Development interventions: science, technology and technical assistance

Historians in the last two decades have thoroughly argued that science and technology played a central role in the construction of the geopolitical order after World War II. Salient themes have included the internationalization of knowledge through the movement of experts and technologies as a constitutive aim of the newly created specialized technical agencies and multilateral programs in agriculture, public health, infrastructure, communications, and others.¹ Science and technology have also been invoked as crucial ingredients of nation building after decolonization in Asia and Africa, as part of the economic and political tensions arising in the postcolonial and ‘Third’ worlds during the Cold War, and for development and modernization projects in different regions of the world, including southern Europe and Latin America.²

Notwithstanding the relevance of these studies per se, and the role they have played in bringing to light the multiple agents, synergies and conflicts involved in the second half of twentieth century history of science and technology, they have opened the door to transformative analyses that transcend the post-World War II narrative and reconfigure the historiography of this period. The present volume aims to be a step in that direction, both by decentering the reflection on development and technical assistance from the usual actors and hierarchies – donor and recipient countries – and by bringing to the fore the material and practical implementation of technical and scientific interventions associated with development.

A word of caution is deserved on the uses and changing meanings of terms like ‘technical aid’ and ‘technical assistance’, long associated with the drive to ‘improve’ and to correct ‘backwardness’ in the non-industrialized regions of the world. While ‘technical aid’ was used well before and after the post-World War II period up to this day, its meaning points to that which is given (a noun), including financial support; while the latter–a more recent term coined by the U.S Department of State and the United Nations (UN) bureaucracy–puts the weight on the action of ‘assisting’ through education and training. The distinction between technical and financial aid and assistance was introduced with post-World War II US policies emphasizing the need of international cooperation for economic recovery and reconstruction by means of capital investment and technical and scientific knowledge. Financial resources were offered to Europe through the Marshall Plan, and to Asia through the Colombo Plan and Japanese war reparations after occupation. But a low-cost solution, restricted to the ‘benefits of technical knowledge’, was offered to the new postcolonial nations and to Latin American countries in standardized packages of what soon became known as ‘technical assistance programs’. In the opening contribution to this volume, Jessica Wang digs into the early uses of the phrase ‘technical assistance, as a form of international developmental aid’, and she finds that, ‘it came from the late 1920s and early 1930s in the form of “technical assistance contracts” signed between the Soviet government and foreign companies as part of the Soviet Union’s drive for rapid industrialization’.³ In this use of the term, the entangled relationship between technical mobilization and the acceleration of time, which is characteristic of modernization projects in the twentieth century, is already present. However, technical assistance and technical aid are sometimes used indistinctively, so it becomes futile to attempt a clear-cut definition that covers all cases. The authors of the following essays rely on the actors’ uses of these terms while recognizing that they point to subtle but historically meaningful differences.

Despite its relevance for twentieth-century history, ‘technical assistance for development’ remains scarcely accounted for as a key instrument in the mobilization of scientific practices, technologies, and knowledge systems, and as a crucial driving force in the effort to train thousands of experts, which had a visible impact on the redistribution of scientific and technical expertise around the globe in the second part of the century. More broadly, our purpose is to historicize development as practice, while development as a theoretical construction takes the back seat as it is permanently resisted, challenged, retooled -and even violated- by all sorts of material contingencies and agents.⁴

Decentering periodizations, geographies and actors

Scholars have inquired into the longer duration – we do not dare to speak of longue durée–of ‘improvement’ and early developmentalist practices that had their multiple origins in the European, Asian and American empires and colonial rule.⁵ Decentering the narratives of development by focusing on technical assistance has key historiographic consequences on periodization(s), on the visibility of otherwise invisible agencies and actors, and on the role usually assigned to development. The papers in this volume constitute a contribution in this direction and reveal, through case studies located in different geographies, the complex diversity of the roots and practices of developmental interventions. By splitting the history of development in a pre- and a post-World War II chronology, as is usual in the history of development and the history of science and technology literatures, a hegemonic agency is given to the imperial actors, including the United States, whose technical and administrative tools are seen as the fabric threading through the two halves of the century. Such periodization obscures the role of non-industrialized independent countries and of defeated empires like Japan’s in producing ideas and practices largely associated with the use of science and technology for a multiplicity of modernization projects. Other periodizations become meaningful as the attention is put on localized material interventions.

