When IAEA experts finally obtained the thin folder of documents substantiating the claim in early March, it only took them a few hours to determine that these were forgeries. But by then it was too late. In the public eye, “uranium from Africa” had topped the list of a lot of other dubious evidence.3 Things were in motion. On 19 March 2003, the U.S. launched its assault on Iraq. We now know that there was no uranium deal, and no evidence that Iraq had restarted its nuclear weapons production.4

The salience of “uranium from Africa”—both in the lead-up to the war and in subsequent opposition to it—traded on three sets of fears and assumptions widespread in the American public sphere:

• the fear of nuclear weapons, and the assumption that acquiring “uranium” is tantamount to building an atomic bomb;
• the fear of “Africa” as a dark, corrupt continent, and the assumption that actions there are ultimately unknowable or incomprehensible;
• the fear of any nuclear materials not within direct Western control, and the assumption that the difference between licit and illicit nuclear trade is clear-cut.

Commentators on the Iraq war spilled a lot of ink on the first of these, very little on the second, and only a bit more on the third. But they largely missed the complex technological and political threads that bind these three outlooks together.

In this essay I attempt to break these restraints by offering three genealogies for “uranium from Africa.” First, I consider the problem of when uranium counts as a “nuclear” thing, when it doesn’t, and what Africa has to do with it. Before “uranium” becomes weapons-usable, it must be mined as ore, processed into yellowcake, converted into uranium hexafluoride, enriched, and pressed into bomb fuel. At what stage in this process does it come to count as a “nuclear material”? The answer, I argue, has depended on time, place, purpose, and markets. Second, I excavate the phrase’s more specific rendition, displaying fragments of a history of “yellowcake from Niger.” Places matter. Niger is not merely an avatar for global threats, but a nation with its own politics, priorities, and conflicts, all of which have significant bearing on the production and distribution of its uranium. Third, I examine another moment when African provenance of uranium was geopolitically contested: the flow of Namibian uranium to the U.S., Japan, and Europe during the height of international sanctions against apartheid. In this instance, licit trade and black markets were materially entwined in ways that made African things invisible.

Understanding the transnational networks that shape the power of technology in the contemporary world is a complex and difficult proposition. Only a bird’s-eye view can reveal the patterns, flows, and imbalances that map the distribution of technologies and the powers they serve or exert. Yet the view from above is always partial; it runs the risk of deceiving us into thinking that some places don’t matter enough to deserve our attention. This is a dangerous illusion. We must land in unfamiliar places and study them on their own terms.

The result is necessarily a fractured history. The fault lines between these multiple narratives gape because transnational history is not smooth and seamless, but uneven and disjointed. As shifting signifiers, nuclearity and markets run through these histories; their meanings are shaped by place, but not always in the same way. The notion of technopolitics helps to highlight such shifts and indeterminacies. Elsewhere, I have used the term in discussions of politically strategic technological design.5 Here I use it more expansively, seeking to highlight the distribution of power in material things and symbolic circulations. These hybrid forms of power, I argue, make some things nuclear, some things commodities, some things African, and some things all three.

Is Uranium a Nuclear Thing?

Nuclear exceptionalism has been a recurring theme in political discourse since the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. American and European cold warriors and their activist opponents portrayed atomic weapons as fundamentally different from any other human creation. “The bomb” appeared as the ultimate trump card: first for the superpowers, then for waning colonial powers, then for other nations. Geopolitical status seemed directly proportional to the number of nukes a nation possessed. Such nuclear exceptionalism went well beyond discourse; indeed, its technopolitical qualities made it particularly robust. “Nuclear” scientists and engineers gained prestige, power, and funding far beyond their colleagues in “conventional” research. Fission meant splitting atoms, and the resulting rupture in nature’s very building blocks propelled claims to a corresponding rupture in historical space and time.

Nuclear exceptionalism could be made, unmade, and remade. In the early decades of civilian nuclear power, exceptionalist claims came primarily from experts and atomic energy institutions. As anti-nuclear groups gained prominence, however, they articulated their own exceptionalist claims by highlighting the unprecedented qualitative and quantitative dangers posed by exposure to radioactive substances. In response, the industry sought to make itself mundane: radioactivity was part of nature, nuclear power merely a form of energy among others. When reactor accidents at Three Mile Island (1979) and Chernobyl (1986) challenged the banality of nuclear things, experts re-branded exceptionalism: the industry, they argued, spent more money preventing deaths from occupational exposure than any other industry. Whatever the political leaning, the stakes of exceptionalism were amplified by morality-talk: nuclear things were either sacred or profane. Whatever the political leaning, too, exceptionalist claims carried the sense that an immutable ontology distinguished the nuclear from the non-nuclear, that the difference was ultimately a clear-cut matter of fission and radioactivity.6

Historically, however, the degree to which—and purpose for which—a nation, a program, a technology, or a material counted as “nuclear” hasn’t always been a matter of consensus. Consider: Yellowcake from Niger made Iraq nuclear enough to justify war in 2003. But in 1995, yellowcake didn’t suffice to make Niger itself nuclear. According to an Office of Technology Assessment report that year, neither Niger, nor Gabon, nor Namibia had any “nuclear activities.” Yet together, these three nations accounted for about a quarter of the world’s uranium production that year.7

So when does uranium count as a nuclear thing? When does it lose its nuclearity? And what does Africa have to do with it?

These questions were present from the beginning of attempts to define, regulate, and market a global nuclear order, via the creation of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The agency’s 1956 statute allocated five permanent seats on its Board of Governors to states globally deemed the “most advanced in the technology of atomic energy including the production of source materials,” and another five according to geographic region.8 Uranium “producers” in Eastern and Western bloc nations would rotate through another two seats; “suppliers of technical assistance” would rotate through one. Remaining board members would be elected by delegates from all IAEA member states.

In those initial negotiations, the South African delegate had pushed hard to include “source materials” as an indicator of “advancement” in the IAEA statute.9 Contracts with the U.S. and Britain had already made uranium vital to the apartheid economy and turned South Africa into one of the world’s largest producers.10 Pressures for decolonization of the African continent were mounting; the South African delegate suspected that apartheid policies would make it impossible to obtain an elected seat. As it was, India had tried to relegate South Africa to one of the rotating seats for “producers.” Indeed, in 1956, South African “nuclear” activities consisted only of uranium ore production, underwritten by a very small research program; in terms of technological “advancement,” this was equivalent to Portugal, Australia, and others who qualified for “producer” seats. Worse, it seemed that South Africa’s competitors for the Africa/Middle East regional seat—Israel and Egypt—had more developed research programs. The Suez Crisis heightened the political risks (for the U.S. and the UK) of granting either of those countries the right to represent the whole region. But the region’s choice of representative had to be technologically justified too. If “source materials” could count, then South Africa would easily qualify as the region’s “most advanced [nation] in the technology of atomic energy”—not the least because the other African producers were not (yet) nations. This argument carried the day; South Africa won its seat.

So in 1956 “source materials” included uranium ore, which in turn seemed nuclear enough to trump the increasingly vocal opposition of postcolonial nations to the apartheid state. But this didn’t compel the nuclearity of uranium ore to remain stable for all time.

Let’s not forget why South Africans craved a board seat: they wanted to influence the formation of a uranium market. Today’s media cover the IAEA primarily as the UN’s “nuclear watchdog,” conducting inspections to certify that civilian installations haven’t been diverted to military ends. But this function of the IAEA emerged historically; it was not built into the institution from the beginning. Crucially, the IAEA emerged—partly in response to the “Atoms for Peace” initiative—in order to facilitate the circulation of nuclear things.11 The South Africans certainly lost no time exploring commercial possibilities. When he wasn’t occupied with agency politics, their delegate used the personal contacts he’d made at the IAEA to deepen relationships with potential uranium customers. In 1959, for example, he escorted two representatives of the South African Atomic Energy Board (AEB) all over Western Europe. This “sales survey team” sought to forecast supply and demand for the upcoming decade, guess at the probable price structure of commercial contracts, and assess how safeguards might constrain the sale of uranium.12 The tour proved so fruitful that the AEB’s sales committee repeated it regularly, building on their IAEA delegate’s expanding network of contacts.13

South Africans were by no means alone in using the agency in this way. From its inception, the IAEA served as a forum for its members. They learned about competing technologies and materials. They made commercial contacts. They offered or applied for technical assistance—and when such exchanges materialized, they inevitably involved buying and selling. And yes, as part of all this, they discussed international rules for regulating the flow of atomic knowledge and things.

The problem with the trade in nuclear things was the exceptionalism of things nuclear. How to buy and sell technologies that carried such heavy moral baggage and destructive potential? “Safeguards” sounded like an attractive answer. But what exactly would they entail? The U.S. promoted a pledge system: purchasers should agree not to use nuclear technologies and materials toward military ends and accept international inspections verifying compliance. Most other nations selling nuclear systems paid lip service, at least, to such a scheme. Buyers, however, rejected the prospect of controls. India, in particular, argued that regulating access would perpetuate colonial inequalities and undermine national sovereignty.

Arguments on both ends obscured more mundane political and commercial issues. South Africa, for example, wanted to avoid mandatory controls on uranium end-use which might commercially disadvantage its product. It had concrete reasons for such fears: South Africans suspected that Israel had “broke[n] off negotiations for supplies of Rand concentrates” in 1962 because it had “instead obtained the supplies [it] required from France, without [the] safeguard inspection requirements”14 that South Africans had initially agreed to in order to placate the U.S. and the UK. Within India, experts disagreed over whether to build an atomic bomb, but at the IAEA they wanted to keep their options open by minimizing international controls. The U.S., the UK, and the Soviet Union, meanwhile, refused to accept inspections on their soil. Western European designers of nuclear systems feared that inspections would open the door to commercial spying, accusing the U.S. and the UK of seeking competitive advantage. Western Europe should also receive inspection exemption and remain subject only to Euratom safeguards. “Third world” nations deemed such proposals straightforward moves by the North to dominate the global South.15

The 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) expressed (but did not resolve) all of these tensions. Under the NPT, “nuclear weapons states” pledged not to transfer atomic weapons or explosive devices to “non-nuclear weapons states” and to make “good faith” efforts to reduce their atomic arsenals. Other signatories renounced atomic weapons and agreed to accept IAEA compliance measures. The treaty thus tried to permanently fix which states had nuclear weapons and which didn’t. It also sought to establish the relationship between these by invoking another ontology of global order, that of human rights and “development.” The NPT referred to “the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to . . . nuclear energy for peaceful purposes,” which in turn would be facilitated by international cooperation that would proceed “with due consideration for the needs of the developing areas of the world.”16

The NPT codified global nuclearity but left the IAEA to implement its vision. The agency launched a major “technical assistance” program aimed at developing nations. It also tried to design a safeguards system. This was difficult, and the agency’s solution to the problem of which things were nuclear enough to require safeguards kept changing. Secure in its position on the board, South Africa pushed to exclude mines and ore-processing plants from official definitions so as to minimize external oversight of its industry. The IAEA’s 1968 safeguards document defined a “principal nuclear facility” as “a reactor, a plant for processing nuclear material, irradiated in a reactor, a plant for separating the isotopes of a nuclear material, a plant for processing or fabricating nuclear material (excepting a mine or ore-processing plant).”17 Uranium mines and mills were thus specifically excluded from the category of “principal nuclear facilities.” The 1972 safeguards document further excluded uranium ore from the category of “source material,” thereby exempting its production from the ritual of inspections.18

By offering mechanisms to balance the spread and containment of nuclear things, inspections (and safeguards) themselves served to define nuclearity. For the NPT had never been specific on this point. How would exporters know what they could sell? In 1971, a committee formed to draft a list of things nuclear enough to trigger safeguards.19 Published in 1974, the first trigger list included reactors, fuel fabrication and reprocessing plants, and isotope separation plant equipment. Still, not all “nuclear exporters” agreed with its specifications. Competing lists developed.20 They grew longer and more detailed.21 Much remained unresolved or underspecified. Did uranium ore count as “source material” or not? It depended on the IAEA document. Did yellowcake count as “natural uranium” for export purposes? Also unclear. In any case, safeguards on uranium sales, when they existed, consisted merely of lines in a contract, paper promises that the buyer wouldn’t use the ore for military ends. In and of themselves, uranium ore and yellowcake did not trigger inspections.22

The safeguards/inspections regime didn’t simply aim to preserve the global nuclear weapons order. The regime’s fine-grained distinctions about nuclearity also served as a technopolitical frame for global trade. At the most basic level, it did this by ontologically separating things which could safely be bought and sold from things which could not. Limiting safeguards on uranium sales to lines in a contract represented an accommodation between the exceptionalism of nuclearity and the banality of commerce. This accommodation, in turn, laid down the technopolitical conditions in which “the uranium market” could exist as both concept and object. In the 1940s and 1950s, the U.S. and the UK had strongly resisted the notion of a “market value” for uranium.23 Invoking the specter of Soviet supremacy (and knowing full well that they were the only large-scale buyers at that stage), they’d strong-armed suppliers into cost-plus pricing arrangements and kept contract terms secret. Cold war ideology had thus placed uranium beyond “the market.”24 Only after safeguards on uranium ore became defined as end-use pledges written into sales contracts did the “uranium market” emerge as an object and practice of political economy. A critical component of this process, freedom from direct inspections meant that the production of commercial-grade yellowcake could proceed under the mundane conditions that obtained for any other commodity. Producers paid penalties if the chemical and metallurgical content of their yellowcake didn’t meet the specs laid down by conversion plants, but no one followed the ore from its site of production to its final destination.

These accommodations held sway until the mid-1990s. Until then, inspections consisted of verifying declarations states made concerning their own “nuclear material and activities.” Revelations that inspections had missed secret Iraqi and North Korean weapons programs, however, pushed the IAEA to expand its purview. The resulting “Additional Protocol” (1997) specified a set of technopolitical practices intended to increase the agency’s ability to detect undeclared nuclear activities. For the first time, uranium mines and mills would be included in inspection rituals.25 Adoption of the “Additional Protocol” remained voluntary. If a state signed on, however, the resulting inspections promised a definitive verdict on weapons programs. States would subject themselves to more intrusive inspections precisely to achieve this apparent finality. Each inspection that exonerated a nation of evil intentions would contribute to global security—and market stability.26

The Additional Protocol’s more inclusive prescriptions restored (at least ontologically) some of uranium’s lost nuclearity. Uranium regained nuclearity through other means too—most notably thanks to the Bush administration, which did not accept the verdict of the IAEA’s 2002 inspections in Iraq. Instead, it displaced Iraqi nuclearity in time and space: back into the failed 1990 inspections, and over onto “uranium from Africa.”

Yellowcake from Niger

“Uranium from Africa” offered a powerful motive for invading Iraq. When intelligence officials, journalists, and bloggers began questioning Bush’s claim, they rapidly transformed the phrase into “yellowcake from Niger.” That begged an irresistible headline: “Follow the Yellowcake Road!”27 In The Wizard of Oz, the yellow brick road led travelers to the Emerald City, a place sustained by illusion.28 Similarly, the yellowcake road led American commentators to the forged documents and manipulation of intelligence that had produced the illusion of Iraqi nuclear weapons. The allusion was even more loaded with irony than journalists seemed to realize. As traced by the U.S. media, the yellowcake road led only to American destinations; like its fictional referent, it remained parochial and unidirectional.

As it turns out, there is an actual yellowcake road in Niger, known locally as the route de l’uranium. Over 600 kilometers long, this highway reaches farther north than any other paved road in the country, up to the mining town of Arlit. Since the road’s inauguration in 1981, most Nigérien yellowcake follows the route de l’uranium from Arlit, through Agadez, then on to Tahoua on the edge of the Sahel. There the yellowcake rolls on to another highway and continues south over the border into Benin and down to the port of Cotonou, where it boards ships destined for conversion and enrichment plants in France. Much else besides yellowcake travels on the route de l’uranium, of course, which among other things has helped to revive Agadez as a major stop for trans-Saharan trade, travel, and tourism.29

The history of this very material yellowcake road requires a detour through French nuclear exceptionalism. Nuclear technology was a major frame for remaking national identity in post-WWII France, and nationalism and colonialism went hand-in-hand.30 The founders of the Commissariat à l’Énergie Atomique (CEA) quickly realized that France couldn’t be fully nuclear without its colonies. There was uranium on metropolitan soil, but not enough of it. The U.S. and Britain had turned to Africa in order to fuel their own nuclearity; France did the same. Starting in 1947, CEA prospectors scoured the French colonies in search of uranium. In the decades that followed, they found more than they could have imagined— especially in Madagascar, Gabon, and Niger.

At first, the French geologists who went to Africa in search of uranium saw themselves embarking on a great colonial adventure. But the CEA couldn’t allow this perspective to flourish, at least not formally, and certainly not after decolonization. Instead, it prescribed a new way of thinking about the Self and the Other, in a booklet aimed at “Europeans likely to leave for Africa or Madagascar.” There, CEA agents learned that Africa had changed: “adventure” was still possible, but “not adventure with a capital A. Gone is the time when one could succeed after having left on impulse, as an escape, with a desire to restart from scratch.” The rupture with the colonial past had to take place deep inside the European Self: “Do not harbor any illusions by thinking that ‘once there, you’ll figure it out.’ Bluffing might work in Paris; it will not stand up to the climate of the tropics.” Above all, CEA agents had to remember that they were operating in independent states, whose laws demanded respect. They had to “be sufficiently non-conformist” to learn about “the true face of the African.” French universities trained Africans as doctors, professors, lawyers, administrators, and bishops; this showed that Africans were fully capable of “elevating themselves intellectually.” A similar argument obtained for manual and technical training. Africans were not inferior to Europeans, the booklet admonished—just less developed. Respecting their potential was a matter of national duty: “remember that the CEA and France are often judged through you.”31

This formulation offered a new prescription for the radiance of France, a way of conjugating the colonial past into a nuclear future. But let’s be clear: this future only seemed nuclear and exceptional to CEA employees from metropolitan France. Malagasies, Gabonese, and Nigériens who worked with uranium barely thought about the nuclearity of their work. Nuclearity was not a category of exceptionalism for them—at least, not initially. Uranium, for them, enacted continuities in practices and structures that had become utterly mundane under colonialism: mining and its horrifying accidents; corporate capital and its modes of discipline.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the Africans who paid most attention to the links between their rocks and the exceptional nuclearity of France were heads of state, especially Hamani Diori, the first president of independent Niger. Soon after he came to power in August 1960, he learned about the potential for enormous uranium deposits in the Sahara. Diori immediately began thinking about how such a resource might shape the Nigérien economy. He hoped things would move quickly; in Gabon, the mine had begun producing uranium five years after initial discovery. Not so in Niger: delineating the extent and nature of the reserves proved a tremendous challenge in the desert.32

Once the CEA finally deemed the huge deposits commercially viable, Diori and his advisers bargained long and hard to ensure that the state derived maximum advantage from its resources. Somaïr, the first mining company, formed in 1968; Niger held 20 percent of its initial capital (an investment itself financed by the French state).33 Two years later, negotiations began to form a second company, Cominak, to mine another set of deposits; this time the Nigérien state insisted on a 32 percent participation.34

Diori waited impatiently during the long process of digging the mines, testing treatment methods for the ores, and erecting processing plants. Meanwhile, he followed from afar the French “war of the systems,” a knock-down, drag-out institutional battle in the late 1960s over which reactor design should prevail in France’s future nuclear power development.35 Diori fully grasped how France’s will to national exceptionalism saturated its nuclear dreams, and how the two fused together. How could he not? In his country, the French wanted to translate nuclear exceptionalism into fiscal exemptions by minimizing their tax burden. Diori, of course, sought to maximize tax and other revenues.

A 1961 defense treaty had specified that Niger would give France priority access to uranium and other strategic materials. For Diori, this meant that uranium negotiations had to be conducted at the state-to-state level. He insisted on direct contact with French president Charles de Gaulle and his successor, Georges Pompidou. Both presidents acknowledged the uniqueness of uranium-related negotiations in diplomatic correspondence. In 1968, de Gaulle signed off on the creation of a Commission franco-nigérienne de l’uranium (CFNU), which would provide the forum for discussions on profits, security of supply, development, cooperation, and fiscal revenues.36

Above all, the CFNU discussed price, value, and market. This was a complicated conversation, and to understand some of its terms we need to step out of Niger briefly. While governments, utilities, and the mining industry often referred to “the uranium market,” no one seemed quite sure what this market was, or what its characteristics were. Many in the industry wondered whether it existed at all. Consider, for example, the entirely typical debate held at the 1975 conference of the World Nuclear Fuel Market (WNFM), a U.S.-based trade organization. At issue was whether it might be feasible to mount a futures market for uranium. Here’s one French report on the discussion:

Is it [uranium] like cattle, grain, and soy, a banal commodity that can be the object of speculation and exchange . . . ? The answer according to the Nuclear Assurance Corporation—which organizes these WNFM conferences—is affirmative.

