no. 2). The potential utility of peatlands for fuel – the hope for their practical commodification – in the eyes of mid-nineteenth century Baltic landowners required that these environs be seen as pristine; that is, as existing in a state prior to intervention. As Sorlin and Wormbs suggest, the degradation or loss of natural places over time, and attendant consequences for diverse human and non-human communities, can only be understood if we historicize such extractive tendencies as a kind of sense-making: a ‘knowledge-based representation of the material world in which humans and their actions are embedded’. Ruuskanen offers just such a problematization in accounting for the landowners’ modernizing technological impulses as political at their core.
Resonances can be heard, too, between Ruuskanen’s piece and Jaume Valentines-Álvarez’ article, ‘Seeing Like a Factory’ in this issue, in which identities and materialities also come into being together. Steeped in the project of ethnic self-characterization, engineers in 1930s Catalonia could imagine themselves as partaking in the creation of a regional infrastructure. Recognizing this helps us see that social and technological rationalities are not historically separable. To presume that either precedes the other is to miss historical conditions vital to the sustenance of technocratic regimes, say or nationalism. The demand for reflexivity concerning the choice of the nation as proper scale of historical analysis is particularly convincing in these two articles dealing with European regions with contested national status, Estonia and Livonia, and Catalonia. Crucially, both Ruuskanen and Valentines-Álvarez deter us from tracing episodes of industrialization, economic expansion or technological commitment apart from the concerted and consequential production of social collectivities, and we are excited to share their essays here.