Since the end of the nineteenth century, the colonial world sought to ‘improve’ societies by means of population resettlements and changes in land property regimes and agricultural practices. A similar process was undertaken by local elites in the independent nations of Latin America after several decades of civil unrest and European interventions. Social structures, modes of production and culture, nevertheless, proved impervious to these projects, and attempts to transform them were received with strong and diverse forms of resistance. Historians from different subfields have long argued that a way out of this conundrum drew upon technoscientific fixes, as a medium to ‘neutralize’ social conflicts with the rationale of science and technology. As Jonathan Hodge has shown for the case of the British empire in Africa and India, ‘the use of technical experts and advisory bodies in planning and implementing a more systematic and scientific approach to colonial rule provided a shared and accepted practice’.⁶ While this Chamberlainite approach was eventually seen as a failure, having unexpected and costly consequences for the metropolis at the beginning of the twentieth century, the main tenets were promptly retaken in the late 1920s and 1930s, and fostered after World War II:

In many senses […] science became a seductive, if contradictory and contested, medium through which the political implications and debates surrounding development in Africa and elsewhere in the twentieth century were filtered, neutralized, and sanitized, and through which various actors both at the center and on the periphery attempted to influence and modify colonial policy.⁷

This was true for other empires, for Latin American countries and, later on, for the post-World War II postcolonial nations. Those attempts shared a broad use of technical interventions, even in the absence of the economic theories of development that came to define the Cold War. The drive towards ‘improvement’, with its Spencerian and positivist overtones, thus marked the end of the nineteenth century. Independent nations actively engaged with the imperative of development and modernization, either adapting colonial institutions and/or acquiring financial and other types of international commitments for that purpose. By the turn of the century, local elites (government officials, land owners and entrepreneurs) aimed to transform the previous arrangement into requests for financial and technical aid, starting in the third decade of the twentieth century, and later incorporated into the postwar international institutions of development.⁸ During those first decades of the century, countries going through social and political turmoil like Mexico, China and the incipiently industrialized USSR, actively pursued local modes of incorporating technical interventions in order to shape the social and economic orders. Similar processes regarding public health took place in Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, countries with relative political and economic stability ‘showing demonstrable advances in welfare state policies’.⁹ Local engineers, agronomists and medical practitioners mobilized science and technology in public health campaigns and agrarian reforms. These attempts were orchestrated by nationalistic or revolutionary elites in consonance, alliance and sometimes conflict with organizations like the League of Nations, and international capital, creating divergent -often contradictory- aspirations and interests that survived the two world wars.

Eric Helleiner has shown that during the interwar period several non-industrialized States sought the means to participate in a more symmetrical commercial and financial relationship with industrialized countries. Social unrest, the economic depression, the fall of raw materials’ prices, the rise of fascist regimes, and the nightmarish effects of WWII provided a solid justification to actively seek technical aid and assistance as the indispensable piece for a foreseeable sustainable peace, as well as for social and economic improvement. Individual contracts and loans from private banks had created an unsustainable debt and numerous defaults from producers of agricultural commodities and other raw materials during this period. This was particularly true for Latin America. Mexico and other countries played an active role in the creation of an Inter-American (IA) Bank between 1939 and 1941 with a developmental focus. Though the IA Bank was never created, the principles of development and multilateral state control were part of Bretton Woods agreements–the Latin American countries backing the US against the British positions there–and provided the template for the creation of the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. ‘As one Mexican official put it [during the Bretton Woods conference], they preferred to receive external support for their postwar development plan from public sources rather than private investors that would be uninterested in “our organic development or industrialization as a whole”’.¹⁰

By locating our case studies in different geographies and times, this double volume subverts the directionality of development and brings to the fore the unacknowledged participation of several new actors and agencies in the origins of developmentalist institutions and practices. While recognizing the unbalanced economic and political power inherent to development, the papers in this volume stress the fact that it has never been an exclusively top-down project.

Discursive flattening and material heterogeneity

Technoscientific interventions inhabited the twentieth century, but this does not mean that the supporting discourse and theories, and the institutional frames, did not suffer distinctive transformations after World War II. One of the things that changed was the reduction of the several modes of improvement and development of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries into a few models and monolithic packages of aid and assistance. According to the new models, economic growth was theorized as part of the geopolitically relevant distinction between industrialized countries and what soon became defined as the ‘underdeveloped areas’ of the world.¹¹ The postwar order was thus partly driven by the mandate to overcome the recently created condition of ‘underdevelopment’ that was deeply entangled with the polarization of the Cold War, and widely used after President Truman’s Four Point Program.¹²

We find it useful to clarify that throughout this collection of papers we use ‘underdeveloped’ and ‘less-developed’ categories as part of the contemporary language of post-war development, avoiding anachronistic and problematic terms like the ‘global south’ which tend to flatten the world and erase historical differences and existing conditions. This does not mean that we assume the derogatory character of this classification. Something similar -though more debatable- happens with references to the ‘Third World’, a term with political meanings, whose later appropriation as an economic (dis)qualification has been thoroughly problematized.¹³