Participants, which include buyers and sellers of uranium, are a bit more skeptical. They point to the uncertain character of the uranium market, whose mechanisms remain confused even for traditional transactions like spot or long-term contracts. How can one . . . envisage a futures market when there isn’t even a real market for cash transactions?37

Similar questions were raised year after year: at international conferences, in contract negotiations, in the production of knowledge about ore reserves.38 The IAEA and the NPT may have framed technopolitical conditions of possibility for a trade in nuclear things, but the objects, organizations, and practices that performed “the uranium market”—an entity whose very existence was perpetually in question—were distributed much more widely (and mundanely). In addition to the purchasing contracts themselves, these included the OECD, which produced “global” estimates of ore reserves in the “free world”; the U.S. broker Nuexco, which began publishing a “spot price” for uranium in 1968; a short-lived uranium cartel in the early 1970s that included South Africa, Canada, France, and the British multinational Rio Tinto Zinc; and many, many others. (It would be 2007 before a futures market for yellowcake was created; a scant two years later, bankruptcy left the Lehman Brothers investment firm holding half a million pounds of yellowcake that it had bought before uranium prices began to plummet—enough, as the financial bloggers put it, to build a nuclear bomb.39)

Ironically, the more such organizations and practices proliferated, the more controversy they generated over the “uranium market” as concept and object. Even if uranium could be treated like any other commodity, brokers couldn’t decide what kind of commodity it was (mineral or fuel?). Nuexco claimed that its monthly “spot price” could serve as a reference point for all transactions. But spot transactions—one-time sales of small lots of ore—formed only a small proportion of uranium sales. Most worldwide transactions fell under long-term contracts. Price formulas in these contracts took into account capital investments that customers had made in the mines, diplomatic links between states, the total quantity of uranium sold, and the time span of the contract. The resulting prices could be wildly different from one contract to the next, and (especially before the mid-1980s) had almost nothing to do with Nuexco’s spot price. How, then, to determine the “value” of uranium, or a “fair price” for a given transaction?

Although unrelated to long-term prices, however, Nuexco’s spot price remained the only published price for uranium: prices in long-term contracts were secret. And so the spot price served as a technopolitical referent, if only in fantasies about possible profit, reports on the future of “the market,” efforts to determine whether deposits were commercially viable, and mining companies’ attempts to attract large investors. When it plummeted, everyone worried. When it rose, everyone celebrated. And if one was the president of a poor country like Niger, one repeatedly questioned the distribution of profits. Especially after a drought in 1970 led to widespread famine. And after neighboring petroleum producers set an example for how to change geopolitical power relations by raising the price of crude oil in 1973. And after France announced the expansion of its nuclear power program later that year. Diori learned that the erection of nuclear power plants brought large bonuses to French rural communities, staggering sums when set against Niger’s national budget. Inspired by OPEC, Diori called for meetings between France, Niger, and Gabon in order to negotiate price and profits.40

Diori sought to place these discussions under the rubric of nuclear exceptionalism. One of his advisers would later describe the “Nigérien thesis on the unusual character of uranium,” which argued that “the content of uranium transcended commercialism.”41 Diori never lost sight of the fusion between nuclear exceptionalism and French national identity. During one meeting in early 1974, one of the CEA’s directors admitted that “over the next decade, Nigérien uranium was indispensable to the French energy boom.” Diori reasoned that if Niger could contribute to the exceptional nuclearity of France, then surely France could make exceptional contributions to the economic development of Niger. (Gabonese delegates supported Diori on this point—after all, more funds could only be good! But for them the stakes weren’t as high: Niger had little to sell besides uranium, while Gabon derived the vast majority of its revenues from oil.)

In response, the French delegation attempted to de-nuclearize uranium by making claims about the banality of the market. CEA executives may have questioned the existential possibility of a uranium market while attending conferences in Europe and North America. But when they traveled south to Niamey, they insisted that the only possible way to determine the value of uranium was to treat it like an ordinary market commodity. Revenues to African states could conceivably increase, they argued, but only if pegged to the international “re-valuation” of uranium. To Nigérien ears, their explanation sounded hollow and condescending:

The recent increase in the price of uranium in international transactions allows us to anticipate a re-valuation of the price of African uranium.

The French delegation affirms France’s desire to give Nigérien and Gabonese producers the benefit of the best possible market conditions . . . . She declares herself ready to study with Niger and Gabon the means for conducting a common action to push for the re-valuation of international uranium prices.42

The African delegations countered that when it came to uranium, the problem of calculability43 transcended ordinary commercial considerations:

Outside of the calculable parameters, there are other more significant ones that are not a function of calculation, such as the economic independence of France, the guaranteed satisfaction of its energy needs, a substantial savings in foreign currency and the reinforcement of the franc zone, and finally the solidarity of the three countries which could together represent 15% of the world uranium market if they coordinated [their efforts].44

Nigériens and Gabonese thus appealed to France’s particular breed of nuclear exceptionalism. Referring to the “planetary dimensions” of uranium-related problems, they insisted that this exceptionalism itself had a value which could be expressed (among other ways) in terms of market shares.

Negotiations ground to a halt, without resolution. In April 1974, two months after the big meeting, Diori was overthrown in a military coup by Lieutenant-Colonel Seyni Kountché. French troops did not come to Diori’s aid (as they had in Gabon in 1964, when a military coup threatened to unseat president Léon M’Ba). Some rumors hold that France was only too glad to see him go, while others insist that Pompidou’s sudden death two weeks earlier made coordinating a rescue impossible.

Whatever the case, Diori’s opponents dismissed his efforts to stand up to the French on matters nuclear, characterizing these as no more than “demagogic declarations aimed at international opinion.”45 They accused him of pandering to French capital and allowing deplorable living conditions for Nigérien mineworkers. Kountché promised to take a harder line with the former colonial power. Rather than pushing for greater revenues from sales that would in the end still be conducted by the French, the new president negotiated an agreement that entitled Niger to sell—directly and independently—a proportion of yellowcake output equal to the percentage of its capital holdings in the mining companies. Other non-French investors in the mines could do the same.

Reliable, accessible sources on subsequent contracts signed by Niger are scant. Most agree that customers for the Nigérien state’s portion of uranium included:46

• Libya—perhaps up to 1,200 tons in the early to mid-1970s. These purchases apparently occurred between the time that Libya signed the NPT (1968) and the time that it ratified it (1975).47 Some reports suggested a second sale, perhaps up to 1,500 tons, in 1980–81.48
• Iraq—around 300 tons in 1981.49
• Pakistan—around 500 tons in 1979, mostly routed secretly through Libya; perhaps more in the mid-1980s.

Under Kountché, the state apparently found it more lucrative to plunge into “the uranium market” directly.

During these years, Niger’s market had a distinct technopolitical geography—one that many Western governments would find increasingly dangerous and come to characterize as a black market. Niger—like France— didn’t accede to the NPT until 1992. Local and regional issues mattered far more to its leaders than cold war superpower politics. For example, Kountché threatened to cut off supplies to Qaddafi in January 1981, after Libya attempted to annex Chad.50 But he apparently changed his mind a few months later, reportedly declaring that Niger needed the funds so badly that “if the devil asks me to sell him uranium today, I will sell it to him.”51 Kountché’s exceptionalism was not that of the NPT heavyweights; compared to the intense economic pressures faced by his government, northern nuclear anxieties seemed distant and insignificant. For a time, meanwhile, France also found advantages in partitioning responsibility for sales. When it came under fire after news coverage of sales to Libya and Pakistan, it could plausibly deny involvement in these transactions by insisting that each shareholder controlled only its own portion of mine product.52 In some respects, then, allowing this wide range of political tensions to fester enabled the mines themselves to thrive.

In the end, however, there were limits to how much uranium Niger could sell on its own. It had begun resorting to spot transactions, and in 1981 the spot price began to decline. Other spot sellers could respond to the drop by stockpiling uranium in the hope that the price would increase again. The Nigérien state could not afford that strategy.53 The Cogéma—a French parastatal company formed in 1977 to take the nuclear fuel cycle over from the CEA—agreed to fill in the gap. But its chairman noted self-righteously that “the best support for Niger is to not give them artificial prices”; simply guaranteeing sales would be far more valuable.54 After several more rough years, the two states renegotiated arrangements again, leaving Cogéma in charge of marketing Niger’s uranium. Later, this renewed French control of marketing led Joseph Wilson—the American diplomat sent by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to investigate whether Saddam Hussein had sought Nigérien yellowcake in the 1990s—to conclude that no recent sales had occurred.

Before we leave Niger altogether it’s worth noting that transnational and regional technopolitical geographies continue to shape the power of nuclear things in Niger. The spot price of uranium skyrocketed in 2005– 2007, precipitating worldwide interest in Nigérien reserves. In 2007, president Mamadou Tandja demanded that France increase the price paid for yellowcake, and that it (once again) make some available for Niger to sell on its own. Anxious not to lose its largest uranium supplier in the midst of the world’s biggest boom in reactor construction, Areva (the successor to the Cogéma) agreed on both counts.55 The concession paid off: in January 2009, Areva obtained a license to operate the new Imouraren mine, which company and government both proudly claim will make Niger the world’s second largest uranium producer. Nevertheless, the Nigérien state continues to hedge its bets and has also entered into uranium partnerships with Chinese and Canadian companies.

Within Niger, a group of armed rebels known as the Mouvement des Nigériens pour la Justice (MNJ) responded to these developments by demanding a greater part of uranium revenue and jobs for the Tuareg nomads who inhabit the desert into which the mines were carved. Their grievances had a long history, one that spans the Sahara and reaches out in many non-uranic directions.56 Nevertheless, uranium—with all its ambiguous, fluctuating nuclearity—certainly helped the MNJ attract international attention. Its November 2007 blog post entitled “La route de l’uranium” ended with the following warning:

AREVA,

From now on, all traffic on the uranium axis is forbidden!

Any truck that travels there will do so at its own risk.

The MNJ will no longer let Areva and Tandja decide the fate of Nigériens,

Will no longer let Areva pillage our Country Will no longer let Areva destroy our Environment,

Will no longer let Areva mine the hope of a whole generation of Youth who aspire to more Equity and Justice

The MNJ will treat Areva, and its subsidiaries, the same way that it treats the Nigérien Armed Militias [i.e., the Nigérien armed forces]!57

Making good on its threats, the MNJ conducted several raids on mine exploration outposts and kidnapped four Areva employees (releasing them unharmed after a few days). Tandja long refused to recognize the group, calling them terrorists and bandits. The multitude of interests invested in the Imouraren mine may change his position, but at this writing it is too soon to tell.58

Meanwhile, some Somaïr and Cominak employees have begun to think about their work as a specifically nuclear activity. Concerned about the effects of radiation exposure on their health and environment, they contacted French legal and anti-nuclear NGOs, which in turn conducted preliminary studies finding exposure levels in excess of international norms.59 At a press conference in March 2007, these groups threatened Areva with a lawsuit if it didn’t volunteer compensation and clean up its operations.

Finally, how did Nigériens react to Bush’s claims? One civil society group called for a libel suit against the U.S. government. Detailing the saga of how forged documents and contradictory intelligence reports led up to the Iraq war, writer and activist Moustapha Kadi concluded in February 2007:

Faced with all this irrefutable proof, George Bush could do no better than present a hypocritical verbal apology to our impoverished, bruised nation. The damages suffered by Niger and its 13 million Nigériens were not on the order of the day! For this enormous lie, which destroyed the image and credibility of our country, it would be normal to press charges against the USA . . . in order to obtain at least 1000 billion CFA francs (about 2 billion dollars) of compensation for Niger. But despite everything, history will show that Nigérien politicians and heads of state kept their traps shut at a moment when the dignity and honor of their country was gratuitously dragged in the mud by a global superpower!60

Like presidents, rebels, and mineworkers before him, Kadi too sought ways to marshal the political promises of nuclearity, using his country’s nuclear innocence (in this instance) to call attention to its political and economic plight.

The yellowcake road in Niger took us into the heart of the uranium market and out to some of the most contested land in the Sahara. Along the way, we saw how nuclear things are embedded in extreme imbalances of geopolitical power and wealth—and the multiple ways in which different actors draw upon them to maintain or redress those imbalances. We saw how nuclear things could be claimed as exceptional or mundane, depending on the context. And we glimpsed, just for a moment, the tenuous border between licit trade and black markets. Let’s take this last point up in another venue.

The Technopolitics of Provenance

American journalists doubtless felt pleased with their witty injunction to “follow the yellowcake road,” but the wordplay wasn’t new in 2003. In 1980, the same phrase headlined a documentary aired on British television. That journey down a yellowcake road took aim at the Rössing uranium mine in Namibia. The documentary was part of a transnational effort to persuade Western governments and Japan to stop purchasing uranium from apartheid states in southern Africa. For the Namibian liberation struggle and its European allies, such an embargo played a key role in efforts to end South African colonial occupation of Namibia. In this instance, it was the provenance of uranium that underwent technopolitical transformations and redistributions (more than—though never divorced from— its nuclearity or its markets).

Rössing Uranium Limited began exporting uranium ore from the Namibian desert in 1976. Still operating today, the company is a subsidiary of the British-based multinational Rio Tinto Zinc (RTZ). In the 1970s and 1980s, other investors included the French-based Total Compagnie Minière (TCF), the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI), and the South African parastatal entity known as the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC, which also controlled most of the voting shares). Before the mine opened, RTZ secured large long-term contracts with German and Japanese utilities and with the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA). By the late 1970s Rössing boasted the largest uranium open pit in the world.61

On many readings of international law, Rössing’s operation was illegal from the start. South Africa had taken over administration of South West Africa (as Namibia was then known) from the German empire after WWI. After WWII the United Nations asked that the territory revert to international trusteeship in preparation for independence. South Africa refused, intensifying its colonial control after the National Party came to power in 1948 on the platform of apartheid. Starting in 1966, the UN formally ended South Africa’s mandate to govern the territory, shifted that mandate to the newly created UN Council for Namibia (UNCN) pending independence, and demanded the immediate withdrawal of South African troops. In 1971 the International Court of Justice ruled that these UN measures were binding. In 1973 the UN General Assembly recognized the freedom-fighting South West Africa People’s Organization (SWAPO) as the “sole authentic representative” of the Namibian people.62 Emboldened by the refusal of several countries to recognize the UNCN’s authority, however, the apartheid state refused to budge.63 In September 1974 the UNCN issued its first decree. Known simply as Decree No. 1, the edict prohibited the extraction and distribution of any natural resource from Namibian territory without the UNCN’s explicit permission, provided for the seizure of any illegally exported material, and warned that violators could be held liable for damages. Projected to become Namibia’s largest mining operation, Rössing was the decree’s primary target.

Many Western governments refused to accept Decree No. 1 as binding. Legal scholars and government officials spilled a great deal of ink on whether the decree was juridically sound, whether and how it might apply, and which courts might enforce its application.64 But the bottom line, as everyone knew, was that Rössing aimed to supply an average of at least 10 percent of the (capitalist, Western) uranium market. Parsing by country, this translated into one-third of Britain’s needs, and probably more for Japan. Decree No. 1 therefore sparked a fifteen-year international struggle over the legitimacy of Rössing uranium.

Starting in 1975, the UNCN sent out numerous delegations to convince governments to suspend their dealings with Namibia. They heard many expressions of support for the independence process, but before the mid-1980s only Sweden (among the large Western uranium consumers) pledged to boycott Rössing’s product. Activists stepped up the pressure in a wide variety of forums. In the UK and the Netherlands, they joined forces with the anti-nuclear movement, resulting in organizations like the British CANUC (Campaign Against the Namibian Uranium Contracts). The UNCN held a week-long hearing in July 1980, during which experts and activists from Europe, Japan, and the U.S. gave presentations on Rössing’s operations and contracts.65 Testimony focused on the relationship between southern Africa and the Western nuclear industry,66 arguing that all purchases of Namibian uranium effectively supported the colonial occupation via the taxes paid by Rössing. In an analysis of “global” uranium supply and demand,67 one economist noted that southern African uranium “could account for as much as 50 per cent of the total . . . available for net export.” Reminding his audience that South African (IDC) shares in Rössing gave the apartheid state voting control of the company, he suggested that Pretoria thereby had “leverage not only as regards the supply and price of uranium but also as regards the formulation of foreign policy towards South Africa itself and . . . [its] present position in Namibia.”68

Other efforts followed these hearings. In 1981, for example, SWAPO helped organize a seminar for West European trade unions. Presentations on living and working conditions at Rössing and on the mine’s paramilitary security forces appealed to the loyalties of the international socialist movement. More pragmatically, the seminar detailed the secret movements of Rössing uranium through European planes, ships, docks, and roads, noting that European transport workers had unknowingly handled barrels of radioactive substances.69 A 1982 seminar organized by the American Committee on Africa on the role of transnational corporations in Namibia focused heavily on uranium, reprising many of the arguments mounted by European activists. In subsequent years CANUC redoubled its efforts to enlist the British peace movement.70

Despite all the bad publicity, Rössing’s customers held firm in their contracts through the mid-1980s. The company helped: it responded to the pressure by papering over the transnational dimensions of its operations. To address “the unwillingness of certain customers to deal direct with a SWA company,”71 RTZ set up a front company in Switzerland under the name RTZ Mineral Services (Minserve). Customers could thus sign contracts that didn’t mention Rössing, whereupon Minserve would sign corresponding “back-to-back” contracts with the mine.72 Minserve’s marketing emphasized that RTZ owned uranium mines in three countries; should one mine prove unable to deliver, ore from elsewhere could take its place. Management referred to customers by number rather than name to reinforce discretion. This protected not just Rössing’s customers but also its board of directors (i.e., investors), who officially remained ignorant of customer identity and contract prices. Until late 1985 (when the threat of sanctions made such topics impossible to ignore), the “market reports” Minserve delivered at company board meetings in Windhoek pointedly avoided discussing how anti-apartheid activism constrained Rössing’s business. The omission was especially glaring because the reports discussed just about every other international political development affecting the flow of uranium.

Nevertheless, records of Minserve’s London sales meetings show that customers began expressing unease in the early 1980s. Japanese utilities in particular worried that their government might cave to international pressure and began asking Minserve to substitute non-Namibian origin material. To secure new contracts, Minserve had to devise increasingly arcane arrangements. In September 1983, for example, one customer who’d previously held a direct contract with Rössing made a new inquiry. A sales associate reported:

Politically [they] cannot buy Namibian material but they are willing to discuss taking swapped material in the form of spot deliveries of UF6 [uranium hexafluoride, the feed for enrichment plants]. Any contract should preferably be with a third party, either the converter or the contracting party and not an RTZ Company.73

Minserve’s role as a front was an open secret, and utilities increasingly sought to maximize their distance from RTZ.

As international pressure for Namibian independence mounted, Rössing and Minserve began using “flag swaps” to fulfill contracts. Such arrangements could follow several scenarios. In one, the material would be re-labeled by conversion plants. Comurhex (in France) and BNFL (in Britain) proved particularly cooperative: after they converted Rössing’s yellowcake into uranium hexafluoride, they would state its origin as French or British on the customs declaration forms accompanying the material to enrichment plants in the U.S.74 In a second scenario, Minserve would swap contracts with another RTZ customer: the contract originally intended to use Rössing yellowcake would get filled with uranium from another RTZ mine, while the contract signed by that mine would get filled with Rössing uranium. This scenario depended on the willingness of the other RTZ customer to accept Namibian uranium; Swiss utilities usually obliged happily.75 Yet another scenario involved two conversion plants shuffling titles to uranium oxide and hexafluoride. All told, the quantity of swapped material rose from a few hundred tons in 1982 to several thousand by 1985–1986.76

At first, the pressures that made Rössing uranium increasingly illicit also made it more profitable. Sales contracts were denominated in U.S. dollars, but most costs were incurred in South African rand. As opposition to apartheid drove down the value of the rand, profits mounted: in 1985 Rössing showed the highest profit to date, recorded at over 190 million rand after taxes.77 This was especially remarkable given “the continued weakness in the world uranium market.”78 Still, a favorable exchange rate would not help if Rössing lost all its buyers. Talks on Namibian independence had stalled and South African state violence had intensified. In 1985 even the staunchest allies of the apartheid state began discussing full-scale mandatory sanctions. Rössing didn’t fret too much about interruptions to its supply chain, since it could circumvent restrictions with purchasing agents, offshore accounts, and more front companies.79 But Minserve did worry about specific prohibitions on the import of Namibian uranium: Rössing’s main customers had “enough of the product and could manage quite well without buying any more . . . [They] might welcome an excuse to renege on their contract.”80 At best, flag swaps and related measures would only give Rössing some breathing space. “We have to accept that in any coordinated imposition of sanctions uranium is the easiest material for the authorities to trace and block. Without the assistance of the converter or the falsification of origin records it is inevitable that the sales of Rössing material will be severely curtailed. . . . Any study on the counter effects of sanctions on Rössing has therefore to be one of damage limitation.”81

One form of damage limitation involved working the finer points of anti-apartheid legislation, particularly in the U.S. after Congress overrode President Reagan’s veto of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act (CAAA) in October 1986. By proscribing the import of southern African material to the U.S. the CAAA paralleled the IAEA’s trigger lists, albeit keyed to matters of provenance rather than nuclearity. Its risks for Rössing were considerable: a significant portion of its yellowcake went to plants in the U.S. for conversion to hexafluoride. In addition, much of Rössing’s yellowcake converted elsewhere went to U.S. plants for enrichment. Stopping the flow of Namibian-origin uranium oxide or hexafluoride through U.S. plants could therefore shut down Rössing’s business altogether. To help work around the bill, Minserve hired the consulting firm Wrightmon USA for a monthly retainer of $15,000.82

Diane Harmon, the firm’s president, employed a double strategy to maximize the amount of Namibian uranium imported into the U.S. On the one hand, she formed an alliance with U.S. conversion plants which stood to lose a lot of money if Rössing’s business disappeared. On the other hand, she also exploited a loophole in the CAAA that went against the interests of the converters. Rössing yellowcake that entered the U.S. directly clearly counted as Namibian. But if that yellowcake got converted and relabeled as British UF6, hadn’t its nationality changed? In which case, surely it could enter the U.S. as enrichment feed? If Rössing transferred all its conversion business to European plants, its customers could maintain their U.S. enrichment contracts. Harmon pointed out that U.S. enrichment plants would suffer if they lost southern African feed; combined with other import restrictions, the impact might force one of the plants to close. Job losses would ensue.83 By the end of 1987, Harmon had obtained a ruling that

South African–origin uranium ore and uranium oxide that is substantially transformed into another form of uranium in a country other than South Africa is not to be treated as South African uranium ore or uranium oxide and is therefore not barred.84

This became known as the “UF6 loophole.” Pleased with this outcome, Minserve asked Sir Alistair Frame, RTZ’s well-connected chairman, to “have a word” with BNFL and the British Foreign Office to ensure that they continued to relabel converted material as UK-origin.85

In the Netherlands, meanwhile, the technopolitics of provenance also proved useful in stalling a case filed by the UNCN in the District Court of The Hague. The case charged Urenco (a British/German/Dutch uranium enrichment consortium) and the Dutch government with violations of Decree No. 1 because they allowed the passage of Namibian uranium through Urenco’s enrichment plant in Almelo. Since the Netherlands did recognize the UNCN’s sovereignty, the court should prohibit Urenco from carrying out enrichment orders that used Namibian uranium. In response, Urenco claimed that British and French conversion plants mixed Rössing’s yellowcake with material from other nations in the normal course of operations, making it technologically impossible to determine which bits of Urenco’s uranium hexafluoride feed had once been Namibian.86

The gathering momentum of anti-apartheid measures steadily weakened the technopolitics of provenance. In 1988, U.S. congressional Democrats began working to close the UF6 loophole. The State Department’s Office of Nonproliferation and Export Policy did as well, declaring that “it is not possible to avoid the provisions of the Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act by swapping flags or obligations on natural uranium physically of South African origin before it enters the USA.”87 Nevertheless, the technopolitics of provenance had worked well enough: they enabled Rössing to delay the implementation of restrictions which could have put it out of business. And in the end, delay sufficed. SWAPO, the South African state, and other negotiating parties signed an independence accord in December 1988. Under the circumstances, the UNCN decided not to pursue its lawsuit against Urenco. Namibia’s official transition to independence began in April 1989, with free elections held in November. In March 1990, Namibia formally became independent, and Rössing uranium became legitimate.

When does licit trade become black (or gray) marketeering? The answer depends on provenance: not just of the material being traded, but also of the traders and those who monitor them. Rössing, Minserve, and the various facilities that conducted or abetted flag swaps never thought of themselves as engaging in black market activities. For anti-apartheid activists, however, the trade in Namibian yellowcake was born illicit. As Rössing uranium went further underground, the technologies of transportation, conversion, and enrichment increasingly served to conceal its origins and movements. The technopolitics of the capitalist uranium market worked hard to invest yellowcake from southern Africa with sufficient legitimacy to enable its circulation, while activists strove to reveal these efforts as technopolitics. Marked power imbalances—between multinational corporations and freedom fighters, between international organizations perpetually fighting for their own legitimacy and wealthy nation-states—shaped the strategies and opportunities available to these different actors, and the resulting boundaries between licit trade and illicit flows.

“Uranium from Africa”

Unresolvable tensions between technopolitical exceptionalism and economic banality reverberate through the history of uranium, as it oscillated between apocalypse-inducing rock and tradeable commodity. In 1957, uranium ore was nuclear enough to give apartheid South Africa a central role in the IAEA. A decade later, the nuclear industry in the West found that creating markets for reactors—and for uranium itself—would go more smoothly if uranium mines and yellowcake plants lost their status as nuclear facilities for purposes of inspections and safeguards. As one outcome of efforts to reconcile nuclear exceptionalism with the mundanity of markets, nuclearity no longer inhered in raw materials.

In the 1970s, France could thus counter Niger’s attempt to value its yellowcake in terms of nuclear exceptionalism by framing uranium in ordinary market terms. The tremendous imbalance of power and wealth gave France the upper hand. When the two states finally did renegotiate their marketing arrangements, that same imbalance thrust Niger into sales contracts that seriously undermined (the capitalist world’s view of) the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. In Niger, Western nuclear exceptionalism slammed into postcolonial capitalism, regional politics, and the horrible mundanity of poverty. Yellowcake from Niger may not have gone to Iraq in 2002, but it did so in 1981; chances are overwhelming that it ended up in the Pakistani bomb of 1998, and that it would have fueled a Libyan bomb had Qaddafi not renounced his effort to build one. Divesting uranium of nuclearity did push Nigérien yellowcake into a market, just not a licit market by NPT definitions. France’s refusal to include nuclear exceptionalism in the “market” value of African uranium turned out to be risky business.

The distinction between licit and illicit market activities depended on one’s place in the geography of nuclear things. From the late 1970s onward, Namibian yellowcake played a central role in the (cold war, capitalist) uranium market. Its presence and its price helped keep conversion and enrichment plants in business; it fueled power reactors as well as bombs. When the liberation struggles in southern Africa threatened to render its uranium illicit, producers recruited these allies and their technopolitical mechanisms in an increasingly desperate (and ultimately successful) effort to remain in business. In this instance provenance, rather than nuclearity or markets, became reconfigured. The technopolitics of provenance not only served to materially intertwine licit trade and black markets; they also enacted a profound symbolic erasure of African things from Western nuclear systems.

We cannot fully account for the power of nuclear things without understanding the many histories of uranium from Africa. Rendering these histories visible requires us to grapple with multiple performances of nuclear exceptionalism, and with the ongoing tensions between those performances and the mundanity of markets, the exigencies of poverty, and the sovereignty of states. Any commitment to analyzing technologies that lay claim to global power—nuclear or not, exceptional or mundane—demands a transnational approach fully grounded in local and regional histories, however fractured or fragmented.

In 2004, the U.S. Senate conducted an investigation into the full range of intelligence claims used to justify the Iraq war. Among its many findings:

interagency consensus was that Iraq’s efforts to acquire uranium were not key to the argument that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. . . . [T]he key judgments [about Iraq’s ambitions] were drawn from a CIA paper which only highlighted the acquisition of aluminum tubes as the reason Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program.88

Information about the tubes had genuinely concerned CIA experts, although officials in other intelligence agencies found such evidence weak and misleading.89 Evidence concerning “uranium from Africa,” however, had seemed flimsy to everyone. Experts contested it from the start and fought to leave it out of their reports. Why, then, did the weakest piece of evidence—the piece that was actually fabricated, rather than merely misinterpreted—come to play the starring role in the buildup to the war?

“Aluminum tubes from an undisclosed location” just didn’t have the same power as “uranium from Africa.”

1. The quotes are from Rice’s appearance on CNN on 8 September 2002, available at http://archives.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/09/08/iraq.debate/ (accessed 21 May 2009).

2. David Albright, “Iraq’s Aluminum Tubes: Separating Fact from Fiction” (Institute for Science and International Security, 5 December 2003), available at http://www.isisonline.org/publications/iraq/ (accessed 21 May 2009). My thanks to Alex Montgomery for this reference.

3. In fact, Secretary of State Colin Powell’s presentation to the UN Security Council in February 2003 didn’t even mention the uranium claim, supposedly because Powell himself found it unconvincing. The evidence that he did present also proved weak and questionable later on, but an analysis of those issues lies beyond the scope of this essay.

4. Iraq had acquired uranium from Niger, Portugal, and Brazil in the 1970s, when launching its nuclear program, but had stopped these purchases in the 1980s. Bush’s claim did not refer to these earlier purchases. See Joseph Cirincione, “Niger Uranium: Still a False Claim,” Carnegie Proliferation Brief, vol. 7, no. 12, available at http://www.carnegieendow ment.org/publications/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1595 (accessed 9 November 2009).

5. Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, Mass., 1998; new edition, 2009).

6. The introductory material in this section draws on Gabrielle Hecht, “Nuclear Ontologies,” Constellations 13, no. 3 (September 2006): 320–31.

7. Office of Technology Assessment, Nuclear Safeguards and the International Atomic Energy Agency, OTA-ISS-615, April 1995, Appendix B.

8. In 1956, members of the first category were the U.S., the USSR, the UK, France, and Canada; members of the second were South Africa, Brazil, Japan, India, and Australia. See David Fischer, History of the International Atomic Energy Agency: The First Forty Years (Vienna, 1997).

9. “International Atomic Energy Agency,” annex to South Africa minute no. 79/2, 28/7/56, pp 10–11, National Archives of South Africa (hereafter NASA), BLO 349 ref. PS 17/109/3, vol. 2. The position of South Africa vis-à-vis the IAEA is thoroughly documented in the BLO 349, BVV84, and BPA 25 series of these archives.

10. South Africa’s uranium was located in the same mines that produced its gold. In the decade following WWII, supplying uranium to the U.S. and Britain saved many of these mines from economic collapse and served as conduits for massive foreign investment in the nation’s industrial infrastructure. See Thomas Borstelmann, Apartheid’s Reluctant Uncle: The United States and Southern Africa in the Early Cold War (New York, 1993); Jonathan E. Helmreich, Gathering Rare Ores: The Diplomacy of Uranium Acquisition, 1943–1954 (Princeton, N.J., 1986); and David Fig, Uranium Road: Questioning South Africa’s Nuclear Direction (Johannesburg, 2004).

11. I elaborate on this point in Gabrielle Hecht, “Negotiating Global Nuclearities: Apartheid, Decolonization, and the Cold War in the making of the IAEA,” in “Global Power Knowledge: Science, Technology, and International Affairs,” ed. John Krige and Kai-Henrik Barth, special issue, Osiris 21 (July 2006): 25–48. For an even more detailed analysis, see Astrid Forland, “Negotiating Supranational Rules: The Genesis of the International Atomic Energy Agency Safeguards System” (Dr. Art. thesis, University of Bergen, 1997). For parallel developments with respect to Euratom, see John Krige, “The Peaceful Atom as Political Weapon: Euratom and American Foreign Policy in the Late 1950s,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 38, no. 1 (2008): 9–48.

12. Donald Sole, “Uranium Sales Survey: Interim Report on Continental Western Europe,” 8 June 1959, NASA, HEN 2756 ref. 477/1/17.

13. For example, as reported in AEB Sales Committee, Minutes of the 5th meeting, 24 February 1961, NASA, HEN 2756 ref. 477/1/17 (among many other documents in this series).

14. A. J. Brink to H. R. P. A. Kotzenberg, “Sale of Uranium by France,” 14 March 1962, NASA, HEN 2756 ref. 477/1/17.

15. Lawrence Scheinman, The International Atomic Energy Agency and World Nuclear Order (Washington, D.C., 1987); Itty Abraham, The Making of the Indian Atomic Bomb: Science, Secrecy, and the Postcolonial State (New York, 1998); George Perkovich, India’s Nuclear Bomb: The Impact on Global Proliferation (Berkeley, 1999); Forland.

16. Article IV of The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (signed at Washington, London, and Moscow, 1 July 1968), emphasis mine. For the full text of the treaty and the U.S. State Department’s triumphalist version of its history, see http:// www.state.gov/www/global/arms/treaties/npt1.html (accessed 9 November 2009). Hugh Gusterson has insightfully called the worldview implemented and legitimated by the NPT “nuclear orientalism”; see Gusterson, “Nuclear Weapons and the Other in the Western Imagination,” Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 1 (February 1999): 111–43.

17. IAEA, INFCIRC/66/Rev. 2, 16 September 1968.

18. IAEA, INFCIRC/153 (Corrected), June 1972. Article 112 reads: “nuclear material means any source or any special fissionable material as defined in Article XX of the Statute. The term source material shall not be interpreted as applying to ore or ore residue.”

19. This was the so-called Zangger committee (after its chairman, Claude Zangger), initially composed of 15 states that were “suppliers or potential suppliers of nuclear material and equipment”; IAEA, INFCIRC/209/Rev. 1, Annex.

20. Notably, two trigger lists developed in parallel: one under the rubric of INFCIRC/209, and another under the rubric of INFCIRC/254. Different nations adhered to different lists; the two streams were brought into synch in 1977 but continue to develop separately at this writing.

21. For example, IAEA, INFCIRC/209/Rev. 1/Mod. 4, 26 April 1999.

22. Gabrielle Hecht, “A Cosmogram for Nuclear Things,” Isis 98 (March 2007): 100–8.

23. Helmreich (n. 10 above), and Margaret Gowing, Independence and Deterrence: Britain and Atomic Energy, 1945–1952 (London, 1974).

24. Early (failed) proposals to use the IAEA as an international fuel bank would have placed uranium beyond “the market” in a slightly different way, by fully centralizing its distribution.

25. For a summary of these measures, see the IAEA’s fact sheet, “IAEA Safeguards Overview: Comprehensive Safeguards Agreements and Additional Protocols,” available at http://www.iaea.org/Publications/Factsheets/English/sg_overview.html (accessed 29 June 2006).

26. As of May 2006, 107 nations had signed Additional Protocols, 75 of which put them into force.

27. The phrase was a subheading in Michael Duffy and James Carney, “Iraq: A Question of Trust,” Time, 13 July 2003, available at http://www.time.com/time/printout/ 0,8816,1005234,00.html (accessed 10 February 2009). It became the title phrase in Michael Isikoff and Evan Thomas, “Follow the Yellowcake Road,” Newsweek, 21 July 2003, available at http://www.newsweek.com/id/57977/output/print (accessed 10 February 2009). More recently, it headed an editorial: Scott Horton, “Follow the Yellowcake Road,” Harper’s, 10 April 2007, available at http://www.harpers.org/archive/2007/04/ horton-follow-the-yellowcake-road (accessed 9 November 2009).

28. Given how much more cultural currency (at least in the U.S.) the film has over L. Frank Baum’s book The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Chicago, 1900), I’m assuming the reference is primarily cinematic; in any case, the difference is irrelevant for this purpose.

29. Emmanuel Grégoire, Touaregs du Niger: Le destin d’un mythe (Paris, 1999).

30. Hecht, The Radiance of France (n. 5 above).

31. CEA/DP/DREM, Groupement Afrique-Madagascar, “Notice d’information destinée aux Européens susceptibles de partir pour l’Afrique ou Madagascar (1.2.63),” 2 (Cogéma archives, Bessines). For more, see Gabrielle Hecht, “Rupture-Talk in the Nuclear Age: Conjugating Colonial Power in Africa,” Social Studies of Science 32, nos. 5–6 (October–December 2002): 691–728.

32. Gabrielle Hecht, “Quelques mots coloniaux à propos de la nucléarité exceptionnelle de la France, et de la banalité du nucléaire français,” Cosmopolitiques 16 (septembre 2007): 181–95. Parts of this argument appeared in Gabrielle Hecht, “Uranium from Africa,” Chimurenga 14: Everyone Has Their Indian (March 2009): n.p.

33. Somaïr stands for Société des Mines de l’Aïr. The CEA’s initial participation was 40 percent, and the CFMU and Mokta—which had invested in uranium mining in France and Gabon—each put up 20 percent of the initial capital. The proportions allocated to non-Nigériens would change as more investors bought in, but the proportion held by the state of Niger increased to over 35 percent by 1988. See Antoine Paucard, La Mine et les mineurs de l’uranium français. III: Le Temps des Grandes Aventures, 1959–1973 (Brive, 1996), 264–72, and Robert Bodu, Les Secrets des Cuves d’attaque: 40 ans de traitement des minerais d’uranium (Vélizy, 1994), 79.

34. Cominak stands for Compagnie minière d’Akouta. Though initial agreements were signed in 1970, Cominak didn’t formally come into existence until June 1974, after the commercial viability of the operation had been established to everyone’s satisfaction, and also after Diori was ousted by a coup d’état. Over half the participation assigned to Niger—i.e., 18 percent of the total capital—would be free. Other investors included the CEA (34 percent), OURD (Overseas Uranium Resources Development Company, a Japanese firm, 25 percent), and ENUSA (the Spanish Empresa Nacional de Uranio SA, 10 percent). See Paucard, 287–92, and Bodu, 125.

35. See Hecht, The Radiance of France, chap. 8.

36. Jacques Baulin, Conseiller du Président Diori (Paris, 1986); Jacques Foccart, Le Général en Mai. Journal de l’Elysée, tome II (Paris, 1998).

37. “Principales Informations Nucléaires,” Octobre–Novembre 1975, p. 6 (although unattributed, this document is clearly part of a series of documents produced by the Cogéma for its subsidiaries), COMUF archives, Mounana, Gabon.

38. These debates played out in numerous sites over the course of two decades, including the meetings of the World Nuclear Fuel Market and the symposia hosted by the Uranium Institute in London on uranium supply and demand. See the annual proceedings of both of these meetings. A full analysis of these debates must await my book-length treatment of uranium’s African histories.

39. See for example the Bloomberg announcement at http://www.bloomberg.com/ apps/news?pid=email_en&sid=aNJJYNBs1rQA (accessed 15 April 2009).

40. Baulin; André Salifou, Le Niger (Paris, 2002); Grégoire (n. 29 above); François Martin, Le Niger du Président Diori: 1960–1974 (Paris, 1991).

41. “l’uranium [était] réellement un métal à contenu extra-commercial”; Baulin, 101–19. As of this writing, archives that might enable me to deepen or nuance this discussion remain closed.

42. Cited in Baulin, 116.

43. On “calculability” in this theoretical context, see especially Michel Callon, ed., The Laws of the Market (Hoboken, N.J., 1998), and Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, 2002).

44. Cited in Baulin, 117.

45. “Niger: Le prix de l’uranium,” Politique-Hebdo, 4 avril 1974, quoted in Martin, 373.

46. Figures culled from information compiled by the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI) and posted in its country profiles at http://www.nti.org/. See also International Institute for Strategic Studies, Nuclear Black Markets: Pakistan, A. Q. Khan, and the Rise of Proliferation Networks, A Net Assessment (London, 2007).

47. Qaddafi had refused the central premise of nuclear exceptionalism expressed in the NPT, declaring in 1974 that “the future will be for the atom. . . . Atomic weapons will be like traditional ones. . . . And we in Libya will have our share of this new weapon”; quoted in John Yemma, “Will ‘New Boys’ Joining Nuclear Club Be Responsible?” The Christian Science Monitor, 4 May 1981, 8.

48. Peter Blackburn, “Niger’s Koutoubi Says He Is ‘Prudently Optimistic’ about Future of World Uranium Market,” Nuclear Fuel 11, no. 14 (14 July 1986): 7.

49. Note that this is NOT the transaction to which the Bush administration was referring in 2002–2003.

50. Thomas Gilroy, “Niger Cuts off Libyan Uranium Supply as Fear of Internal Disruption Spreads,” Nuclear Fuel 6, no. 3 (2 February 1981): 4.

51. Quoted in Yemma, 8.

52. “France Denies Uranium Sales,” Associated Press, 3 January 1980, International News at http://www.lexisnexis.com.

53. In addition to the obvious reasons, the state had taken out huge loans for infrastructural development, using projected sales as a guarantee. See Salifou (n. 40 above) and Grégoire (n. 29 above).

54. Michel Pecqueur, quoted in Douglas Glucroft, “Cogéma Registered Its First Loss Last Year but Says It Prepared Well for a Dry Spell,” Nuclear Fuel 7, no. 15 (19 July 1982): 7.

55. Niger’s first independent sale under this new market regime was to an American utility. Areva’s holdings—which include industrial installations in 40 countries and a commercial network spanning over 100 countries—cover the entire nuclear power system, from mines to power plant construction to waste disposal. The French state remains the primary shareholder, but the company’s chairwoman, Anne Lauvergeon, has been pushing hard to increase the percentage of shares quoted on the Paris stock exchange from its current 4 percent.

56. See Grégoire, and Jeremy Keenan, “Resource Exploitation, Repression, and Resistance in the Sahara-Sahel: The Rise of the Rentier State in Algeria, Chad, and Niger,” in Extractive Economies and Conflicts in the Global South: Multi-regional Perspectives on Rentier Politics, ed. Kenneth Omeje (Burlington, Vt., 2008).

57. http://m-n-j.blogspot.com/2007/11/la-route-de-luranium.html (accessed 4 May 2009); translation mine.

58. At this writing (May 2009), it appears that Tandja’s position may be about to change, in part to avoid further conflict in the uranium development zone but also for other reasons too complex and rapidly changing to detail here.