As Nick Cullather has noticed, during the postwar decades development became discursively, practically, and administratively, the only path.¹⁴ Development was promoted both by the Socialist bloc and the West as the only solution to past ills and to present or future alliances. The core formulae stated that social progress would derive from economic development, which in turn was assumed to depend on planning and technoscientific solutions to real and perceived problems. The overarching model ‘flattened’ individual needs and local peculiarities in standardized development packages. Such packages were produced as a theoretical and administrative abstraction that sought to erase material contingencies and cultural diversity. James Ferguson has thoroughly argued for the case of Lesotho, ‘development institutions generate their own forms of discourse, and this discourse simultaneously constructs Lesotho as a particular kind of object of knowledge and creates a structure of knowledge around that object’.¹⁵

Such theoretical and administrative abstractions were put into practice notably by the United Nations and its technical assistance agencies. As a result of the new geopolitical reconfiguration, a sizable proportion of international aid was reorganized and concentrated in the new system of the UN and its specialized agencies. Although not all aid was channeled through this system, its nearly global reach assured its impact on other subservient systems, and the prevalence of multilateralism in contrast to the predominantly bilateral pre-war organization of technical aid. The UN agencies had been created in order to absorb colonial administrative functions and with the explicit purpose of mobilizing expertise, standards, and technologies as the main tools to sustain the evolving postwar world. Scientists suddenly became diplomats, makers, and planners. To do so, the UN designed a monolithic program exclusively for the (re)distribution of financial aid, expertise, and material goods to implement technical assistance. In 1950, David Owen, then head of the Economic Affairs Department of the United Nations, and upcoming director of the Expanded Program of Technical Assistance (EPTA), recounted that ‘in one form or another [technical assistance] has been provided ever since the first session of the General Assembly in 1946ʹ.¹⁶ By the end of that year, EPTA asked the help of the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) to find out the ways in which the new specialized agencies could offer expertise to those countries that asked for assistance. This led to a resolution in 1947 which, among other things,

[…] instructed the Secretary General to establish machinery […] to give assistance to Member governments which seek expert advice, especially in the form of teams of experts to study specific problems and recommend appropriate practical solutions for the consideration of the Member governments concerned.¹⁷

The creation of EPTA was finally approved by the General Assembly in 1948, following a draft prepared by the governments of Burma, Chile, Egypt, Haiti, and Peru, clearly revealing the interest of non-industrialized nations. Among its functions, EPTA was in charge of creating ‘teams consisting of experts’, training experts of ‘underdeveloped countries’ abroad, the ‘training of local technicians within the underdeveloped countries themselves’, and finally, ‘[providing] facilities to assist governments’ on creating the administrative organization needed to promote economic development. To achieve these functions the new program was charged with the coordination of the specialized agencies.

It must be emphasized that since its beginnings, the UN program established that countries asking for technical assistance had to bear a substantial cost of the services and technologies involved, while EPTA–whose budget relied on weighted membership fees–provided the rest. Technical assistance was not free, and it had never been. Multilateral aid rested upon a pretended political neutrality, understood as the avoidance of conflicting bilateral relations between recently decolonized countries and pre-war empires. It was also predicated on the assumption that standardized packages of technical, scientific, administrative, and institutional approaches would provide a spectrum of possible solutions to a broad array of local problems. Both arguments, however, need to be problematized. The heavy weight of the United States within the UN system constantly shaped the asymmetrical field where decisions and actions were taken, and other important actors–including the permanent members of the security council–played their geopolitical interests with technical assistance cards. On the other hand, the theoretical and administrative tools continuously flattened the needs, assets, and aspirational utopias around the ‘assisted’ world; these abstractions produced taxonomies of countries based on ‘stages of development’.

EPTA, however, was not the only or, in some cases, the main provider of technical assistance during the first decades after the war. Bilateral agreements played the role of complementing multilateralism by fine-tuning the technopolitical solutions offered by on-the-ground development projects. They also remained as a salient mechanism for the deployment of power relations, by which we mean not only the asymmetry of one-way dependency, but the possibility of using whatever national leverage an individual country had in order to harvest economic and technoscientific benefits. At the same time, regional programs like the Marshall Plan on devastated European countries, and the Colombo Plan which provided a frame for bilateral agreements between the countries in South and Southeast Asia, became the biggest alternatives to the UN’s system.