59. Samira Daoud and Jean-Pierre Getti, LA COGEMA au Niger: Rapport d’enquête sur la situation des travailleurs de la SOMAÏR et COMINAK, filiales nigériennes du groupe AREVA-COGEMA, 25 avril 2005 (a report for the NGO Sherpa). The same two NGOs also sent a mission to the shut-down mining site in Gabon, resulting in Samira Daoud & Jean-Pierre Getti, Areva a Gabon: Rapport d’enquête sur la situation des travailleurs de la COMUF, filiales gabonaise du groupe AREVA-COGEMA, 4 avril 2007 (a report for Sherpa). Both missions were conducted by Sherpa in collaboration with the CRIIRAD (an NGO that seeks to provide independent scientific expertise on radiation levels at nuclear sites), as well as with Nigérien and Gabonese NGOs representing local uranium mine workers and an NGO that represents former expatriate mine employees currently living in France.

60. Moustapha Kadi, “Procès Niger-USA: Les raisons d’une plainte contre l’Administration George Bush,” Énergie Pour Tous 1 (10 février 2007), posted on http://max1412.powweb.com/htdocs/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=561&Ite mid=2 (accessed 8 May 2007); translation mine.

61. In 2004, I obtained unrestricted access to Rössing’s corporate archives in Swakopmund, Namibia (I extend my thanks to Rössing’s management for this access). The archives were filed, but not cataloged or numbered. In the citations that follow, I have done my best to reflect the organizational scheme I found at that time. The history of British contracts for Rössing uranium is documented in archives held at the National Archives of the United Kingdom. I consulted those records in 2001, when the archives were named the Public Records Office. Individual documents are too numerous to cite in full.

62. SWAPO had taken up armed resistance in 1966 and became the most prominent group in the Namibian liberation struggle. There were other organizations besides SWAPO within the liberation struggle. While activists in Europe and Africa interpreted UN recognition as a sign that Namibians, not white South Africans, had legitimate sovereignty over the territory, within the liberation movement UN recognition served to strengthen SWAPO’s position over other groups. See Gretchen Bauer, Labor and Democracy in Namibia, 1971–1996 (Athens, Ohio, 1998), and Colin Leys and John S. Saul, Namibia’s Liberation Struggle: The Two-edged Sword (Athens, Ohio, 1995).

63. Several states abstained or voted against the various UN resolutions terminating South Africa’s mandate and creating the UNCN. Many “Western” government officials agreed with the assessment of one British civil servant that the UNCN was “an extremist body” without much “Western” support (Martin Reith, Central and Southern African Dept, FCO to W. E. Fitzsimmons, Dept of Energy, 10 Oct 1974, PRO: EG 7/139 AB16 PRO notes, 14). In a 1984 report to the UNCN, Nico Schrijver wrote that “the composition of the Council . . . has not helped its international image, especially in the eyes of major western countries. Originally there were eleven members of the Council, all coming from Africa, Asia and Latin America. Later it was successively increased to 18 (in 1972), to 25 (in 1974) and to 31 (in 1978). Among the 31 members there are only four Western countries, viz. Australia, Belgium, Finland and Turkey.” See Nico J. Schrijver, “The Status of Namibia and of Its Natural Resources in International Law,” 27 July 1984, A/AC.131/GSY/CRP.13.

64. In “The Status of Namibia,” Schrijver reviews and adds to this literature; see especially pp. 36–42 of his report.

65. The hearings included a screening of Follow the Yellowcake Road; United Nations Council for Namibia, “Report of the Panel for Hearings on Namibian Uranium, Part Two: Verbatim Transcripts of the Public Meetings of the Panel Held at Headquarters from 7 to 11 July 1980,” 30 September 1980, A/AC.131/L.163.

66. This relationship wasn’t limited to uranium; the South African liberation struggle had already pointed to the complex connections binding Western and South African nuclear systems in discussions leading up to UN Resolution 418 (1977), which, among other measures, required member states to “refrain from any cooperation with South Africa in the manufacture and development of nuclear weapons” (Security Council Resolution: The Question of South Africa, S/RES/418, 4 November 1977, item 3). The main vehicle for the ANC and other South African liberation activists for drawing attention to Western nuclear and military ties with South Africa was the World Campaign against Military and Nuclear Collaboration with South Africa, launched in 1979 with a high-profile seminar at the United Nations. Paul Edwards and I discuss these matters in our essay, “History and the Technopolitics of Identity in (and against) Apartheid South Africa,” Journal of Southern African Studies (forthcoming).

67. By “global,” this economist, like most market analysts at the time, meant “non-Communist.” The economist in question was Stephen Ritterbus, who described himself as a “consultant on international resource issues” and noted that he’d been at the Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

68. United Nations Council for Namibia, “Report of the Panel for Hearings on Namibian Uranium, Part Two: Verbatim Transcripts of the Public Meetings of the Panel Held at Headquarters from 7 to 11 July 1980,” 30 September 1980, A/AC.131/L.163 (Part II), pp. 177–82.

69. SWAPO, Trade Union Action on Namibian Uranium: Report of a Seminar for West European Trade Unions Organized by Swapo of Namibia in Co-Operation with the Namibia Support Committee, London, 29–30 June 1981 (n.p., 1982).

70. CANUC, Namibia: A Contract to Kill, The Story of Stolen Uranium and the British Nuclear Programme (London, 1986), 67.

71. RUL, Board of Directors 44th meeting, 28 April 1977, Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia.

72. RUL, Board of Directors 43rd meeting, 17 February 1977, Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia.

73. Minutes of Sales Meetings, 16 September 1983, Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia.

74. Minserve, London Office Memorandum, J. H. G. Senior to P. Daniel, 21 February 1986, Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia; Minserve, London Office Memorandum, G. R. Elliott to Sir Alistair Frame, 9 March 1988, Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia.

75. Minutes of Sales Meetings, 22 November 1984, Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia.

76. Needless to say, conversion plants and utilities that helped Minserve re-title Rössing material didn’t do so for free: swap fees ranged from 70 cents/lb. to $2/lb; Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia.

77. Minutes of the 19th Meeting of the Board of Directors, Rössing Uranium Limited, 5 March 1986, Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia.

78. RTZ 1984 Annual Report, quoted in Alastair Macfarlane, “Labour Control: Managerial Strategies in the Namibian Mining Sector” (Ph.D. thesis, Oxford Polytechnic, 1990), 271. Macfarlane explains (pp. 268–69) that the “effect of the decline in value of the rand was threefold. A) It raised the price of imports thus raising operating costs since the majority of mining equipment and some consumables were imported. B) It raised the value of sales in local currency since worldwide sales were denoted in dollars. C) The value of profits attributable to RTZ were reduced as a result of the devaluation against the pound.”

79. GLS/mje, “Mandatory UN Sanctions,” 11 June 1986. There were no shortage of banks willing to establish offshore accounts to facilitate such transactions. In March 1987, for example, Barclay’s Bank tendered a proposal for an “offshore arrangement which would enable Rössing to purchase mining equipment and supplies in such a way as to avoid a direct RSA linkage and at the same time continue to use existing buying agents in the United States and the United Kingdom.” I did not find evidence of whether or not Rössing accepted this proposal. See S. G. J. Rowley to R. B. Carlisle, 13 March 1987, Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia.

80. GLS/mje, Rössing Uranium Limited, “Mandatory UN Sanctions,” 11 June 1986, Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia.

81. Minserve, London Office Memorandum, J. H. G. Senior to P. Daniel, 21 February 1986, Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia.

82. This was a risky move. U.S. law required lobbyists to reveal whom they represented; disclosure in turn would open the door to the UN Council for Namibia to present its perspective, and thereby nullify the entire effort. Furthermore, the South African government had specifically asked Rössing to “do nothing in Washington to attempt to influence the situation.” The links between Wrightmon and Minserve had to remain as discreet as possible. Officially, Wrightmon served as “consultants” rather than lobbyists, and Rössing’s board of directors was told that the company had decided against a “formal lobbying approach.” See Minserve, London Office Memorandum, G. R. Elliott to Alistair Frame, 9 March 1988, Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia; and RUL, Board of Directors 93rd meeting, 21 November 1986, Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia.

83. Diane Harmon, “Report for the September 1, 1987 meeting with Minserve Administration A.G.,” 31 August 1987, Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia; Diane Harmon to John Senior, 26 September 1987, Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia; RUL, Board of Directors 95th meeting, 5 June 1987, Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia.

84. NRC, SECY-87-223, “Imports of South African origin uranium,” 17 September 1987. This was a ruling by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department made similar judgments. See Diane Harmon to John Senior, 17 September 1987, Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia.

85. Minserve, London Office Memorandum, G. R. Elliott to Sir Alistair Frame, 9 March 1988, Archives of Rössing Uranium Limited, Swakopmund, Namibia.

86. Dutch activists, including one parliamentarian, first articulated this argument at the 1980 UNCN hearings (n. 65 above, p. 123 passim.) For more on the Urenco lawsuit from an activist perspective, see David de Beer, “The Netherlands and Namibia: The Political Campaign to End Dutch Involvement in the Namibian Uranium Trade,” in Allies in Apartheid: Western Capitalism in Occupied Namibia, ed. Allan D. Cooper (New York, 1988). An overview of the suit can be found in Nico Schrijver, Sovereignty over Natural Resources: Balancing Rights and Duties (Cambridge, 1997).

87. The quote continues: “If a US broker arranged for an obligation swap to take place in Europe between South African natural uranium and French natural uranium and then sought to bring that unprocessed material into the USA as French origin material and so declared it to the US Customs Service, then the Customs Service would regard that action as a fraudulent declaration since the true origin of the natural uranium would be South African”; quoted on pp. 48–49 of F. McGoldrick, “Flag Swaps,” Uranium and Nuclear Energy, 1988: Proceedings of the Thirteenth International Symposium held by the Uranium Institute, London, 7–9 September 1988 (London, 1989), 43–50.

88. U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, “Report on the US Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq,” 7 July 2004, 53.

89. Albright (n. 2 above).

Gabrielle Hecht is associate professor of history at the University of Michigan. Research for this essay was supported by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, as well as Grant No. 0237661 from the National Science Foundation. Its first draft was circulated at the NSF-sponsored SHOT Fiftieth Anniversary Workshop in Washington, D.C., supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0623056. The author thanks Bruce Seely for his encouragement, and co-panelists Michael Adas, Mats Fridlund, and Rosalind Williams for their engagement. Subsequent drafts benefited tremendously from extensive comments by Rebecca Herzig, Dan Hirschman, Arne Kaijser, Nina Lerman, Chandra Mukerji, Bill Storey, and—as always—Paul Edwards.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

The summer of 1969 was a very difficult time in American national life, but for me it was something of a summer of liberation; I had no teaching obligations and had (finally!) finished my dissertation several months earlier. When the summer began, Richard Nixon had been in office for six months; Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor, had decided that the war in Vietnam was unwinnable and had started talking about “a negotiated settlement”—although the United States was still bombing not just North Vietnam but also Cambodia. Streets and campuses were in turmoil. In February, Ronald Reagan, then governor of California, had called out the National Guard to quell protesters on the Berkeley campus; by May the entire city of Berkeley, not just the campus, was under military control. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, the police had forcibly removed Harvard students from university offices, and in Hartford, Connecticut, black youngsters had rioted for three days and nights. The Black Panthers had become a national movement and several dissident members of the group had been murdered. At Cornell, in April, armed black students took over the student union, vowing not to leave until the administration had agreed to set up, of all things, a racially segregated dormitory—and in response, a fair number of faculty members had refused to meet their classes until the administration had removed from the campus every firearm, and every student who had carried a firearm.

In July, Senator Edward Kennedy will drive off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, drowning Mary Jo Kopechne. A month later Charles Manson and his followers will go on a killing spree in Southern California, hoping to stimulate a race war, and Woodstock will take place. Later, some of the Weathermen, after the failure of the Chicago “Days of Rage,” will go into hiding (only to emerge, a few months later, by blowing themselves up in a Manhattan townhouse). And in the midst of all this carnage and mayhem, John Lennon and Yoko Ono will record “Give Peace a Chance.”

My intellectual adventure as a historian of technology began during and because of that very distressing summer, the summer of our national discontent. A few months earlier, in response to the chaos on the campus at which I was then teaching, the State University of New York at Stony Brook, some junior members of the faculty had come up with the idea that in order to make our courses more “relevant” to our students, we would each teach a freshman seminar on a subject we knew nothing about. We would, in the language of the time, teach a process rather than a subject; that is, we would learn along with our students, thereby teaching them how to learn. This notion now seems ludicrous to me, after more than forty years at the lectern, but at the time I had only been a university instructor for two years, and I took it very seriously.

In the spring, preoccupied with typing and editing, I had chosen a topic for my seminar, “Technological Determinism,” but by the end of June, with my degree now in hand, I was beginning to feel the need to create some sort of syllabus, or, at the very least, some initial reading assignments with which to begin the fall semester. Well, yes, I thought, it was a good thing to learn along with my students, but if I really knew nothing at all about my topic, how was I going to begin? So there I was, sweltering in the magnificent (but un-air-conditioned) South Reading Room of the Research Collections of the New York Public Library, trying to read up, just a little bit, on this subject that I was supposed to know nothing about.

Of course “technological determinism” is not a topic that you suddenly pluck out of thin air, no matter how rarified an academic you happen to be. The term had been bruited about, sometimes dismissively, sometimes surreptitiously, during my graduate education in the history of science. Looking back, I strongly suspect that it was the dismissive and the surreptitious that attracted me to the topic: The summer of our national discontent was going to be the summer of my personal liberation—at least from the structures and strictures of my scholarly training.1 I suppose that I had heard the term first, when I was beginning my graduate studies, because Stephen F. Mason’s A History of the Sciences (which had just come out in 1962) was assigned in a general historiography course. Mason was a Marxist, I remember being told, and therefore a technological determinist—and that is why he worked so hard to demonstrate that artisans made important contributions to the Scientific Revolution. We could skip those chapters, I also remember being told, because Mason’s Marxism was just an ideology; mathematicians and philosophers were responsible for the Scientific Revolution, not masons (!) and lens-grinders. The same message was delivered a few years later, when we were asked to read J. D. Bernal’s Science and Industry in the Nineteenth Century (1953), only to be told that Bernal’s tendentious desire to describe the sciences that were connected to technological developments (e.g., thermodynamics) as “progressive” and all the others as “retrogressive” derived from his Marxist convictions about technological determinism, and were therefore not to be taken seriously.

Technological determinism was thus doubly fascinating to me because doubly derided by my professors. It had something to do with technology (which was just the application of science and therefore of no interest to historians of the pure sciences), and it had something do to with Marxism (which was just an ideology and therefore unquestionably wrong). Perfect!

Except for one small problem that was starting to loom large by late July: I could not find a reading selection, neither from Mason nor Bernal, nor anyone else for that matter, that explained, clearly, what technological determinism meant as a theory of history. I had located several paragraphs on the subject from the original primary source, Marx and Engels, The German Ideology, but I deemed these unlikely to start a lively discussion among Stony Brook freshmen, partly because they were written in fairly opaque and convoluted Germanic English, and partly because their historical subject matter ranged from pre-history to the feudal period, subjects of less than minimal interest to the average Long Island teenager.

A month earlier I had already discovered that virtually all the books to be found under the heading “Technology and Social Change” in the New York Public Library (index card) catalog were the works of anthropologists and archaeologists: unlikely to yield readings that could be adapted to my needs. By the end of July, I had also decided that the sole historical work under that subject heading, Lynn White jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962), was entirely unsuitable for my course, not only because of its focus on the Middle Ages, but also because White was about as far from being a Marxist as it was possible to get. (I was not yet sophisticated enough to realize that an anti-Marxist who nonetheless believed that technological changes had helped create the feudal social order would be worth further investigation.)

Because it was so hot in the library, I tended to get drowsy after lunch and in order to keep myself from the embarrassment of falling asleep in public, I usually carried some diversionary reading. One day, in what must have been early August, I had grabbed the most recent issue of The New York Review of Books before leaving my apartment—and when I picked it up after lunch, there, right on the front cover, was the announcement of a special supplement that had something to do with technology. I skimmed it quickly, and snapped wide awake: here was the reading selection I had been searching for! “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals” did not quite explain what technological determinism meant as a theory of history, but it was most decidedly not about the Middle Ages; indeed, it was extremely relevant because it was about The War, “defense intellectuals,” and the social impact of very contemporary technology.

The author was someone named John McDermott, who appeared to be a rather newly minted public intellectual. The biographical squib on the table-of-contents page referred to him as “a former editor of Viet-Report, an organizer for the New University Conference . . . [who] will join the Cambridge Institute and MIT in the fall.”2 Although he was not a historian of technology (and apparently never became one), McDermott’s article had a considerable impact on our field. Because his piece has been anthologized many, many times I suspect that I am not alone in recalling “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals” as intellectually foundational; indeed, since I delivered the oral version of this essay in 2007, several colleagues my age or maybe a bit younger have confessed to being similarly inspired.

McDermott was clearly a Marxist. Although neither he nor the editors of TNYRB had felt it necessary to use the usually forbidden “M” word, his theoretical stance was broadcast both in his title and in his opening lines: “If religion was formerly the opiate of the masses,” he wrote, “then surely technology is the opiate of the educated public today, or at least of its favorite authors.” What McDermott had written appeared to be a review of The Fourth Annual Report of the Harvard Program on Technology and Society (about which, more below), but it was much longer than most articles in TNYRB because, in addition to reviewing a book, McDermott was articulating an entirely new perspective on modern technology—and, along the way, pillorying not only the Vietnam War, but also the new technologies with which it was being prosecuted, the scientists and engineers who had developed those technologies, and the defense intellectuals who had encouraged their efforts. This new perspective was nothing more nor less than a new dialectic for the twentieth century, replacing, but also building on, the dialectic that Marx had proposed for the nineteenth.

The Vietnam War was being fought, McDermott argued, with technologies that were so advanced and so complicated that ordinary soldiers could not understand them. These military technologies were akin to contemporary consumer technologies in having been developed by scientists and engineers in the employ of big corporations—and these corporations, of course, also had contracts with the overweening federal government. According to McDermott, all of the people in charge of producing these technologies—the managers of those companies and the managers of the government and the technoscientific experts in their employ—had formed a new, twentieth-century elite class, a class which both developed and celebrated advanced technology. This new class, of course, also used advanced technology, just as the predecessor elites of the nineteenth century had tried to do, in order to squelch democracy, to oppress workers, to drown the humanities, to destroy craftsmanship, and to suppress individual creativity.

The nineteenth-century elites had not, however, completely succeeded in controlling the masses, McDermott went on to say, because early industrial technologies had had countervailing, libratory characteristics. Some early industrial technologies, he argued, had actually facilitated the spread of a democratic ethos by extending literacy (the printing press) and, by enlarging the cultural horizons of a larger segment of the population (roads, postal systems, railroads, radios), had thereby both demystified the rule of the religious and governing classes and, simultaneously, provided the means of resistance to that rule. “Social skills and experiences which underlay the monopoly of the upper classes over the processes of law and government were spreading to important segments of the lower orders of society,” McDermott wrote.

For carrying on trade, managing a commercial—not a subsistence— farm, participating in a vestry or workingmen’s guild, or working in an up-to-date manufactory or business, unlike the relatively narrow existence of the medieval serf or artisan, were experiences which contributed to what I would call the social rationality of the lower orders (p. 12).

Unfortunately, according to McDermott, the post–World War II elites were succeeding where their nineteenth-century predecessors had failed. This new elite class did not own the means of production, but it was, in a crucial sense, an even more elite elite because it understood how to produce the now-very-much-more-complicated means of production, knowledge which the owners of the means did not have. To put the matter another way, this new elite was an intellectual elite, rather than a capitalist one. Because of this, McDermott believed, its impact on society was more destructive of humane values than what had come before; because knowledge rather than ownership was its means of control, this new elite had taken over even the not-for-profit sector of society, particularly the universities.

Thus, unlike Marx, McDermott was a technological pessimist. He understood the social effects of the new technology as completely, rather than only partially, oppressive.

The social organization of the new technology, by systematically denying to the general population experiences which are analogous to those of its higher management, contributes very heavily to the growth of social irrationality in our society. . . .

The normal life of men and women in the lower and, I think, middle levels of American society now seems cut off from those experiences in which near social means and distant social ends are balanced and rebalanced, adjusted and readjusted. But it is from such widespread experience with effective balancing and adjusting that social rationality derives. To the degree that it is lacking, social irrationality becomes the norm, and social paranoia a recurring phenomenon (p. 12).

This social irrationality, McDermott went on to argue, means that even those who are now rebelling against the social order have no sensible program for transforming it, no realistic social program with which to combat the central control that the new elites have established. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century rebels had had Marxian socialism—a realistic, rational scientific socialism. The new rebels, despite being better educated than their predecessors, were protesting, yes, but after that they were just turning on and tuning out. As a result, according to McDermott, they were entering “battle under extremely vague symbolic banners,” and unless they wised up about technology, they were, he feared, doomed to fail.