Technical assistance practices, however, were confronted with a myriad of local needs, trajectories, and contrasting interests, with the outcome that economic and social goals associated with technological and scientific solutions were continuously redirected, resignified, and often unattained. In large part, this failure to comply with the stated goals was the result of how individual countries were ‘constructed’ at development institutions to fit into the models and into the possible packages and taxonomies in the available areas of technical assistance.¹⁸ By the end of the 1950s the UN agencies introduced changes to the ways in which recipient countries participated in their requests for technical assistance. However, those changes did not solve the problem that all of this assistance came into pre-conceived packages.¹⁹

Failure also resulted from the inherent contingencies of mobilizing knowledge, people, and technologies to a variety of contexts, which was an ever-present challenge. Ten years after the creation of EPTA, in 1959, Harry L. Spence Jr., Resident Representative of the UN Technical Assistance Board in Pakistan, noticed that in practice, ‘improvisation is the rule, and flexibility an absolute necessity’, a phrase that illustrates the challenges and unexpected character of technical assistance, and emphasizes its historical nature.²⁰

Science and technology as interventions of development

In contrast to analyses of the intellectual history of development, or development as a discursive regime, our aim is to contribute to the material history of technical and scientific interventions as key instruments in the political economy of the twentieth century, embodied in the mobilization of experts, scientific and technological practices, technological systems, and materials.²¹ In the contributions to this volume, technological objects, different sorts of commodities, and technical and scientific skills, take center stage. If hegemonic practices and related discourses of development can persist in time and across the political spectrum, it is only because they rely on the commodification of knowledge, and the multiple evolving objects – crops, containers, reactors, vaccines, or satellites – that sustain the possibility of a better future that never seems to arrive.

Technical and scientific interventions, as well as colonial administrative practices, crossed the divide between pre- and post-World War II periods. Continuities also included a deeply embedded racism – a colonial trait translated into the language of ‘underdevelopment’ after the war – and a promise of social and economic justice.²² Dreams of social and economic progress found material and political grounding in the infrastructures, skills and techniques, instruments, and a myriad of objects were mobilized, although not without facing multiple difficulties, and made present in landscapes that made evident their decontextualized origins. Imperial civilizing interventions, interwar philanthropic campaigns in public health and agriculture, and socialist and capitalist projects sought technoscientific fixes that aimed to ‘improve’ societies supposedly lacking ‘development’.

A visible change, slowly evolving from the interwar era, was the major presence of State-led technical and scientifically informed ‘solutions’ in the postwar period. As development and modernization became explicitly associated with processes of national identity building in the 1950s and 1960s, many countries adopted administrative tools for institutionalized planning to deal with multilateral and bilateral institutions providing technical assistance in the form of scientific and technological training. China and India used the model of socialist planning in the USSR to elaborate state-led plans of science and technology as platforms to promote economic and social development. As argued by Jahnavi Phalkey and Zuoyue Wang, despite the differences between both countries, similarities point to the comparable ‘[…] faith in the practice of science and technology as a powerful instrument of social change to deliver progress, to retrieve greatness; and the aspiration to shape circumstances under which China and India could each claim their “rightful place in international politics.”’²³ The case of Indonesia, as studied by Suzanne Moon for the steel industry, and by Joshua Barker on the country’s first satellite system, also illustrates this point. However, it must be stressed that the authors also highlight the interpretive flexibility of technology.²⁴ This idea is clearly expressed by Moon, ‘[a] technology project can give a material dimension to a national imagining […]. However, it is important to realize that the materiality of the technology does not necessarily stabilize a particular view of national identity’.²⁵ This flexibility is revealed when particular models of development and local political interests were used in contingent ways to inform technoscientific decisions.²⁶ The import substitution model in Mexico, for instance, was used to shape the federal government’s argument in favor of thermoelectric power production instead of nuclear energy, a technology that supposedly would reinforce national sovereignty and lessen the economic dependence on the United States.

Moreover, as the Cold War renewed and transformed alliances, science and technology played a large role as geopolitical leverage in the international arena. The acquisition of technologies and specific requests for scientific training became essential tokens of exchange amidst political contests and accommodations. ‘Third World’ countries exerted their geopolitical power by diversifying their sources of technologies, and of scientific commodities and training, not only by relying on multilateral institutions, but also on regional powers and ‘lesser’ players.

Probably, the most consequential change after World War II was the explosion of training and education as part of technical assistance programs for development. Starting in the 1950s, thousands of scientists, experts and technicians in Asia, Africa, Eastern and Southern Europe, and Latin America were trained at home, with many of them mobilized to foreign countries or becoming part of the new technocratic transnational bureaucracy, sometimes reaching the highest positions. The ranks of expertise were now swelled with experts from all over the world. Multilateral agencies and programs replaced philanthropies and colonial rulers as the main sources for funding and planning, staffed by pre-war experts, and by the new generation of economists, engineers, scientists and others. Training and technical assistance provided by the United Nations specialized agencies (more on this below) constituted the main source of development interventions for newly decolonized and non-industrialized countries.

A critical history of this period cannot be blind to the optimist and rationalized approach to social and economic problems that plagued the postwar world. Experts and the ‘middle politics’ of the technocrats in charge of technical assistance, often expressed the hopeful possibility of betterment of the quality of life in the impoverished regions of the world. As a result of this mobilization, one of the most visible consequences was the creation and consolidation of local scientific communities who aligned most of their research projects with international networks; those communities extended beyond the training of technical experts and engineers involved in technological systems. On the other hand, as Eve E. Buckley has noticed, ‘these men were misled by their belief that one could arrive at rational, scientifically grounded solutions to what was fundamentally a political issue of unequal control’. Furthermore, ‘they were trained to render complex problems technical [which] often meant ignoring inconvenient political dimensions’.²⁷ Eventually, they became a ‘professional middle class’ with their own invested interests and unwilling to face the political and economic roots of the profound inequalities.

The contents of this volume

By focusing on the long history of technical and scientific interventions as linked to development, the papers in this volume open up the field to include new themes, geographies and actors in evolving reconfigurations. Decentering the US-focused narrative of development, a variety of chronologies, networks and alternative narratives unfold. Rostow becomes an anomaly, instead of the rule. Multiple actors arise and are made visible, rebalancing power relations. Different kinds of experts and interests populate the various ways by which technical assistance and aid – domestic, regional and international – were mobilized. They included those motivated by anti-capitalist politics and international solidarity, like the case of Indian agronomist Pandurang Khankhoje working in Mexican agricultural schools, the Hungarian nurses and medical doctors involved in the Korean war, imperial Japanese geneticists teaching in Malaysia, and countercultural believers in the power of telecommunications to educate the Indian poor. At the same time, convinced developmentalists found their ways to transform nuclear technologies into packages to overcome underdevelopment, though the final results (for example, the contrasting cases of military Pakistan and the creation of scientific elites in Mexico) were far from the asserted initial goals.

All of the cases presented in this volume, with the exception of those on post-war nuclear and telecommunication technologies, extend their roots back in time with respect to the received periodization. This represents not only a shift in timelines, but also new narratives that include local practices and actors that provided the grounds for postwar technical assistance programs. Particularly relevant is the inclusion of commercial networks in Southeast Asia which necessarily moves the chronology of technical assistance and development in the region back in time. As a consequence, the presence of the United States and the Japanese empire are resized and even subverted.

Jessica Wang, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Hiromi Mizuno, and John DiMoia place scientific and technical assistance in a world order that well preceded the Cold War and was deeply rooted in the contrasting cases of the United States extraterritorial power in the Pacific, the Mexican social revolution, and the Japanese empire. As Wang forcibly argues for the case of Hawaiʻi, tropical produce – such as pineapples, coffee and bananas – besides being obvious commodities in the opening Pacific US economy and markets, were purposely used to weaponize cane-sugar and plantation agriculture as a means to induce white settler colonialism. Echoing previous historical research on colonial projects for agriculture and land distribution in Asia and Africa, Wang’s account focuses on the disruption of the social structure and culture of plantation production, as the ‘scientific’ agriculture is promoted by the experts at the United States Department of Agriculture.²⁸ The moral obligation to intervene through social and technical tools was centered on conflicting ideas of civilizing the territories and exploiting human and material resources, while preserving the inherent asymmetries of colonial relations and its racist character. Wang’s essay decenters the US-based Cold War developmentalism in several ways. First, in its attention to material practices that predate the 1950s theories; second, with its reach in the origins of the American extraterritorial empire in the Pacific; and finally, by breaking down the dichotomy between success and failure in modernization projects, a feature which is common to all the contributions to this volume.

Two papers problematize the received narrative and chronology of the Green Revolution in two different geographies. Looking at the material cultures of maize and rice, they offer a revisionist account of that quintessential example of technical assistance. Gabriela Soto Laveaga’s paper offers a counter narrative of the Green Revolution by probing the early socialist roots and actors of agricultural ‘improvement’ programs, who have remained invisible in traditional accounts centered on the Rockefeller Foundation’s role in Mexico. The author’s research on Indian plant geneticist Khankhoje in the 1920s and 1930s, whose technical skills were embedded in a larger project of domestic technical assistance. The program made use of ancestral and modern hybridization practices and relied on newly created postrevolutionary research institutions and local experts - a few of them trained in the United States – in close relation with local campesinos. By focusing on already existing expertise, the author resizes the important role of agricultural practices in postrevolutionary Mexico, decades before the Rockefeller Foundation arrived. Soto Laveaga’s purpose goes beyond reassigning credit, suggesting a narrative that decenters modernization as the only path imagined by technocrats, to introduce possible alternative values and futures. In contrast to Wang and Mizuno’s contributions, where the role of technical interventions in advancing markets and capitalism is highlighted, the events described by Soto Laveaga pertain to international socialist activism in the context of the convulsed years of the early twentieth century.