Thus, in McDermott’s view, and despite the title of his long essay, technology was not just the opiate of the intellectuals; it was the opiate of just about everyone in late-twentieth-century society. The new priestly class— scientists and engineers, professors in the universities and senior managers in the government and the corporations—were celebrating the wonders of consumer technology, he argued, in order to obscure the evils that were being wrought in the name of progress, just as the old priestly classes had used religion to obscure the evils being wrought by the bourgeoisie in the name of social order. Humanists and social-scientific intellectuals were being taken in by this con game, and so, he asserted, were “the lower orders.” McDermott believed that everyone in late-twentieth-century America was falling for the comforts of consumer technology in the same way that Marx had believed that everyone had once fallen for the comforts of religion.

I thought my students would love McDermott’s long essay, because he was furious, as they were, about Vietnam, and angry, as they were, about obscurantist faculty members who taught courses on irrelevant subjects. Unfortunately, I turned out to be wrong; my students hated this particular reading. Every time I taught the piece (and I was so enamored of it that I kept trying to use it, semester after semester) I felt as if I was pulling teeth. Sometimes I brushed off the students’ negative reactions as class-based: Many of them were first-generation college students, probably unable to shake off the parental hope that they would become members of precisely the managerial elite that McDermott found so appalling. Other times I told myself that their dislike was evidence that McDermott was right, that these newly affluent youngsters were so addicted to their cars and television sets that they could not, would not, see the extent to which they and their parents were being duped.

Both the passage of time and the growth of our discipline have now convinced me that my students were right and I was wrong. Forty years after the awful summer of 1969, I now see that McDermott’s essay had three fundamental and related problems. The first is that it is empirically empty; there is only one technological system discussed in detail in its twenty-seven pages, and that discussion occupies only a few paragraphs. To put the matter in an Edisonian way: McDermott’s essay is 99 percent ideology and only 1 percent evidence. The second problem is that this example is not nearly as generalizable as McDermott thought it was. The third problem— and the one that my students may have found particularly galling—is that McDermott’s technological pessimism is profoundly snobbish.

The single example on which McDermott built his comprehensive assault on high technology was a computer being used, for the first time, in the Vietnam War. “Intelligence data is gathered from all kinds of sources,” McDermott wrote,

. . . and fed into a computer complex located . . . in Bien Hoa. From this data and using mathematical models developed for the purpose, the computer then assigns probabilities to a range of potential targets, probabilities which represent the likelihood that the latter contain enemy forces or supplies. . . . Again using models developed for the purpose, the computer divides pre-programmed levels of bombardment among those potential targets which have the highest probability of containing actual targets. Following the raids, data provided by further reconnaissance is fed into the computer and conclusions are drawn (usually optimistic ones) on the effectiveness of the raids. This estimate of effectiveness then becomes part of the data governing current and future operations, and so on. (pp. 6–7)

From the point of view of the designers, McDermott argued, this system is very rational, because it doesn’t waste American lives or matériel. Yet there are, he went on to say, two points of view from which it is very irrational: the point of view of the Vietnamese peasants whose lives and livelihoods may be destroyed—and also the point of view of the American servicemen who have no way of understanding the system and are therefore alienated from it. Because they do not understand how this system works, servicemen cannot understand why it is failing. Needing to explain what is happening on their battlefields they invent entirely outrageous explanations for this failure; they cease to pay attention to the real world and become socially irrational, turning on and tuning out.

Even though McDermott believed that the characteristics and social effects of this computer were identical to the characteristics and social effects of all advanced technologies, my students must have sensed that both his conclusion (about alienation) and his convictions (about the generalizability of the example and about the social irrationality that it generates) were incorrect. The students, after all, had brothers and friends and cousins serving in Vietnam and they probably understood (as I did not) that alienation from the computer systems that determined bombing patterns was the least of the problems facing the servicemen and -women in that conflict. In addition, my students’ lives were also embedded in technological systems that they did not regard as in the least bit irrational and from which they did not feel the least bit alienated: the cars that got them back and forth to school, for example, the television sets that brought entertainment to their living quarters, the air conditioners that relieved the oppressive heat of summer, and, maybe best of all, the transistor radios that allowed them to bring their music with them to the beach.

From their perspective, McDermott provided no take-home message about technology that resonated in any way, shape, or form with their own experience of technology or with their own technological praxis. On top of this, my students probably noticed that McDermott was much more exercised about “[p]rofessionals who seek self-realization through creative and autonomous behavior without regard to the defined goals, needs, and channels of their respective departments” than he was about people like themselves and their parents, whom McDermott consistently referred to as “members of the lower orders.”

Interestingly enough, two of these problems—a lack of both concrete and generalizable examples—also plagued the book that had originally occasioned McDermott’s critique. In 1964, the IBM Corporation had given Harvard University several million dollars in order to establish, for ten years, the Harvard University Program on Technology and Society. Emmanuel Mesthene had been appointed as director of the program, and in 1968 he had written and published its Fourth Annual Report, not just for IBM, but for distribution (free) to the general public.3 Mesthene had a Ph.D. in philosophy and had taught for a while at several liberal arts colleges (at one of which, apparently, he had had John McDermott as a student). At some point, Mesthene had become a policy analyst, first as an employee of the RAND Corporation and then at OECD, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. As a result, to use McDermott’s terminology, he had become a member of the scientific-managerial intellectual elite.

At Harvard, Mesthene proceeded to hire several young scholars with various kinds of disciplinary training, and he asked them to explore the relationship between specific technologies and society. The academic goal was, in a sense, to do for the modern world what Lynn White jr. had done for the medieval. In a political sense, the goal was to also develop “action plans” that would ameliorate the social problems that so many people believed technological change to be creating.

In his first report, written two years after the program began operating and published in Technology and Culture, Mesthene confessed that “The Study Group is currently learning to talk.” “An example of the process,” he went on,

. . . is our effort to understand the specific ways in which technological changes and social changes affect each other. We found the standard literature on each too self-contained to be illuminating of the relationship, and most current discussions of the interaction too impressionistic and lacking in conceptual rigor to serve as useful starting points.4

In the next few years, Mesthene and his colleagues published a fair number of research reports (which were most notable for their very extensive bibliographies), but, with one exception, they never improved very much on his original critique of the existing literature: that is to say, they failed to produce either a concrete example of a technology producing a social change or a concrete action plan with which to mitigate the “bad” social effects of a technology, while preserving the “good” ones.5 The Fourth Report, the one that McDermott was reviewing, was a summary of some of those research reports, with a few pages of generalizations from Mesthene by way of introduction. Mesthene subsequently attempted to say a bit more in a short book that he published with Harvard University Press, Technological Change: Its Impact on Man and Society (1970), and the final report of the project, Harvard University Program on Technology and Society, 1964–1972 (1972).

Most of the reviewers of Mesthene’s books and pamphlets found them vacant. Kenneth Boulding, writing in Science, referred to Technological Change as an extended essay (indeed, it was only seventy-five very small pages). “It has the judicious, rather lofty quality of Emerson’s essays, and at the end of it one has the same slight feeling of emptiness.”6 George Basalla, writing in the same journal three years later, called the summary volume an example of “bland and sterile philosophizing.”7 IBM apparently agreed; unhappy with the lack of results, it pulled its funding for the project two years early.

John McDermott’s critique was different. He specifically disapproved of the fact that none of the project research was focused on military technology. But he was also generally unhappy with Mesthene’s frequent assertions that if scientists and engineers were better educated about society they would be able to build technologies that had no negative social effects, or no negative effects that could not be regulated away. As he made repeatedly clear in “The Opiate of the Intellectuals,” McDermott was a Marxist pessimist. He thought that the negative effects of technology were simultaneously inevitable and overwhelming: inevitably negative because of the nature of capitalism, overwhelmingly negative because all attempts to regulate technology were bound to fail unless capitalism was overthrown— and this was unlikely to happen, given what he thought were the inadequacies of his fellow revolutionaries.

Given that their characterizations of technology were so different, it is ironic that both Mesthene and McDermott thought of the entities called “technology” and “society” as unitary abstractions, equally simple and straightforwardly understandable. “Failure of society to respond to the opportunities created by technological change means that much actual or potential technology lies fallow, that is, is not used at all or is not used to its full capacity,” Mesthene wrote in 1970, leaving the reader to wonder how a whole society manages to respond to an opportunity and then how anyone could possibly know when a technology is being wasted.8 “Technology creates its own politics,” McDermott had written a year earlier, “[and the point] of advanced systems is to minimize the incidence of personal or social behavior which is erratic or otherwise not easily classified,” leaving the reader to wonder how an electric power system or a railroad network could possibly lead to a reduction in anarchic behavior. That there might be different kinds of technologies, each of which had different kinds of social effects, or that different elements of society might be affected in different ways by various kinds of technologies seems not to have occurred to either of these two commentators.

McDermott’s essay stimulated my generation of historians of technology because of both its Marxism and its pessimism, most especially his conviction that the contemporary authoritarianism that we found so repellent was actually built into our technologies and might therefore be very difficult, perhaps impossible, to eradicate. In a sense, “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals” was a paradigm-shifting work; it replaced optimism-based history of technology with pessimism-based history of technology— and, precisely because it was so lacking in good examples, it opened new doors for research, created new questions to be answered. Ironically (or maybe dialectically would be a better word), as we walked through those doors and set about answering those questions, we also developed a much more subtle, and much less unitary, understanding of both “technology” and “society.” And as we increased the level of evidence, we also decreased the level of ideology because we built up, I believe, a more sophisticated understanding of what it means to label a technology either “good” or “bad.”

Consider, for example, Merritt Roe Smith’s classic 1977 study, Harpers Ferry Armory and the New Technology: The Challenge of Change. Taking up McDermott’s challenge, Smith examined the social impact of a military technology, but by contrasting the introduction of interchangeable-parts arms manufacture in two different armories, Springfield and Harpers Ferry, Smith demonstrated that the same technology can have very different effects, depending on the social character of workplaces. Somewhat routinized but nonetheless skilled jobs were created in the North, but unroutinized skilled jobs were eliminated in the South. Smith also reminded us that while we might join McDermott in yearning nostalgically for some aspects of early-nineteenth-century artisanal culture—devotion to craftsmanship and a respect for the regular alteration of work and leisure—we are perfectly delighted to have put others far behind us: nepotism, violence, feudalistic corruption, and racism. Pace McDermott, technologies, and the cultures in which they are embedded, can be both libratory and authoritarian, both good and bad at the same time.

Similarly, by closely examining yet another military technology, David Mindell has shown us, in War, Technology, and Experience Aboard the USS Monitor (2000), that a single technological system, an ironclad warship, can debase one set of cultural values, military heroism, for one set of people, the men who served onboard, while at the same time enhancing the same set of values for another set of people, the civilians who celebrated its victory. And Janet Abbate has taught us, in Inventing the Internet (1999), that a complex technological system developed to enhance military command and control can—again, pace McDermott—radically decentralize mass communications when adapted by civilians. Contrary to McDermott’s thesis about the relationship between experts in and the owners of advanced technology regimes, Thomas Parke Hughes has taught us, in Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society (1983), that technological and managerial elites are themselves often at the mercy of non-technologically minded investors as well as elected and appointed politicians.

As historians of technology learned to complicate the relationship between technology and society we also learned to temper our pessimism, or at least I did. In the autumn of 1969, stimulated by McDermott (and bored with the subject of my dissertation), I decided to try my hand at a research project that would be both modern (that is, subsequent to industrialization) and relevant to some contemporary social difficulty. After reading a bit about the development of commuter railroads (I had, by that time, moved from Manhattan to Long Island, in order to be closer to my job), I changed my mind about a topic and decided to focus on technologies and social changes with which I was more intimately involved: the technologies of housework, and the rise of second-generation feminism. I set out, in other words, to provide an evidentiary base for what was then received (technological determinist) wisdom, namely that the rise of advanced household technologies had left educated housewives discontented because there was little meaningful work left for them to do inside of homes.

The very first file folder that I opened when I started research about household technology was labeled, therefore, “Resistors,” because I was sure—following McDermott (and E. P. Thompson)—that domestic artisans—women who made butter and cheese, who baked their own bread and canned their own vegetables—would have resisted industrial technology in the same way that English weavers and some American armorers once had, by resisting its incursion into their working lives. My forays into the primary sources about housework were, however, full of surprises. The vast majority of American women, I discovered, were perfectly delighted to have motors ease the drudgery of household labor, and many, especially those who had not been affluent as children, welcomed the improvements in living standards that accompanied what advertisers liked to call the “modernization” of American homes. My “Resistors” file remained very, very thin; by the time what I had originally conceived as a very short project finally reached its end ten years later, there were only three index cards in that file. All of them were about very rich women who had resisted the electrification of their homes because they were unwilling to modernize their servants out of jobs while simultaneously being rich enough to be able to continue to live luxuriously without refrigerators, fans, electric lights, or electric coffeepots.

Thus, by the time I wrote More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (1983), I had come to understand that neither the technological pessimists nor the technological optimists were subtle enough in their analyses, which is part of the reason why the subtitle of the book contains the word irony. I had also come to understand that technologies were different from each other—that washing machines are not like assembly lines; that work processes were different from each other; that household work is not like factory work; and that people are different from each other: that women, for example, are socialized differently from men. To put the matter more concretely, I had started to deconstruct the entities “technology” and “society” that both McDermott and Mesthene had thought unitary—and I had ended up discovering that my original hypothesis was almost the opposite of the truth. I had also stopped being a left academic snob.

My most recent research project, summarized in Heredity and Hope: The Case for Genetic Screening (2008) is an exploration of a very different set of technological systems—the ones that screen adults and babies for the mutations that result in genetic diseases—but it has led me along very similar paths to very similar conclusions. My original hypothesis was that genetic screening had been foisted on the public for nefarious (read “eugenic”) reasons; this hypothesis was completely reversed during the course of the investigation. I discovered, to my surprise, that the physician-scientists who undertook the research and then developed the technologies did so in the interests of and under pressure from their own patients. I also discovered that the vast majority of pregnant women were in favor of genetic screening, even when the downsides were carefully explained to them. Were all these women victims of false consciousness (as I once thought industrializing housewives were), or did they understand something about their own interests that I, sitting in my well-appointed ivory tower, had somehow missed? It took ten years of research in primary sources derived from many different kinds of people playing many different kinds of roles in the drama of genetic screening before I finally realized that, once again, snobbism had led me astray: The social meanings of these new technologies were more complicated than my ideology (still Marxist-pessimist) had led me to suspect.

Ironically, had I kept reading The New York Review of Books attentively into the late autumn of 1969, I might have encountered an answer to John McDermott. And, had I known then what I know now, I might have appreciated the answer enough to save myself from some of those false starts. In the 20 November issue, the noted poet, memoirist, and social critic Paul Goodman published an essay entitled “Can Technology Be Humane?” This was, as far as I could tell, the only response to “Technology: The Opiate of the Intellectuals” that TNYRB ever published. Goodman’s text was wordfor-word identical to the first chapter of his then-forthcoming book, New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative, but the fact that either he or an editor regarded it as a positive response to McDermott’s negative is revealed by its title; in the book version the essay is called “Sciences and Professions,” not “Can Technology Be Humane?”9

Goodman was born in 1911, making him several decades older than McDermott. He was one of the so-called New York intellectuals, a writer of novels, poetry, and essays; he became famous after the publication, in 1960, of a work of social criticism, Growing Up Absurd: Problems of Youth in the Organized System. Although he described himself as an anarchist, members of McDermott’s generation might well have thought of him as Old Left; his essays had appeared regularly in such journals as Partisan Review, The New Republic, Commentary, and, of course, The New York Review of Books.10 New Reformation, his twenty-sixth and last book, was intended as a commentary (often personal and impassioned) on the youth movement of the late 1960s, from which, as the subtitle, Notes of a Neolithic Conservative, is meant to suggest, he felt more than a little estranged.11

“Can Technology Be Humane?” begins with a student protest in which McDermott might have been involved and that he certainly would have championed.

On March 4, 1969, there was a “work stoppage” and teach-in initiated by dissenting professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, followed at thirty other major universities and technical schools across the country, against misdirected scientific research and the abuse of scientific technology. . . . I want to consider this event in a broader context than the professors did, as part of a religious crisis. An attack on the American scientific establishment is an attack on the worldwide system of belief. I think we are on the eve of a new Reformation, and no institution or status will go unaffected.12

Although Goodman could understand the dismay of these dissenters, he thought that their attack was focused on the wrong target. Yes, he went on to say, it is absolutely true that too much money is being funneled through universities to support the wrong kind of research on the wrong kind of subjects. And yes, it is absolutely true that that money could be better spent on projects that would more directly benefit individuals, particularly those who are poor and hungry. But, Goodman continued, science and technology are not to blame; the blame lies with social institutions through which they are currently being funded and developed.

Science and technology are not thoroughly and irrevocably evil, as so many young people seemed to think, because they have additional and countervailing characteristics, redeeming social graces which the young rebels seem to be forgetting. “For three hundred years,” Goodman admonished the dissenters, “science and scientific technology had an unblemished and justified reputation as a wonderful adventure, pouring out practical benefits and liberating spirit from the errors and superstitions of traditional faith.”13 We ought to be rebuilding them, he continued, not destroying them, socially reconstructing them rather than eliminating them. Yes, he concluded, science and technology can be humane; they were in the past and, even if they are not in the present, they can be in the future.

Had I been attracted to this argument, I might have obtained a copy of Goodman’s book—and there, in its second chapter, would have found a counterexample to McDermott’s target calculating computer, an example of what Goodman meant by those complimentary phrases, “wonderful adventure,” “practical benefits,” and “liberating spirit.” “I am writing this chapter in July, 1969,” he begins chapter 2 of New Reformation,

when the two men have just walked on the Moon, and five hundred million televiewers have watched it. Surely this is mankind being great at several of our best things, exploring the unknown, making ingenious contraptions, cooperating with a will to do it, drawing on the accumulation of culture and history, whether we think of the equations of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton, or of the roving Polynesians, Vikings, Columbus, and Magellan. And we have satisfied our lust to see at a distance: the pictures a second later were as sensational as the voyage.

People do beat all!14

The “wonderful adventure” is, of course, the risky exploration of the unknown; the “practical benefit” is that five hundred million people were able to experience it, not just those who participated, and not just those who could subsequently read a report about it; the “liberating spirit” is the dual inspirations that led to and resulted from this effort to “reach for the stars.”

Much as he approved both of the space program and of the television coverage, Goodman found some things to criticize: the program, because of the secrecy that surrounded it and the nationalism that had initiated it; television in general, because of the gullibility its visual components induced in its audiences. But unlike McDermott, he did not think of either space capsules or television sets as monolithic: they had, in his view, several different moral valences, several different social effects, some good, some bad, some humane, some inhumane. All these effects, he argued, were inseparable from the technology itself, and so the good had to be taken with the bad and if the good were good enough—which in these cases he thought they were—then accepted. One of the features of the space program that bothered him was that success required teamwork and therefore individual creativity had to be suppressed. But, he argued, “[t]he collectivity is inherent in the enterprise, and that is acceptable since the purpose is not stupid and the people are not coerced.”15 Thus, Goodman’s optimism countered McDermott’s pessimism as being too monolithic. At the same time, and perhaps unknowingly, Goodman also countered Mesthene’s faith in the possibilities of technocratic regulation as being too simplistic, as not understanding both that technologies have inherent social characteristics and that they can have many different social effects simultaneously.

Technology, in Goodman’s vision of it, was, thus, neither good nor bad nor neutral. The solution to our current dissatisfactions, he argued, was not to ditch the good because of the bad, but to change the social institutions through which new technologies were being constructed, so that, in the future, the good might outweigh the bad, by being built in from the outset, by having good social effects as the goal rather than as the spinoff.

I would not be surprised to discover that Goodman had been corresponding with Mel Kranzberg, because his solution to the problems of the day could well have come from one of the founding documents of SHOT. “. . . [T]echnology,” Goodman wrote, “is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science. It aims at prudent goods for the commonweal, to provide efficient means for these goods.” At present, he went on to say, “It has no principles of its own,” but is merely treated as a “bastard” subject half in the theoretical sciences and half in the vocational schools. “To remedy this . . . technology must have its proper place on the faculty as a learned profession important in modern society, along with medicine, law, the humanities, and natural philosophy, learning from them and having something to teach them.”16

What Goodman advocated, then, was precisely what the founders of SHOT had in mind and what so many members of subsequent generations have sought to achieve: a body of humanistically inspired, evidence-based scholarship, which treats technology as both morally and socially multifaceted—so that the young can make changes, if they want to, that are, to borrow a concept from McDermott, both technologically and socially rational.

Looking back, I wonder if it wouldn’t be a good idea if we resurrected all these texts—McDermott’s, Mesthene’s, and Goodman’s—as a way of demonstrating how far our field has come in the intervening four decades. Looking forward, I confess that if I were asked to choose just one of them to exemplify my hopes for the future of our discipline, it would surely be the first two chapters of Goodman’s New Reformation: by all means, in the future as in the past, let ideology inspire research, as long as, in the end, evidence trumps ideology.

1. I cannot resist a comment on sociotechnological systems here. I kept typing “strictures” as I was drafting this essay, and Word kept substituting a “u” for an “i”: structures instead of strictures. After being corrected for the third time by some programmer’s dictionary, I decided to honor that person by leaving in what she or he thought I ought to be saying.