Mizuno’s essay illustrates the implications of paying attention to the materiality of technical assistance for a historization of development. The author traces the continuities of aims and scientific practices through the genealogy of Mahsuri rice varieties, as they transitioned from colonial rule and territorial administrations, through the Japanese empire with its heavy industrialization, up to the reconfigured international institutions and programs of the Cold War, such as the Colombo Plan for Commonwealth nations in Asia. The author follows the story of Japanese genetics research and the long-lasting effect of their hybridization practices in Asia, thus subverting the American-centered history of the Green Revolution and its supposed successes. Moreover, Mizuno introduces plant varieties, no less than rice, as tracers of historical processes, a heuristic tool previously used by other historians in similar cases.²⁹ This essay brings to the fore the crucial role of varieties of rice in regional commercial networks that were reconfigured after the war. The Malayans demanded training in genetics and agriculture as war reparations from the Japanese, whose previous research on plant hybridization went hand in hand with their imperial resources and markets’ monopoly. Thus, expertise and technical assistance are here transformed into extremely valuable commodities by the recipient country, in a context of geopolitical reorganization where new agencies emerge.

Like Mizuno’s, the paper by John DiMoia also deals with the established trading networks dating to the Japanese empire. Taking the chronology back in time drives attention to agencies and networks that are crucial for the postwar geopolitics of the region. In particular, DiMoia’s essay addresses the war - and capital-driven transformation of East and Southeast Asia, as a result of the changing practices of shipping and transportation after World War II and the Korean War. Such practices were particularly relevant during the Vietnam War, due to the US army’s reliance on South Korean ports, that led to the construction and standardization of the CONEX containers. This leads DiMoia to argue for a broad conception of technical assistance, one that makes room for ‘blurring the line between donor and recipient’, in which the employment of technology rebalances the asymmetrical relation between agents. In this case, technical assistance is a crucial ingredient of trade networks where the United States needs the Republic of Korea’s ports in providing their military with shipping infrastructure to assist South Vietnam. Very soon, the South Koreans dock workers learned, improved, and adjusted their labor skills and practices to meet their partners’ demands in the quick and efficient management of containers. Technical and administrative standardizations had a relevant effect on the redistribution of power in the region, and a new status-quo emerged between decolonized countries and the old and new Empires, with important and durable economic and political consequences. As DiMoia concludes, ‘the story of containerization in postwar East Asia brings Japanese empire together with Cold War interests; and equally, it traces the actions of a proactive South Korea, acquiring and handling technology for its own ends’.³⁰

Economic liberals, socialists, social democrats, and even countercultural organizations enthusiastically participated in the pursuing of the goals of development after World War II. This consensus meant that technical assistance traveled in varied directions and at different speeds involving the so-called First, Second, and Third Worlds; it also suggests that development was understood and grounded on a diversity of models, values and paths distinct from US-born modernization theories. In this context, Dora Vargha’s paper deals with a scarcely studied topic, namely, the engagement of socialist countries as donors of technical assistance for the Third World. The author examines the Eastern European countries’ competing views of public health and international aid through the case of the medical assistance provided by Hungary to North Korea from the start of the war in 1950, in the form of technical skills to face war injuries and declined public health. Hungary’s assistance exemplifies a style of technical interventions customized on the advancement of an international socialist model in seek of geopolitical alliances, but also in the value of solidarity, both as state propaganda, and as aid of doctors and nurses. By building hospitals and creating networks of experts, Hungary – a state which is both a donor and a recipient of technical assistance – is repositioned in the frame of the socialist countries’ exit from the World Health Organization (WHO). The paper offers a view of the world ‘not only divided along political ideologies, but also along the way obligations, practices and networks in the emerging world health system were imagined’. In this case, technical assistance is not offered as a development package, but as an explicit political commitment in which the positioning as a donor or a recipient is relative with respect to the specific actors and technologies involved.

Among the UN specialized agencies, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) stands as a rather peculiar case, given that nuclear knowledge and commodities were the result of negotiations that transformed a want into a need. In contrast to the most common interventions in agriculture and public health, nuclear technologies and knowledge did not meet any basic necessity and were beyond the financial, human, and institutional resources of most of the world. Nevertheless, the IAEA soon became a part of the development machinery of the United Nations. The strategies that justified the commitment and implementation of nuclear technical assistance are explored in the papers by Gisela Mateos and Edna Suárez-Díaz, and by Jacob D. Hamblin. They inquire into the multifarious actors, interests, and strategies involved in the set-in motion of nuclear technical assistance in Mexico and Pakistan, by pointing to opposite extremes of the non-proliferation/proliferation axis. Like the majority of countries in the world, Mexico’s engagement into the atomic era was not seen as a priority by most of the relevant local actors, including the federal government. Nevertheless, Mexican scientists and the IAEA apparatus co-produced the need for technologies, materials and skills in the peaceful applications of nuclear energy. Locally, development was used as a rhetorical tool in different ways by the federal government and the small scientific elite. In practice, however, the varieties of nuclear technical assistance requested by the Mexican scientists were not justified nor used in those terms. The authors thus argue for a strong dislocation between technical assistance and development in this case.

In contrast, by addressing one of the most questionable and unexpected consequences of nuclear technical assistance programs, Hamblin’s paper recounts the IAEA’s involvement with prospecting and mining uranium in Pakistan, and the complicit relation involving an ‘Agency in need of a function’, that eventually resulted in the country’s nuclear proliferation program. Moreover, this case study is an outstanding example of the ‘recipient’s’ agency in the outmaneuvering of the IAEA in its double play as a watch-dog and as promoter of the atomic sciences and technologies. As the author argues, Pakistani requests, ‘used the nation’s poverty as a rationale for a reactor program’, thus mobilizing and manipulating the rhetoric and material resources of development in order to attain a goal that, at least in principle, stood against the Agency’s explicit mission.³¹ This essay offers a fine example of one of the salient themes in the technical assistance and development literature, namely, the unexpected consequences of technoscientific interventions. In this case, the acquisition of a powerful military technology produces a stark geopolitical rearrangement in the region. Something similar happens in the case of the Republic of Korea, whose active engagement with port infrastructures also results in a reconfigured geopolitical order with Japan and South East Asia.

The papers by Vargha, Mateos and Suárez-Díaz, and Hamblin also deal with one of the most potentially revealing questions concerning the dialectic of power involved in all technical assistance transactions. The co-construction of specific relations between so-called donor and recipient countries clearly took place between asymmetrical agents, but it required the involvement and alignment of local elites with particular interests and the shared conviction, among actors from a broad political spectrum, so that science and technology would lead to economic and social progress, as well as become a resource to be exchanged in the moral economy of the Cold War.

Following the thread of this collection of papers, namely the focus on the material history of technoscientific interventions, the last paper also stretches the concept of technical assistance by focusing on communication infrastructures. In his contribution, Asif Siddiqi deals with the Satellite Instructional Technology Experiment (SITE), a project that aimed to broadcast educational programs in rural India. Framed by Cold War’s nuclear proliferation concerns and the attempt to diverge India from building nuclear weapons, the project aligned NASA, the local Indian Space Research Organization, and countercultural activists in the United States under a developmentalist rhetoric as hoisted by Vikram Sarabhai, one of the leading voices of India’s scientific elite. Like many technical assistance projects in the period, Siddiqi’s paper recounts how these extraordinary agents genuinely believed in the power of cutting-edge communication technologies to lift rural India out of perceived poverty and illiteracy. At the same time, India was treated as an experiment by the NASA designers of the SITE project, who saw in the country a possible model to be used for other technical interventions in the Third World. Throughout this project, different actors portrayed their own views of India, with Sarabhai’s leading voice urging its transformation from a colony into a postcolonial technoscientific object. As the author rightly claims, notably absent are the voices of the ‘illiterate masses’ to whom the supposed benefits of development were directed, a common feature in all contributions of this volume for reasons we address below.

The case studies included in this volume thus inquire into the specifics of technological and scientific instruments, materials, and skills as they moved as a crucial ingredient in development interventions which sought to ‘neutralize’ political and economic conflicts along the course of the twentieth century. A variety of actors, such as colonial and international experts, colonial administrators, resident representatives, and other technocrats participating in multilateral, regional, and bilateral agencies and institutions mobilized a number of administrative skills and tactics that made possible the massive movement of knowledge and technologies. Conspicuously absent among the actors are the non-elite supposed beneficiaries of technical assistance. This is due to the fact that development has always been a project of the local and transnational elites, which in turn affects the nature of institutional archival resources. The contested actions of resisting non-elite actors could be traced by their uses and adaptation of technoscientific objects. However, none of the contributions to this volume address this point, which remains urgent work to be done.

For the movement of scientific practices, technologies and materials to take place, disciplinary fields and scientific and technological communities were sometimes created, and in other cases consolidated, as a result of the implementation of training, education and exchange programs. Agriculture, public health, telecommunications, transportation, and nuclear technologies appear as salient areas where new commodities and technoscientific practices could be relocated by means of colonial interventions, commercial networks, and postwar technical assistance. They required the design of pedagogical instruments and new academic programs to facilitate the education of thousands of engineers, biologists, physicists, agricultural scientists, and others who transformed the distribution of expertise and power around the world. By looking at material mobilizations and the role of science and technology in the reconfiguration of geopolitical balances during the twentieth century, we offer a historiographical intervention that displaces received chronologies, and decenters the usual agencies of the donor-recipient dichotomy. In this sense, the narratives of ‘failure’ and ‘success’ of development, are replaced by accounts where the violence, destruction and accomplishments of technical assistance are always present and evaluated with respect to the interests of the many original actors. The collection of papers thus locates technical assistance as a key producer of wealth and catastrophes, but also of possible futures distinct from the original aims of development projects.