2. The piece appeared in the issue of 31 July 1969, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 1–27. It can be accessed online at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/11253 (accessed 6 November 2009), but I recommend reading it in its original form or on microfilm, because the advertisements of its time provide crucial historical context. McDermott subsequently wrote The Crisis in the Working Class and Some Arguments for a New Labor Movement (Boston, 1980), and he taught labor studies at SUNY-Old Westbury for many years.

3. [Harvard] Program on Technology and Society: Fourth Annual Report. Actually, it was a pamphlet of ninety-six pages, self-published (1967–68) by the Harvard Program on Technology and Society.

4. Emmanuel G. Mesthene, “An Experiment in Understanding: The Harvard Program Two Years After,” Technology and Culture 7 (October 1966): 479–80.

5. The exception is Renée C. Fox and Judith P. Swazey, The Courage to Fail: A Social View of Organ Transplants and Dialysis (Chicago, 1974). Fox, a medical sociologist, and Swazey, a historian, met under the aegis of the Harvard project, where they began what has turned out to be several decades of fruitful collaboration.

6. Kenneth E. Boulding, “Tools on a Grand Scale,” Science 168 (19 June 1970): 1442.

7. George Basalla, “Addressing a Central Problem,” Science 180 (11 May 1973): 584.

8. Emmanuel G. Mesthene, Technological Change: Its Impact on Man and Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1970), 35.

9. Paul Goodman, New Reformation: Notes of a Neolithic Conservative (New York, 1970), 3–23, and “Can Technology be Humane?” TNYRB 13, no. 9 (20 November 1969).

10. A partial bibliography and a biography can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Goodman_(writer) (accessed 6 November 2009).

11. See chapter 3 of New Reformation for Goodman’s discussion of this estrange-
ment.

12. Goodman, “Can Technology Be Humane?”; Goodman, New Reformation, 3.

13. Goodman, “Can Technology Be Humane?”; Goodman, New Reformation, 6.

14. Goodman, New Reformation, 24.

15. Ibid., 30–31.

16. Goodman, “Can Technology Be Humane?”; Goodman, New Reformation, 7–8.

Dr. Cowan is Janice and Julian Bers Professor of the History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. This essay is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0623056, SHOT 50th Anniversary Workshop, Washington, D.C.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

At the core of Hamilton’s account of the demise of economic liberalism lies the claim that rural-based independent trucking offered policymakers a politically viable solution to a thorny dilemma: how to fix the perennial “farm problem” (i.e., chronic overproduction) without alienating urban consumers by driving up food prices. Departing decisively from the inflationary “planned scarcity” approach of the 1930s, the new strategy aimed to boost farmers’ net profits not by limiting output, but rather by decreasing the cost of shipping farm products to market. More broadly, the rise of nonunionized independent trucking—in conjunction with an array of “political technologies” ranging from paper milk-cartons, boxed beef, and frozen convenience foods to “reefers” (mechanically refrigerated tractor trailers), highways, industrial feedlots, and “dynamic” warehousing systems—provided policymakers and agribusiness interests with the tools to create a new food distribution system that could deliver vast quantities of cheap food to the supermarkets springing up in the wake of suburban sprawl.

Successful implementation of this new system, Hamilton argues, relied above all on the availability of cheap transportation that could link increasingly decentralized production and warehousing facilities to suburban supermarkets. To achieve this goal, postwar policymakers exploited a loophole in the 1935 Motor Carrier Act that exempted unprocessed agricultural goods from federal trucking regulations and thus allowed farmers and agribusiness interests to do an end run around the unionized transportation firms that dominated the trucking industry. As the sweated labor of independent truckers (Hamilton likens them to sharecroppers) began to undercut the more lucrative rates charged by unionized trucking firms, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, weakened further by a 1959 Senate investigation that led to the outlawing of secondary boycotts, began to lose its grip on the trucking industry. Meanwhile, Department of Agriculture secretaries under Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Nixon progressively expanded the category of exempted agricultural goods until President Carter, at the urging of Senator Ted Kennedy, finally deregulated the entire trucking industry in 1980. Democratic leadership in this deregulatory effort, Hamilton argues, signaled the culmination of the party’s postwar shift away from New Deal economic liberalism toward “rights-based social liberalism combined with growth-oriented economic policies that primarily benefited business interests and relatively affluent consumers” (p. 227). Moreover, deregulation of the trucking industry served as a model for similar efforts in other sectors of the postwar economy and thus played an important role in the demise of the New Deal order.

As the federal government whittled away at the regulated sector of the trucking industry from 1935 to 1980, it also placed the USDA’s scientific and technological research services at the disposal of agribusiness corporations and large-scale farming interests. This two-prong effort, Hamilton shows, was intended to prop up farm profits by cutting transportation costs while simultaneously mollifying inflation-stressed consumers by flooding supermarkets with an abundance of cheap industrial food. Put more bluntly, Hamilton argues that the bipartisan effort to remake the postwar American food system balanced the interests of corporate agribusiness, large farms, and consumers on the backs of organized labor, small farms, and, ironically, anti-statist independent truckers, whose entrepreneurial ambitions were largely thwarted by the postwar neoliberal order they themselves helped to usher in.

But if independent truckers were quick to jump on the emerging laissez-faire–antiunion bandwagon, Hamilton argues, they were not conservative by nature. Nor were their increasingly militant protests in the 1970s part of a blue-collar “backlash” against permissive liberal elites. The “anarchic libertarianism” of independent truckers was driven not by cultural angst or racial prejudice, Hamilton argues, but rather by “pocketbook politics”—in particular, the firm belief that “neither labor unions nor government regulators had the power to protect their economic interests” (p. 164). The corruption-ridden Teamsters, in their view, were simply not up to the task of safeguarding either job security or purchasing power in the face of devastating stagflation. And the state, truckers believed, had proven no more effective than the Teamsters in this regard. Indeed, it had frequently subverted the interests of the overwhelmingly white, deracinated farm boys who became independent truckers—first by encouraging the industrialization of the countryside that simultaneously foreclosed their opportunity to become farmers and drove them into long-haul trucking; then by issuing regulations that encouraged the cartelization of unionized trucking firms in the 1930s; and finally by failing to curb the entrenched power of agribusinesses that readily ate the lunch of nonunionized truckers.

In making this case, Hamilton directly challenges “backlash” historians in general (Thomas J. Sugrue, Robert O. Self, Kevin Kruse, et al.), and Thomas Frank in particular. In What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004), Frank argues that white working people were driven into the GOP in recent decades not by a rational calculation of their economic self-interest, but rather by the Democratic Party’s abandonment of economic liberalism, which left them vulnerable to conservatives’ clever use of cultural wedge issues and relentless positioning of liberals as latte-sipping elitists. To the extent that independent truckers represent the white working class as a whole, Hamilton poses a serious challenge to Frank’s influential thesis. Yet Hamilton’s research, while shedding considerable light on the complex ideological motivations of white rural workers, does not necessarily refute the notion that conservative efforts to redefine class-based politics in cultural terms may have played an important role in the defection of white workers from the Democratic Party. Perhaps they left for both economic and cultural reasons, just as farm boys gravitated to nonunionized trucking not only because it seemed to make economic sense to them but because it allowed them to hang onto a rural identity emphasizing masculinity and independence even as they knowingly drove their rigs into the maw of the “agroindustrial complex.”

Nor does Hamilton’s research refute the argument of Sugrue and others that racial demagoguery—frequently infused with a racist version of pocketbook politics manifested in systematic residential and workplace discrimination—contributed significantly to the white working-class abandonment of the Democratic Party. Hamilton himself acknowledges the role of racism in a footnote appearing late in the book. In this tempered version of his argument, pocketbook politics is downgraded from leading cause to “a durable component of white working-class disillusionment,” taking its place alongside “George Wallace’s racial demagoguery and Richard Nixon’s ‘Southern strategy’” (p. 288, n. 40, my emphasis). Instead of overturning the backlash thesis in its entirety, then, Hamilton unearths an important but overlooked factor—the remaking of the modern food system—in the demise of economic liberalism.

But none of this diminishes what is undeniably a major achievement. Shane Hamilton has written a brilliant book that will be required reading for anyone interested in understanding the conservative groundswell of the postwar era. His empathy for long-haul truckers left with few good options in the face of a state-sponsored agribusiness juggernaut—an empathy perhaps owing in part to his own farm upbringing—makes the book all the more compelling. Trucking culture, like Bakersfield in the hands of Johnny Carson, is easily mocked. To his credit, Hamilton resists the temptation, offering instead a respectful yet unromanticized analysis of the trucking life and the myths that have grown up around it, all of which should be of considerable interest to social, cultural, and rural historians. Trucking Country will also be of great interest to historians of technology. Indeed, Hamilton offers wonderfully nuanced histories of the half-dozen or so “political technologies” listed above, along with tractor trailers themselves. While acknowledging the power of technological momentum to shape social relations, he wisely steers clear of full-blown technological determinism by showing how technological innovations are products of human struggle and choice mediated by political ideology, economic motivations, and cultural identity. In the end, Hamilton convincingly links these innovations to the rise of an agribusiness-dominated food system and the demise of the New Deal order.

Dr. Kleiman is an assistant professor of history at the State University of New York, Geneseo.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Frank Donoghue makes the same grim point and more in The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities (Fordham University Press, 2008, $65). Donoghue, an associate professor of English at Ohio State University, focuses on the daunting challenges facing new humanities Ph.D.s in an increasingly corporatized academy. The Last Professors is only one of the more recent contributions to the growing literature on the crisis of the humanities in our universities, but Donoghue’s book is unique in three respects. The first is its focus on the figure of the professor as presently conceived—as an autonomous, tenured, accredited scholar afforded the time to research and write as well as teach— and how the dynamics of the corporate university is undermining this image. Second, Donoghue explicitly eschews the rhetoric of “crisis” because he contends that professors in the humanities—as defined above—have already lost the power to save themselves and are irreversibly on the road to extinction; hence, the “fate of the humanities” of his subtitle. And third, he documents the degree to which the humanities have been complicit in their own demise. These last two points make The Last Professors an especially sobering read.

Donoghue’s argument starts on familiar ground, where he traces out the history of capitalism’s ambivalent and at times openly hostile attitude toward the humanities’ place in higher education, starting with industrial giants like Andrew Carnegie, who denigrated the humanities as useless, and coming down to the Reagan era, when corporate America viewed the university as a vexing labor problem to be solved in the face of increasing college enrollments. In Donoghue’s account, the “casualization” of academic labor started at this point, which marks the beginning of the dismantling of the American professoriate. But Donoghue’s main focus in this history is on the constancy with which the techniques and vocabulary of business have been deployed to undermine the humanities, from the Gilded Age to the 1980s and beyond. Donoghue argues that the Tayloristic ideology of efficiency, productivity, and utility has come to figure prominently in academe and has driven the humanities into a permanently defensive stance. Relentlessly judged by a standard of “usefulness” defined in strictly economic terms, Donoghue claims that humanists have no ready answer to the question of, say, how the study of philosophy or literature could be considered “market-smart” in this new, corporatized environment. His worry is that in the absence of an adequate answer to this question, the humanities may be permanently put out to pasture across academe, as has already happened at for-profit entities like the University of Phoenix.

The second half of Donoghue’s argument rests on the notion that corporate values have been internalized by academics in the humanities: instead of traditional academic values like intelligence or erudition or originality, market values like productivity, efficiency, and competitive achievement have come to drive professional advancement in the modern academy. The irony here is that humanists have come to at least implicitly accept the very same values that have traditionally been used to attack them. This is because more and more graduate students are chasing fewer and fewer tenure-track slots, which turns young scholars into salespeople forced to feverishly sell themselves in a perennially weak humanities job market. This competition, for Donoghue, creates a need for uniform measures of academic achievement by which different kinds of intellectual work can be assessed against each other. These uniform measures, in turn, tend to produce uniform and mediocre scholarship. This dynamic generates further irony: the ostensibly “autonomous” scholar undermining the integrity of his or her own research through institutionalized conformity, for the sake of competing for the Holy Grail of academe—tenure—a practice that has become increasingly rare in the face of the rising numbers of nontenured, temporary faculty.

When the two strands of Donoghue’s argument come together, they point to a very dismal future for the humanities professor. As college credentials become more expensive and more explicitly tied to job preparation, the liberal arts curriculum will be viewed as a luxury item in a student’s education. In order to compete with the for-profit universities (the only growth sector in higher education, according to Donoghue) that have already done away with tenure and the liberal arts, a growing number of financially straitened traditional universities will have no choice but to adopt the only business model that will allow them to compete and survive—but at the expense of the humanities. In this hostile environment, the only place left for the humanities will be a dwindling number of elite institutions still dedicated to the liberal arts model, but even this sanctuary has been tainted by academe’s new culture of competition. These select universities chase prestige through rankings such as U.S. News & World Report’s “America’s Best Colleges” issue, which assume that the prestige generated by any institution can be quantified and compared. Donoghue argues that in this environment the humanities, even in institutions still dedicated to the liberal arts model, have had to abandon the traditional rationales for their existence, such as intellectual self-improvement and preparation for responsible citizenship. These rationales are subordinated to the frenzied pursuit of commodified prestige, which undermines the humanities’ distinct contribution to higher learning.

One might be tempted to criticize The Last Professors for telling us much that we already know; a lot of this ground has already been covered in texts like Marc Bousquet’s How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (2008). But, to be fair, Donoghue freely acknowledges his debt to other authors on this topic, and he reframes this material in a distinctive way. A more valid criticism could be leveled against Donoghue’s final chapter on the pursuit of prestige, which is the least compelling part of the book. Since “prestige” is a rather amorphous concept (as Donoghue himself admits), it is not clear exactly how the race for prestige subverts the traditional mission of the humanities. Despite this shortcoming, however, the alarm that Donoghue raises in this book is one that should be heard and heeded, especially within the shrinking community of fully tenured professors.

I must admit that reading The Last Professors induced many pangs of survivor’s guilt in me, as a member of this dwindling community. I know that I am one of the fortunate few of my generation who was lucky enough to land a tenure-track position and earn tenure. I am fully aware that if fate had treated me differently, I could just as easily have been drafted into the reserve army of perpetually disposable adjunct instructors. Many friends from graduate school still labor in this army under intolerably unjust conditions, living tenuously from semester to semester as they help to cultivate young minds in the art of becoming more fully human, a calling university administrators praise to the skies as essential to their educational mission but who nevertheless cannot find it within themselves or their budgets to offer those who answer this call stable employment, or a salary they can live on, or a modicum of professional dignity. If we who have achieved tenure in the last two decades or so are at all honest with ourselves, we must admit we were fortunate to have scuttled up that ladder even as it was being pulled up after us.

Once secure in the warm bosom of tenure, a myopic complacency can set in, and I confess my shock at discovering that a sizable majority of those presently teaching college-level classes in this country are adjunct instructors; moreover, many of my tenured colleagues are equally surprised when I share this information with them. But assuming the tenured professoriate becomes sufficiently aware of the very dire straits it is in, what is to be done? Should it merely follow my example of passively warning off potential graduate students? Or does it have a more positive obligation to try to save itself for future generations of scholars and teachers? If the answer to this last question is “yes,” then we must next take up the question of what strategies to adopt in this fight.

Donoghue, despite his pessimistic stance, does point to instances of adjunct faculty successfully organizing on their own behalf, and he catalogs the serious accreditation, recruitment, and retention problems encountered by some of the for-profit universities, which are obviously vulnerabilities that could be exploited in this fight. And he ends The Last Professors with two items of very pointed advice for us tenured faculty: first, stop romanticizing a quaint image of “the professor” that is fast fading into oblivion and start paying closer attention to how the corporate university actually works; and second, begin a relentless challenge of these corporate assumptions before they become settled articles of faith within academe. Despite his earlier claim that the humanities are doomed, it seems to me that here Donoghue hits his strongest note, and in closing I would like to briefly amplify it.

How often has the bromide been heard that “if we just ran X like a business, all of its problems would be solved”? This has long been the dogma in our commercial culture, but it raises the problem of misapplied principles. Markets and businesses are designed to generate profit, generally considered a private good, whereas higher education is meant to generate competent professionals and (one hopes) well-rounded and informed citizens, who are regarded as public goods. Running a university like a business may have the benefit of introducing needed economic efficiencies to different aspects of the institution, but if this model is overapplied it risks making its public mission a slave to these efficiencies. For examples of what I’m talking about, one only has to look as far as our purportedly democratic system of government, which has been grotesquely distorted by profit, or our system of health care, which is enormously profitable but leaves at least one out of every six citizens vulnerable to catastrophic medical crises. More fundamentally, this dogma rests on a deeply flawed assumption: that businesses and markets have always proven successful. Economic history puts the lie to this claim, as it amply documents the instances where markets and businesses have gone awry and required intervention on the part of regulators, legislators, or prosecutors to put them right again. Again, bear witness to the recent implosions of our housing and financial markets, when some of our most accomplished businessmen could not manage to run even their businesses like businesses.

Karl Marx once declared that capitalism “has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honored and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage-laborers.” Donoghue’s warning is that unless we start challenging the assumptions underlying the corporate university—very quickly and with great urgency—the tenured humanities professor is well on its way to making this list.

D. R. Koukal is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Detroit Mercy.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Now, John Rennie Short, a professor of public policy at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, has revisited and updated Gottmann’s original Megalopolis formulation in his elegant and thought-provoking book Liquid City: Megalopolis and the Contemporary Northeast (Resources for the Future Press, 2007, $70/$28.95). Short explains the metaphor behind his book as follows:

Metropolitan growth has a liquid quality; it is constantly moving over the landscape, here in torrents, there in rivulets, elsewhere in steady drips. . . . Metropolitan growth possesses an unstable quality that flows over political boundaries, seeps across borders, and transcends tight spatial demarcations; it is a process, not a culmination, always in motion, never at rest (pp. 14–15).

In such felicitous prose, Short emulates Gottmann’s own tendency to embellish dry statistical analysis with flights of rhetoric, as in the latter’s rather grandiloquent description of Megalopolis as “a stupendous monument erected by titanic efforts” whose fortunate inhabitants he deems to be “the richest, best educated, best housed, and best serviced in the world.” Gottmann supported his assertions with nearly 800 pages on settlement history, economic geography, demography, land use, and related topics. But despite his blizzard of statistics, Gottmann begged at least two questions: By what criteria was the geographic area of Megalopolis defined, and why is Megalopolis significant as a region, as distinct from the principal city-regions that it contains?

Short candidly admits that Gottmann’s original definition of Megalopolis was “neither consistent nor clear” and provided “no consistent demarcation or empirical base to build upon” (pp. 9–10). Nevertheless, Short gives it a try. Admitting to an element of subjectivity in his own selection process, Short drops a few of Gottmann’s peripheral counties and adds several others, yielding a new map of Megalopolis that includes 124 counties in 12 states with a population of 48.7 million (as compared with 31.9 million in Gottmann’s original study area).

Appropriately, the question begged by Gottmann is explicitly raised by Short: “Having defined the region, what does it mean? In what sense is Megalopolis a region?” But to confront that question is not necessarily to answer it. Like Gottmann, Short resorts to assembling a vast array of spatial data ranging across demography, employment, housing, crime, farming, bank deposits, and other variables tabulated by the census. These data are not explicitly set forth in Liquid City but are posted as an online “Electronic Atlas of Megalopolis” (http://www.umbc.edu/ges/student_ projects/digital_atlas/index.htm [accessed 25 August 2009]) containing sixty maps of social and economic data for the counties in the updated list. (The atlas was compiled in collaboration with Thomas D. Rabenhorst and UMBC geography students. I found it graphically inviting but a bit random in the selection of variables included.) The remainder of the book draws extensively on selected subsets of these variables to attempt to define what Megalopolis means today.

Short provides a much more nuanced analysis than Gottmann of the demography and economy of Megalopolis. For example, Gottmann dismissed race and poverty with cavalier disdain, observing that Megalopolis “attracts large numbers of in-migrants from the poorer sections . . . especially Southern Negroes and Puerto Ricans, who congregate in the old urban areas and often live in slums.” By contrast, Short compares available census data on race and ethnicity, finding not surprisingly that the white population of central cities within Megalopolis declined from 83 percent in 1960 to 42 percent in 2000, while suburbs, or at least some of them, have gradually become more ethnically diverse since 1960. The white-black dichotomy of Gottmann’s era has now been supplanted by a more complex mosaic of whites, blacks, Hispanics (white or black), and Asians. Foreign-born immigrants from Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America account for most of the population growth of Megalopolis since 1950.

“Suburbs” of course are no longer the monolithic middle-class white enclaves of “organization men” and their families as documented by William H. Whyte in his classic 1956 study of postwar suburbia, The Organization Man (republished by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2002). “Suburbs” (not a census category) now encompass older inner-ring bedroom communities, impoverished former industrial enclaves, “edge cities,” upscale gated communities, and, on the metropolitan fringe, residual farm villages and rural areas. Short devotes several chapters to examining the changing economies, land use, and demographics outside the central cities of Megalopolis.

Predictably, “decentralization” is identified as the fundamental trend in Megalopolis, in large part oriented to the network of interstate and other limited-access highways which have facilitated urban sprawl and the abandonment of older central city neighborhoods since the 1960s. Another important driver of decentralization is the loss of manufacturing to lower-cost regions of the United States and abroad, with the concomitant decline of industrial and port cities within Megalopolis like Worcester, Camden, Baltimore, and Portland. Suburban office parks and the “edge cities” of Megalopolis and elsewhere reflected the rise of spatially diffuse service industries, such as finance, health, travel, and marketing. With the advent of the internet, those industries are also spreading away from Megalopolis to low-wage urban centers around the world.

Short strives to characterize the “liquid landscape” of Megalopolis through several forms of analysis conducted at different geographic scales. He develops a typology of county units based on their relative affluence and demographic diversity (using “foreign born” as a measure of the latter). A subsequent chapter addresses a finer scale of “urban places” which Short estimates to number 2,353 within Megalopolis, grouping several census categories. This set of places is subject to a withering array of 39 variables employing standard statistical techniques. For good measure, a brief chapter focuses on selected census tracts to represent the variation among “urban neighborhoods” within the Megalopolis cities of Washington, Boston, and Baltimore. The bottom line resulting from these various levels of analysis seems to be that Megalopolis may be more heterogeneous than homogeneous—that its internal diversity overwhelms any sense of unity as a region. I shall return to this matter before concluding.

Turning from the micro to the macro, Short considers the status of today’s Megalopolis in the global context. The preeminence of New York City in world finance and of Washington, D.C., in international relations needs no elaboration. To extrapolate the importance of those cities and their respective metropolitan hinterlands to Megalopolis writ large requires a rhetorical leap of faith, e.g., Gottmann’s famous declaration that Megalopolis is “the Continent’s Economic Hinge.” Short fairly admits that today “The region neither dominates the national economy nor shapes the national identity to the extent that it did in 1950” (p. 23). Late in the book, however, he succumbs to Gottmannesque oratory: “Megalopolis is the world’s most important GCR [global city region] where the different processes of globalization are readily apparent” (p. 141).

This still begs the question that Gottmann himself never addressed: What lends significance to the megaregion as such, as distinct from the important cities that it contains? Specifically, what is so “readily apparent” that makes Megalopolis—as distinct from its principal cities—“the world’s most important GCR”? Apart from those central cities and their respective satellite edge cities and bedroom communities, what is left is a motley assortment of counties in various stages of economic boom or bust (mostly the latter in 2010). Is the whole more (or less) than the sum of its parts?

“Megalopolis” thus remains a semantic and graphic construct, more statistically refined by Short than by Gottmann, but nevertheless enigmatic in its exact extent and significance. As Short admits, Megalopolis is a vast collection of political units that have little in common or concern for each other. There is no Megalopolis government nor is it the perceived “home place” for its 48.7 million inhabitants, most of whom have probably never heard of it. It is fragmented physically by watersheds and mountain ranges, by economic divides between rich and poor and those in between, by cultural divides among sports loyalties, newspaper circulation, political ideologies, religious roots, vernacular cuisine, and so on. Its internal differences seem to outweigh whatever binds it into a single entity. Can Megalopolis, despite its reduced national importance, still be “the world’s most important global city region?” Or is it a geographical fiction and outworn cliché?

Personally, as a disciple of Gottmann myself, I will cling to the terminology and mental map of Megalopolis as a convenient reference to my own home region. And the alliterative resonance makes it a pleasant term to drop in a dinner conversation—unlike “global city region”! John Rennie Short has done a masterful job of revisualizing and documenting how Megalopolis has changed since Gottmann, and I am grateful to him for revisiting this elusive but enduring geographical proposition.

Rutherford H. Platt is emeritus professor of geography at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

The 2006 NASA conference on which the volume is based brought together quite an array of men and women: various kinds of historians; civil servants; a communications specialist; independent scholars; museum curators; an astronomer; an economist and lawyer; an engineer; and professors of English, American studies, public administration, public affairs, and space policy. The book is subdivided into six sections, though boundaries between sections are porous and topics spill over and sometimes duplicate one another. The section on “Commercial and Economic Impact,” for example, covers some of the same ground as that on “Applications Satellites, the Environment, and National Security.” In general, the organization is sound and the quality of the essays is good, although it is doubtful whether a commercial publisher would have accorded editors Steven Dick and Roger Launius the luxury of including all the contributions that appear here.

Some of the material is refreshingly original and unexpected, at least to this reviewer. Kim McQuaid’s account of NASA’s hiring, demoting, firing, rehiring, and bridling of Ruth Bates Harris, the agency’s highest-ranking black woman at the time of her appointment as director of equal opportunity in 1971, is a chilling reminder of the mindset at NASA in the Apollo era, what subsequent administrator Daniel Goldin called “male, pale, and stale” (p. 448). Jennifer Ross-Nazzal analyzes the Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP), NASA’s pioneering plan for proactive quality control in the development of processed foods for the Apollo astronauts, showing how it became the food-industry gold standard in ensuing decades; here we appear to have an instance of an innovative technological development that really did spin off from the space program. Peter Westwick’s brief but insightful appraisal of the impact of Cal Tech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on Southern California reveals the agency’s seminal contributions to commercial computer graphics and suggests that the JPL itself may be seen “as a subset of the entertainment business” (p. 479).

Societal Impact of Spaceflight also displays a critical edge, a refreshing exception to the party line so often encountered in official histories. Glen Asner, for example, a civil servant in NASA’s History Division, notes that space history “remains focused on elites and artifacts.” Even “the concept of societal impact is problematic,” he says, because it suggests a causal arrow that moves only from spaceflight to society (p. 388). Asner recommends a dose of rigorous social history, including attention to class, race, gender, labor, education, and community relations. Martin Collins voices a similar dissatisfaction with the failure to employ critical theory and other conceptual contributions from the humanities in order to situate space history in the “broader landscape of the postwar historical experience” (p. 621). Collins particularly recommends framing space history in the nexus between culture and Marxist production. Equally critical of normative space history are the four authors in this volume—Valerie Neal, Linda Billings, Ron Miller, and Wendell Mendell—who analyze the public rationales for spaceflight, usually meaning human spaceflight.

As for the weaknesses of space history illustrated or exposed in this volume, three stand out. First, almost all of the essays display a surprising lack of evidence: Stephen Johnson’s reprise of his exemplary and exhaustive statistical analyses of space activity within the U.S. and world economies is the exception that proves this rule. Even though Philip Scranton offers anecdotal evidence from a wide range of aerospace industrial projects to support his claim that NASA has been the “hub of Big Engineering in America,” not all of his cases are drawn from the space program. Too many of the chapters in Societal Impact of Spaceflight lend credence to Eric Conway’s stinging rebuke that “space history has been little more than advocacy written in heroic prose” (p. 287).

A second deficiency in this volume, and the conference from which it proceeded, is the slight amount of attention paid space activities in the realm of national security. According to Stephen Johnson’s data, in 2005 the United States spent almost three times as much on space-related military and intelligence-gathering activities as it did on NASA. It seems reasonable to suspect that the impact from these different realms was proportional to their funding. Of course, much of the national security work is secret and its impact can be even more difficult to measure than that of civil programs. Still, the title of this volume cries out for more attention to national security programs in space.

Finally, space history remains a parochial and internalist field, narrowly focused on civilian, especially human, spaceflight as a self-contained historical entity. To the extent that the topic is contextualized at all, it is usually represented as a cold war phenomenon that has struggled for adequate funding in the years since Apollo. Scranton’s chapter on the aerospace industry suggests some of the interpretive rewards of putting space activity in play with its economic, political, technological, and business environment, but little work in the field rises to the challenges posed by Asner and Collins. Too much of the space history represented in this volume is solipsistic; not enough engages the mainstream of historical scholarship.

Alex Roland is professor of history at Duke University, where he teaches military history and the history of technology.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

Rubin argues that state coercion and Stasi surveillance cannot fully explain the GDR’s political and social cohesion. He suggests that, over the decades, East German society developed a genuine self-understanding whose nature can be grasped by analyzing its everyday material culture. Private life was not a “state-free” sphere. State provisions and socialist ideologies were put forward, questioned, adopted, and transformed through the artifacts with which East Germany decorated itself. In the production of synthetic materials and plastic goods, the state and party ultimately “found a central point of agreement between the needs of the political economy, the aesthetic ideology of modernist industrial designers, and the desires of the population for a modern yet efficient life” (p. 2).

Two concurring and inextricably linked events, discussed in chapter 1, made the year 1958 a watershed for the GDR: the Chemistry Program and a “consumer turn.” The Chemistry Program intended to use investment in the chemical industry as a stimulant to other industrial areas; chemical synthesis was to become the keystone of all economic planning. The stakes were high: economic success should earn the state the consent of its citizens. Rubin’s thesis is as follows: from the moment that “the main economic task of the GDR” was defined as “overtaking West Germany in per capita consumption” (p. 33) instead of excelling in the sector of heavy industry, plastics of all sorts became the material which, in the official rhetoric, embodied the envisioned authority of the state. The subsequent chapters explain how and why plastics linked mass consumption, the idea of individual prosperity in socialism, and political consent.

Chapter 2 proposes that the science-based synthetic materials enabled functionalist designers to present themselves as being guided by scientific principles, producing an aesthetic of objectivity and “truth.” In this reading, functionalist design was congruent with the ambitions of the state and party. Most important, plastics helped form a genuine GDR culture through the housing program started in 1957. The new living culture, pursued in chapter 3, was “aggressively advertised” in the late 1950s and 1960s (p. 89). The GDR diverted significant amounts of synthetics to prefabricated mass-housing construction, making plastics a salient feature of the new apartments. Drawing on interviews, Rubin convincingly suggests that, collectively, people experienced their move into modern suburbia as a major rupture with the individual past. Rather indirectly, therefore, plastics came to be associated with individual transitions and adjustments to the socialist present. Chapter 4 deals with plastics as the “fabric” of most consumer goods. Interpreting the wave of plastic guidebooks and explanatory exhibitions, Rubin argues that East Germans, after years of programmatic propaganda in favor of a functionalist or socialist aesthetics of plastics, not only approved the key position of synthetics in socialist economic planning but also shared the political and aesthetic values officially attached to them. Plastic rather improbably acquired the reputation of being a highly valuable material—even though, one might add, it was not necessarily molded into modernist forms (consider, for instance, the plastic eggcup in the shape of chickens on the book’s cover which, like many other products, was definitely at variance with what functionalist industrial design would demand).

The larger part of chapter 5 refocuses the book’s culturalist narrative by putting plastics into the broader picture of the GDR’s economy. It traces the history of how the planning, production, and distribution of plastic materials worked, failed, and improved in the course of the 1960s and early 1970s. Centralized coordination and efforts to standardize the quality and types of plastic allowed for an increased output with fewer rejections. Material testing and a standardized range of products eventually led to a homogeneity of plastic material culture. Until the early 1970s, however, Soviet oil was in short supply and modern thermoplastic production facilities were not yet online. That plastic became a hallmark of the GDR’s modernity even though the state frequently struggled with producing large amounts of high-quality synthetics fits into the larger picture: Political legitimization of socialism was generally based on its utopian dimension (see, for instance, Lucian Hölscher, Weltgericht oder Revolution: Protestantische und sozialistische Zukunftsvorstellungen im deutschen Kaiserreich 1871–1914 [1989]).

Historians of technology may feel that Rubin does not pay enough attention to the larger history of the materials he uses for exploring East Germany’s political culture. This is true both in terms of discourse and in terms of practices. When the Chemistry Program picked plastics for enhancing the output of consumer articles, the choice was a traditional one. Virtually all modern plastics, starting with celluloid in the 1870s and 1880s, were developed and discussed with a view toward mass consumption. Future prosperity through plastics had been prophesied many times, and in many places. The GDR was, as Rubin notes, a latecomer in this respect. In order to fully understand why the promise of plastics persisted as a powerful agent of social change, the historical and contemporary semantics evolving around this artifact could have been explored more systematically. A great source, for instance, is the bulk of petition letters citizens addressed to the organization of plastics processing facilities. I wish Rubin had provided the readers with a much closer reading of the 2,728 Eingaben concerning plastics, only selectively interpreted in the last part of chapter 5.

For some time now, focusing on material culture has implied advocating the practice turn in historical research. I would have liked Rubin to be more explicit about how he conceptualizes the relationship between dealing with plastic as a material and its shaping of collective experience and social cohesion. With regard to the centralizing of planning authorities around plastics, for instance, he suggests that synthetics reflected the “centripetal forces” of the plan (p. 176). It seems more convincing, though, and also more in line with Rubin’s overall approach, to argue just the other way around: New materials exert “centripetal forces”; they serve as a medium of social interaction and entail infrastructural and organizational adaptations—be it in market or planned economies. These points aside, Synthetic Socialism is an innovative contribution to the history of consumption in the GDR.

Dr. Westermann is a historian of technology at ETH Zürich.

©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.

We return to it for two reasons—intellectual and institutional. The three articles that follow in this theme cluster all break new ground on an issue of longstanding concern to historians of technology: the evolving nature of engineering education. As Rosalind Williams commented at the 2007 SHOT meeting, work in the history of engineering has paid “a lot of attention” to engineering education, in sharp contrast to concerns within the history of science.4 The extensive historical study of engineering education reflects, in part, a broader focus in histories of engineering generally to highlight the normativities of technical practices. Here we are speaking of fine-grained historical work delineating the ways in which engineers have served specific social agendas as they have reworked the material world. The practitioners of this sociotechnical knowledge have carried different names over time and across differing territories. But in all times and places, engineering has entailed technical work to achieve social ends—both stated and hidden. Edwin Layton’s The Revolt of the Engineers is still widely read, according to Ronald Kline, because of its “rich and insightful account of the struggle between ‘progressive’ and ‘conservative’ engineers to remake the profession of engineering, mostly within engineering societies.”5 David Noble’s America by Design is also still widely read, in part because of its argument that engineers in the United States have been a “domesticated breed” who “in reality served only the dominant class in society.”6 Peter Meiksins challenged Layton’s account by calling attention to the role played by “rank-and-file” engineers who sought to enhance their material welfare by “pursuing a ‘middle way’ between patrician reformers and trade unionism.”7 A host of volumes by Angus Buchanan, Kees Gispen, Ronald Kline, Michal McMahon, Terry Reynolds, Bruce Sinclair, and others have documented the contents and challenges of professionalism in engineering.8 Ruth Oldenziel found the professionalization of engineering to be a project that “turned out to be a thoroughly male and middle-class endeavor.”9 Comparing the drawing practices of mid-nineteenth-century British and American engineers, John K. Brown concluded that their “application of plans (and the drawings themselves) came to reflect and reinforce their host cultures.”10 Comparing engineering building practices in early-nineteenth-century France and the United States, Eda Kranakis maintained that “the difference between the engineering cultures of the two countries was a factor” in their differential technological development during the nineteenth century, making France “less dynamic” industrially than the United States.11 Antoine Picon showed how engineers came to supplant architects in eighteenth-century France as “[t]he accuracy of their calculations . . . bec[a]me synonymous with progress.”12 Engineering is never solely about reworking the material world.

In like fashion, histories of engineering education have frequently described how practices of engineering formation (including variable mixes of informal training and formal education) positioned engineers in relation to larger societal projects. Ken Alder’s Engineering the Revolution showed how instruction in a “middle epistemology” to “describe quantitatively the relationship among measurable quantities . . . [in order] to seek a region of optimal gain” both facilitated the developing autonomy of French artillerists and grounded the later revolutionary movement.13 Through several works, Bruce Seely has reported how by the late 1950s U.S. engineering schools seeking to grow “had to develop graduate programs to support fundamental research, and emphasize engineering science” not to serve industry, but “rather to attract federal research funds.”14 Amy Slaton’s recent Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering examines how specific “conceptions of engineering talent and rigor” have supported racial selectivity in U.S. engineering schools, ranging from formal segregation in the 1940s to the denial of “race-based interventions” in the 1990s.15

Among Continental historians of engineering education, Peter Lundgreen turned to “bureaucracy rather . . . than industrialization” to account for contrasts between training “state engineers” in Continental Europe and training “engineers for the private sector of the economy” in Anglo-America.16 The elite status of state engineers in France, stretching back three centuries, has justified a veritable industry of historical work on engineering education.17 More recent Continental work has examined the travels of “models” of formation, the role of key “reference schools,” and, most recently, the distinctive normativities of schools on the European “periphery” in the context of the ongoing debate on concepts such as transnationality, circulation, and appropriation.18

The three articles in this cluster extend this interest in relationships among the contents of engineering education and larger-scale social projects in three different ways. Matthew Wisnioski’s “‘Liberal Education Has Failed’: Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America” hews closely to the link between engineering and technology in a cautionary tale for historians of technology and other would-be liberal educators of engineers. He examines how engineering educators in the 1960s coped with a “broad . . . conceptual breakdown” in the “technological foundations of modernity” by attempting to appropriate critical insights from the humanities and social sciences.19 Ideological debates over the nature and control of technology offered concepts, asserts Wisnioski, that “provided commonality among the countercultural, environmental, civil rights, and antiwar movements” and “challenged engineers’ self-image as creative individuals responsible for technological progress.”20

Wisnioski examines three approaches engineering educators took to wielding liberal education and social theory as tools to reassert that engineering served as a beneficent force in society. One approach to control involved telling students technology had adversely affected civilization and attempting to develop a new applied humanities to produce “expert managers of the public good.”21 Another approach resisted dramatic curricular change by granting social scientists both the resources to develop fundamental theory about technology and society and the curricular responsibility to create “expert policymakers.”22 A third effort involved producing “introspective” engineers who would “draw on” the humanities and social sciences just as they currently drew on mathematics and the basic sciences of chemistry and physics.23 Wisnioski also recounts how historians of technology helped “enhance engineering’s luster” by becoming “embedded participants in engineering culture” who “assimilated the humanities and social sciences to engineers’ sensibilities” as “humanist mediators.”24 Although most of these programs did not last, what did endure was an emergent “ideology of technological change” that preserved “existing managerial relations” by casting technological change as autonomous and accelerating, and by assigning to engineers the responsibility for managing it.25

Wisnioski concludes with a worry that the apparent receptivity of contemporary engineering educators to liberal educators constitutes yet another attempt to essentially co-opt the humanities and social sciences, “this time to redefine who engineers should be in a global economy.”26 Echoing Langdon Winner, Wisnioski cautions that participants in engineering education must replace problem sets with question sets. Those who fail to make this transition risk “acced[ing] to the longevity of feigned innocence” exhibited by too many of their forebearers.27

Ross Bassett’s “Aligning India in the Cold War Era: Indian Technical Elites, the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, and Computing in India and the United States” examines how Indian technical elites used strategic international alignments in engineering education as a vehicle for acquiring powerful technologies for the new country—and to advance their own professional aspirations. Following independence in 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru strongly advocated scientific and technological development as a pathway toward unity and international strength. The greatest “national enthusiasm toward technology” focused on atomic power, steel mills, and hydroelectric dams.28 Embracing a report written before independence, Nehru also endorsed the establishment of five advanced technological institutes. The first Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) was formed in 1951 at Kharagpur with multinational support. But each of the other four institutes, established between 1958 and 1961, aligned to a separate partner: the USSR, West Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Bassett follows how the establishment of electrical engineering at IIT Kanpur provided the broad community of engineers across India with access to advanced IBM computers and to the American educational system. Bassett’s analysis builds on postcolonial studies, rejecting the old metropoleperiphery distinction to see agency in a new light. His narrative shows how Indian technical elites strategically aligned themselves with the United States—even at moments when bilateral relations between the two nations’ political elites had soured—in order to fulfill localized agendas.

This study ably demonstrates how histories of technology can provide revisionist frameworks by viewing historical contingencies and emergences through the lens of technological developments, thus disrupting standard narratives of political, economic, and social history. In this case, the diplomatic history of post-independence India has tended to focus on the twin “bipoles” of India versus Pakistan and the U.S. versus the USSR Bassett shows, however, that even “near the peak of anti-American sentiment in India” in 1972, a faculty committee at IIT Bombay, an institution formally aligned with the USSR, proposed a series of educational reforms “whose overall effect was to bring the curriculum more in line with American engineering-education standards.”29 Strategic alignment differs sharply from the transfer (and presumed reproduction) of educational “models” from one country to another.30 Prior to independence, engineering colleges established by the British had a “circumscribed role” to “prepare Indians to work in subsidiary positions under British rule.”31 But after independence, education in controls engineering was a means for acquiring computers and advancing Indian capabilities in the “regulation of systems.”32 The key points of reference were the aspirations and massive challenges in the new country, not simply a potentially replicable model elsewhere. The first director of IIT Kanpur in 1968 gave a talk in the United States on “The Role of the Professional as an Agent of Political, Economic, and Social Change in Low-Income Countries.”33 And notably, Bassett reports, “mass education did not receive the same priority” at the highest echelons of Indian government as did the IITs.34 The focus was on technical elites. Nehru’s legacy thus includes “low levels of education and persistent poverty” as well as the large-scale science and technology projects so often linked to his name.35

A second contribution of this study, especially for audiences of engineers and others beyond the history of technology, is its account of the role played by graduates of IIT Kanpur in the rise of the information technology industry in India and the United States. The millions of readers of journalist Thomas Friedman’s The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century can describe the role played in the industrial development of Bangalore by inexpensive communication across unusually cheap (devalued, really) fiber-optic cable.36 Indeed, Bassett reports that the Indian IT industry is not one that makes sense within Indian boundaries, for “twothirds of its business comes from the United States.”37 But while Friedman’s account sinks into ethnocentric xenophobia about new Indian (and Chinese) threats to the United States,38 Bassett maps the operations of a “transnational elite” that has provided “critical intermediaries between the two societies.”39

In “Engineering Education and the Identities of Engineers in Colombia, 1887–1972,” Andrés Valderrama and his five coauthors (Juan Camargo, Idelman Mejía, Antonio Mejía, Ernesto Lleras, and Antonio García) locate technology in the background of an account of the role of engineering education “in defining the evolving identities of engineers in Colombia.”40 In a rare Technology and Culture article on a topic in Latin America, Valderrama et al. describe “interdependence” in the “stabilizations” of both engineers and the country itself.41 Colombian history differed markedly from the pattern of other Latin American nations, such as Argentina, Peru, and Mexico—where economic and political authority centered on the capital and reached out to shape the periphery. The emergence of Colombia is an account of regional competition to define the whole. In regional differences lay contrasting images of progress and contrasting trajectories for the formation of engineers at engineering education institutions.