Acknowledgements

We want to thank the editors of the journal, Amy Slaton and Tiago Saraiva, for their enthusiasm and encouragement during the publication process. We are also grateful to the reviewers for their insightful suggestions. Finally, we are in debt to all our friends/contributors for being on board along the course of this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was possible thanks to research grants by Dirección General de Asuntos del Personal Académico UNAM-PAPIIT (grant number IN401017) and Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnología CONACyT (grant number 53351).

Notes

1. This literature includes: Connelly, Fatal Misconception; DiMoia, Reconstructing Bodies; Cueto, Cold War, Deadly Fevers; Cullather, The Hungry World; Krige, American Hegemony; Hamblin, “Let There be Light…”; Krige, “Atoms for Peace”; Krige, Long Callahan, and Maharaj, NASA in the World; Smith, “The Awkward Years”; Mizuno, Moore, and DiMoia, Engineering Asia; Oreskes and Krige, Science and Technology; Siddiqi, “Another Global history of Science”; and Turchetti and Roberts, The Surveillance Imperative.

2. Hecht, “Introduction”; Moon, “Takeoff or Self-Sufficiency”; DiMoia, “Atoms for Sale?”; Phalkey, Atomic State; Wang, “The Chinese Developmental State”; Mateos and Suárez-Díaz, “We Are Not a Rich Country”; Phalkey and Wang, “Planning for Science and Technology”; Krige and Wang. “Nation, Knowledge, and Imagined Futures”; Cullather, “Miracles of Modernization”; Webster “Development Advisors”; Buckley, Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development; Moon, “Justice, Geography and Steel”; Barker, “Engineers and Political Dreams”.

3. Wang, “Agricultural Expertise,” PAGE TK.

4. On historicizing development see Cullather, “Research Note: Development?”; Cullather, ”Damming Afghanistan.”

5. Salient examples include Hodge, Triumph of the Expert; Mehos and Moon, “The Uses of Portability”; Wang, “Colonial Crossings”; Tilley, Africa as a Living Laboratory.

6. Hodge, The Triumph of the Expert, 53.

7. Ibid.

8. Helleiner, “The Development Mandate.”

9. Carter, “Social Medicine,” 794.

10. Helleiner, “Southern Pioneers,” 382.

11. Different theories of development cohabited between the 1950s and 1970s with varying analytic approaches and implications for the economy, trade, and policies. Hodge, “Writing the History of Development (Part 1)”; Adelman, Worldly Philosopher.

12. See note 8 above.

13. Tomlinson, “What Was the Third World?”

14. Cullather, “Damming Afghanistan,” 513.

15. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine, xiv.

16. Owen, “The United Nations,” 109.

17. Ibid., 111–112.

18. Ferguson, The Anti-Politics machine.

19. Owen, “The United Nation: A Multilateral.”

20. Spence, “A Resident Representative’s View,” 10.

21. On development as a discursive regime see Escobar, Encountering Development; Esteva, “Desarrollo.” We are echoing Joseph Morgan Hodge’s analysis of the history of development. Hodge, “Writing the History (Part 1 and Part 2).”

22. According to Michael Adas, US Ambassador Matthew Perry’s assertion in the mid-1850’s that “none of the ‘Oriental Civilizations’ had ‘graduated beyond technique or thaumaturgy [magic] to curiosity about things in general’ provided a scientific imprimatur for speculation in the 1950s and 1960s by prominent foreign policy specialists such as W.W. Rostow regarding what they viewed as ‘pre-rational’ or ‘pre-Newtonian’ responses by people in postcolonial societies to America’s civilizing mission, at that point dressed up in modernization jargon.” Adas, Dominance by Design, 19–20.

23. Phalkey and Wang, “Planning for science and technology.”

24. Moon, “Justice, Geography and Steel”; Barker, “Engineers and Political Dreams.”

25. Ibid., 276.

26. Hecht, “Introduction.”

27. Buckley, Technocrats and the Politics of Drought and Development, 6–7.

28. Hodge, Triumph of the Experts; Van Beusekom, “Disjunctures.”

29. Herrán and Roqué suggested the use of radioisotopes as tracers of historical processes, a path followed by other authors, such as Creager, “Tracing the Politics”; Mateos and Suárez-Díaz, “Clouds, Airplanes and Trucks”; Herrán and Roqué, “Radioisotopes as Historical Tracers.” A different example is that of historians of malaria, who have followed the ecological and social history of mosquito and parasite distribution as a trace of social and economic history. Packard, The Making of a Tropical Disease; Cueto, Cold War, Deadly Fevers.

30. DiMoia, “Reconfiguring Transport Infrastructure,” PAGE TK.

31. Jacob Darwin Hamblin, “Aligning Missions,” PAGE TK.