Like Bassett’s case of Indian technical elites, the Colombian engineers Valderrama et al. follow “partially co-invented” the educational practices they advocated and constructed. The Facultad de Ingeniería, building on the Colegio Militar, looked to France in emphasizing mathematics-intensive instruction “for the development of the country’s infrastructure.”42 Like elite French institutions, it was located in the capital city, Bogotá, whose leaders desired for it the centrality long performed by Paris. In contrast, the Escuela de Minas established a “longstanding position” that engineers “should serve as entrepreneurs and managers in [private] companies.”43 It was located in Medellín, a “commercial and industrial center that dominated the [country’s] most important export product of the time, coffee.”44

The dominant narrative in this account is the reconciliation of these two approaches to engineering education in a country-wide structure that ultimately vested the highest authority in Universidad Nacional—to which Facultad de Ingeniería belonged. After 1945, however, that reconciliation was challenged and displaced by a new regime of progress built on the image of development. This emergent image of progress legitimized the development of private-sector institutions, most especially the Universidad de los Andes. While Bassett’s account of engineering institutions in India emphasizes a disconnect between technological and diplomatic histories, for Valderrama et al., the founding of Universidad de los Andes and realignments in older public institutions signaled a convergence of technological and diplomatic histories around explicit alignment with the United States. Although such alignment met with significant, sometimes fierce, resistance, its success also indicated dominance of the “faith in science and technology as vehicles for development” that was “sought and maintained” by both Colombian and American engineers.45

Valderrama et al.’s account has particular significance for Latin American engineering educators today who are attempting to emulate the regional collaboration under way in Europe under the label “the Bologna process.” A contemporary competition exists, for example, between two distinct strategies for collaboration in engineering education.46 On the one side are organizations that align Latin American engineering education with initiatives in Spain and Portugal (e.g, the Iberoamerican Society of Engineering Education). On the other are organizations that frame engineering education in Latin America as “capacity building” in conjunction with multinational corporations based in the United States (e.g., the Engineering for the Americas project).

Taken together, the three contributors to this cluster advance research in the history of engineering education by investigating new normativities. It is especially notable that these articles also have the potential to speak to audiences beyond the readership of Technology and Culture—beyond the membership of SHOT.

This returns us to Terry Reynolds’s concern that the history of technology has become less relevant to external audiences. Another way to think of this: how well do its topics and methods speak to the needs and goals of the scholars, readers, and “users”—beyond regular history departments—that the field needs to sustain its health over the long haul? Reynolds focused on industrial archaeology. Other neighboring arenas making use of work in the history of technology include museums and graduate programs in museum studies and public history. More relevant in the context of this issue of T&C are engineering schools and the engineering professional societies. Such varied users of the history of technology are vital to the ultimate health of the field. On this count, there is cause for concern.

Fifty years ago, engineering amounted to a parent of the nascent SHOT, not merely a neighbor. The first conversations among the cadre of people who would establish SHOT took place at the 1957 conference of the American Society for Engineering Education at Cornell. On page one of the first issue of Technology and Culture, Mel Kranzberg wrote of his aspirations for the journal—“to bring together the engineer, the scientist, the industrialist, the social scientist, and the humanist.”47 In the early years, non-historians published half the articles in T&C, and “the early bias toward engineering and science was even more pronounced than this evidence suggests,” according to John Staudenmaier’s analysis.48 But by the 1970s, historians penned 72 percent of T&C articles.49 For a society of historians this was clearly good news, evidence that the field had advanced far in its professional aspirations. The methodological frames of the 1970s and 1980s— contextualism, Hughesian systems, and social construction—were further evidence of a confident and advancing field. The articles in this theme cluster are all by historians as well, but historians affiliated with academic institutions dominated by engineering. Surely all this is good news, evidence of real strength. So what is the problem?

All is not well in the history of technology—and for that matter in the engineering profession—at least in Europe and the United States.50 Now, more than ever, the two fields need each other. Like all historical subfields that grew up in and after the 1960s, the history of technology clamored for decades to gain currency among “mainstream” history, only to discover that the center had melted away—if it had ever existed.51 For at least fifteen years, the academic job market for fresh Ph.D.s in the field has been tough, even in the (rare) good years for hiring overall. Increasingly, bad years have become the norm, as American higher education undergoes a broad retrenching. A vibrant, international community comes together for SHOT’s annual conferences, but Reynolds was right. Success as an academic discipline of historians has meant the loss of that ecumenical quality that SHOT’s founders sought, achieved, and maintained for decades.52

Trying to counter that trend, a new SHOT special interest group formed after the Munich meeting. Founded by an author and an editor of the present issue (Bassett and Brown), the Prometheans builds bridges between the history of technology generally (SHOT specifically) and various constituencies in engineering. The group has created paper sessions at SHOT on such topics as “History Informing Practice: Using the History of Technology in Engineering” (Washington, D.C., 2007). Thanks particularly to the dedicated work of Atsushi Akera (another historian in an engineering-dominated institution), the Prometheans also sponsor sessions on engineering history at SHOT’s annual conferences. SHOT’s president and secretary have targeted practicing engineers for special introductory invitations to SHOT meetings. All this is merely a start, a sketch of possibilities. Consider it as well an invitation for further initiatives and collaborations by all SHOT members, historians and engineers.

In recent decades, the engineering profession(s) have also struggled. Their challenges lie in such areas as membership, funding, societal roles, and self-identity. In the past half-century, engineering has splintered further, with new specialties in systems, nuclear, computer science, computer engineering, environmental, and biomedical—to name just the major additions among academic degree programs. Rosalind Williams has described this process as the “expansive disintegration” of engineering.53 These new specialties have made it more difficult for engineers to claim “jurisdication” over technology.54 They have also made it harder for engineers—and the general public—to derive a clear sense of whether engineering plays any social role beyond the twinned determinisms of advancing autonomous technical change and serving the profit motive. As we know from Edwin Layton and David Noble, American engineers always had divided loyalties between their employers and their professional colleagues and institutions.55 Less well known is that during the post-1945 heyday of American manufacturing, the big U.S. corporations played major roles in sustaining and funding the activities of the engineering professional societies.56 In recent decades, those supports eroded as the “American century” ended amid a dramatic international reorganization of industrial production. Engineering design work has shrunken in its scale—whether the field is digital, nano, genetic, or biomedical—even as societal dependence on technology has deepened across much of the world. As its scale shrinks, the nature of engineering work becomes increasingly opaque to young people, making it harder to attract their interest in pursuing engineering careers.

These trends may also help explain why interest in technological history has apparently waned among engineers and engineering educators. At a fascinating lunch discussion at SHOT 2007 on the “role of history within engineering,” many SHOT members chimed in with accounts of persistent disinterest in history by engineering students, engineering educators, and working engineers.57 Many agreed that rapid growth in the engineering sciences during the 1960s “killed interest in history.” Textbooks no longer had historical introductions, and the “few efforts to reintroduce history in the seventies and eighties were utter failures.” Suggestions for reinvigorating historical work within engineering ranged from developing case studies that would be useful in engineering courses to insisting on continuing to “mess up the minds” of engineering students by introducing them to “questions that cannot be answered” and teaching them “to appreciate complexity.”

But presenting recent developments entirely as a tale of troubles distorts the full complexity of the picture and ignores the opportunities of complexity. In 2004, the International Network for Engineering Studies (INES) formed in an effort to dramatically expand scholarly investigations into “knowledge and service,”58 with research built around the following question: “What are the relationships among the technical and the nontechnical dimensions of engineering practices, and how have these relationships evolved over time?” In addition, Network participants acknowledge that “[a]ddressing and providing answers to this question can sometimes involve researchers as critical participants in the practices they study, including, for example, modes of engineering formation.”59 In 2009, INES launched its journal, Engineering Studies: Journal of the International Network for Engineering Studies, with the threefold mission: “(a) to advance research in historical, social, cultural, philosophical, rhetorical, and organizational studies of engineers and engineering; (b) to help build and serve diverse communities of researchers interested in engineering studies; and (c) to facilitate contributions from scholarly work in engineering studies to broader discussions and debates about engineering education, research, practice, policy, and representation.”60 The three articles in this cluster originated at the first INES international workshop, “Locating Engineers: Education, Knowledge, Desire,” held at Virginia Tech in 2006. Six additional articles from that INES Blacksburg workshop have been published in Engineering Studies.61 The editorial staff of the journal includes eleven historians of technology.62

The shifting nature and challenges of modern engineering also offer real opportunities to historians of technology (SHOT members specifically) who are willing to embrace new relationships, new goals, and new kinds of research and writing. Histories for engineers can come in different forms. In the inaugural Morison Prize Lecture in 2000, Thomas Hughes offered “A Usable History for Engineers” focused on “drawing analogies from the past to envision future scenarios.”63 Maintaining that “history tends to repeat itself in broad patterns, if not in details,” he made the case that “the future of the Internet will be analogous to the history of electric power systems.”64 In discussions at the 2007 SHOT conference, David Mindell pointed out in reference to the NASA Apollo project that there are “things we did forty years ago that we can’t do today.” “There really is a role for historians,” he continued, in that good history of technology “belies a notion of linear progress” commonly assumed by engineers and “helps provide a sense of humility.”65 History of technology can help prevent or overcome hubris among engineers.

All the engineering professional societies work hard to develop materials—aimed mostly at high-school students—to explain the nature, creativity, and social worth of engineering work. Short and accessible case studies, drawn from history, could make important contributions to this work. If their authors heed Wisnioski’s concern about appropriation, these cases would also bring critical historical analysis to bear in engineering education and practice, in short “messing with their minds” in ways that can improve students’ working lives in engineering. All engineering degree programs must, under accrediting rules, offer coursework in ethics. Here too, historians of technology have already done the work in primary sources. What remains is drafting cases in applied ethics on diverse topics that could range from the collapse of the Quebec Bridge to the legal and ethical ramifications of engineered organisms.66 The engineering societies struggle with their own self-identity: are they still independent professional societies? Or does their search for revenues drive them to become hybrid trade organizations? Advocates for the first view have often turned to history to show the mutual shaping of society and their engineering discipline.67 SHOT members who see a role for themselves in these activities will likely need to hone their skills in grantsmanship, with proposals aimed at the technical societies or sympathetic foundations like Sloan. But they can also work through the history and heritage committees of the professional societies.68 The engineers who staff these committees may have little interest in historiography, but they embrace history, respect rigorous research and knowledge, and can value an academic perspective.69

In considering engineers as users for the history of technology, the biggest challenge—and the biggest opportunity—lies in the accrediting standards that govern the undergraduate engineering curricula in the United States. For many decades, those rules specified that roughly oneeighth of student coursework be taken in “social-humanistic subjects.”70 Critics denounced the formula as “beancounting,” but this requirement did at least assure that students in every engineering program took courses in such fields as ethics and history. Under this accrediting system, the history of technology had a logical appeal to students, engineering deans and faculty, and historians—whether affiliated with history departments or engineering schools.

Beginning in 2000 the Accrediting Board for Engineering and Technology revamped almost entirely its approach to accreditation.71 Instead of counting off the courses required of students, ABET’s new EC 2000 standards enumerated a list of specific outcomes in student learning, ranging from the obvious (ability to apply math, science, and engineering) to the innovative (examining engineering in its global and social contexts).72 The methodology—to measure results, not just inputs—is itself innovative, as is ABET’s clear goal that schools integrate its required skills and subjects. The EC 2000 guidelines appear to require wide-ranging roles for educators in the “liberal studies” fields, such as history, ethics, STS, and writing. Of the eleven mandated outcomes, liberal studies (as distinguished from traditional engineering subjects) should play a major role in seven areas and a supporting role in all of them.73

In all, the EC 2000 criteria appear to open up a broad entrée to the liberal studies in engineering education. Given their many ties to engineering, historians of technology seem well positioned among the liberal-studies disciplines to capitalize on this opportunity. But historians of technology must undertake deliberate efforts—as individuals and as a society—to build these bridges while preserving the critical analysis that is central to the humanities, and often in tension with engineering’s normativities. Given those caveats, historians in mainline history departments could find real value in understanding the EC 2000 standards and in seeking out collaborations with their colleagues across campus on engineering faculties. It is one thing for the Accreditation Board to desire certain skills and perspectives. It is an entirely different matter for engineering deans, chairs, and faculty to really understand how they can integrate rigorous humanistic knowledge and critical analysis into their curricula. Historians of technology can help. Offering help may open employment doors for graduate students and novel avenues to disseminate research. It can also make history matter in very real ways.

As an organization, SHOT too can play a key role in building bridges for the field. EC 2000 changed most of the rules in accrediting engineering programs in the United States—except in one key area. Accreditors still represent the separate professional societies. After making site visits and reviewing assessment materials, they accredit individual degree programs, not schools as a whole.74 This process has two unfortunate effects for the liberal studies. First, it means that individual departments often develop ad hoc approaches to achieving outcomes dependent on liberal-studies disciplines, to the detriment of real rigor and thorough integration. More problematic, the accreditors who pass judgment on this degree program in Aerospace Engineering or that program in Civil Engineering are well trained in those disciplines and essentially untrained in understanding or assessing the liberal studies.75 If historians of technology want engineering educators to preserve—let alone expand—a substantive role for the field, then the discipline must take the responsibility of showing those educators how historical knowledge and modes of critical inquiry are essential to the education of capable and insightful engineers.76

As editors of this cluster, we are well aware that this introduction appears to stray from tradition, veering from an overview of the historiography to a consideration of the uses of history. But questions of use and audience are—or should be—essential matters for all historians. Anyone who teaches history of technology deals with this duality all the time. Engineering educators pride themselves on viewing their fields as forwardlooking. But as shown in the articles that follow, history always influences engineering formation and its evolving incarnations and concerns.

1 Terry S. Reynolds, “On Not Burning Bridges: Valuing the Passé,” Technology and Culture 42 (July 2001): 523–30.

2 Ibid., 523.

3 Ibid., 525.

4 Quoted from Gary Downey’s “SHOT 2007 notes” file, typed during the meeting.

5 Ronald R. Kline, “From Progressivism to Engineering Studies: Edwin T. Layton’s The Revolt of the Engineers,” Technology and Culture 49 (October 2008): 1019–20.

6 David Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (New York, 1977), 323 and 324.

7 Peter Meiksins, “The ‘Revolt of the Engineers’ Reconsidered,” Technology and Culture 29 (April 1988): 238.

8 R. A. Buchanan, The Engineers: A History of the Engineering Profession in Britain, 1750–1914 (London, 1989); Kees Gispen, New Profession, Old Order: Engineers and German Society, 1815–1914 (Cambridge, 1989); Ronald Kline, Steinmetz: Engineer and Socialist (Baltimore, 1992); A. Michal McMahon, The Making of a Profession: A Century of Electrical Engineering in America (New York, 1984); Terry S. Reynolds, 75 Years of Progress: A History of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, 1908–1983 (New York, 1983); and Bruce Sinclair and J. P. Hull, A Centennial History of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 1880–1980 (Toronto, 1980). There are a significant number of European national studies on this topic written in local languages.

9 Ruth Oldenziel, Making Technology Masculine: Men, Women, and Modern Machines in America 1870–1945 (Amsterdam, 1999), 168.

10 John K. Brown, “Design Plans, Working Drawing, National Styles: Engineering Practice in Great Britain and the United States, 1775–1945,” Technology and Culture 41 (April 2000): 196.

11 Eda Kranakis, Constructing a Bridge: An Exploration of Engineering Culture, Design, and Research in Nineteenth-Century France and America (Cambridge, Mass., 1997), 304.

12 Antoine Picon, French Architects and Engineers in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1992), 10. While one can find normativities in Walter Vincenti’s historical case studies, his explicit interests were philosophical and focused on epistemology. See Peter Meiksins and Chris Smith, Engineering Labour: Technical Workers in Comparative Perspective (London, 1996), and Walter G. Vincenti, What Engineers Know and How They Know It: Analytical Studies from Aeronautical History (Baltimore, 1990).

13 Ken Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (Princeton, N.J., 1997), 60.

14 Bruce E. Seely, “The Other Re-Engineering of Engineering Education, 1900–1965,” Journal of Engineering Education 88 (July 1999): 291.

15 Amy Slaton, Race, Rigor, and Selectivity in U.S. Engineering: The History of an Occupational Color Line (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), conclusion, p. 5.

16 Peter Lundgreen, “Engineering Education in Europe and the U.S.A., 1750–1930: The Rise to Dominance of School Culture and the Engineering Profession,” Annals of Science 47 (1990): 33.

17 Some key entry points include Bruno Belhoste, La Formation d’une technocratie: L’École Polytechnique et ses élèves de la Révolution au Second Empire (Paris, 2003); André Grelon, ed., Les Ingénieurs de la crise: Titre et profession entre les deux guerres (Paris, 1986); and Antoine Picon, L’invention de l’ingenieur moderne: L’École des ponts et chaussées, 1747–1851 (Paris, 1992).

18 See Ana Cardoso de Matos, Maria Paula Diogo, Irena Gouzévich, and André Grelon, eds., Les Enjeux identitaires des ingénieurs: Entre la formation et l’action (Lisbon, 2009), and André Grelon, Anousheh Karvar, and Irina Gouzévich, La Formation des ingénieurs en perspective: Modèles de références et réseaux de médiation, XVIIIème–XXème siècles (Rennes, 2004). Another useful entry point is Melvin Kranzberg, ed., Technological Education—Technological Style (San Francisco, 1986).

19 Matthew Wisnioski, “‘Liberal Education Has Failed’: Reading Like an Engineer in 1960s America,” Technology and Culture 50 (October 2009): 757.

20 Ibid., 758 and 756.

21 Ibid., 777.

22 Ibid., 772.

23 Ibid., 777 and 773.

24 Ibid., 755 and 763.

25 Ibid., 777 and 778.

26 Ibid., 779.

27 Ibid., 781.

28 Ross Bassett, “Aligning India in the Cold War Era: Indian Technical Elites, the Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur, and Computing in India and the United States,” Technology and Culture 50 (October 2009): 798.

29 Ibid.

30 For discussion of the dangers of positing transferable “models” in engineering education, see Gary Lee Downey, “Low Cost, Mass Use: American Engineers and the Metrics of Progress,” History and Technology 22, no. 3 (2007): 293.

31 Bassett, 786.

32 Ibid., 791.

33 Ibid., 794.

34 Ibid., 809.

35 Ibid.

36 Thomas L. Friedman, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2005).

37 Bassett (n. 28 above), 809.

38 See also Thomas L. Friedman, “It’s a Flat World, after All,” New York Times Magazine, 3 April 2005, available online at (accessed 27 April 2008).

39 Bassett, 786 and 808.

40 Andrés Valderrama et al., “Engineering Education and the Identities of Engineers in Colombia, 1887–1972,” Technology and Culture 50 (October 2009): 811.

41 Ibid., 837.

42 Ibid., 829.

43 Ibid.

44 Ibid., 837.

45 Ibid., 835 and 836.

46 For an overview, see Juan C. Lucena et al., “Competencies Beyond Countries: The Re-Organization of Engineering Education in the United States, Europe, and Latin America,” Journal of Engineering Education 97, no. 4 (2008): 433–47.

47 Melvin Kranzberg, “At the Start,” Technology and Culture 1 (Winter 1959): 1–10. For more on SHOT’s early ties to ASEE, see Bruce E. Seely, “SHOT, the History of Technology, and Engineering Education,” Technology and Culture 36 (October 1995): 739–72.

48 John M. Staudenmaier, S.J., Technology’s Storytellers: Reweaving the Human Fabric (Cambridge, Mass., 1985), 3.

49 Ibid., 4.

50 Rosalind Williams, another SHOT president with deep expertise at the intersection of engineering and technological history, has raised similar concerns in an insightful account of the challenges that grew to confront orthodoxies in engineering and in the history of technology over the past four decades. Her essay “All That Is Solid Melts into Air” also details the widening gap that has come to separate those fields (Technology and Culture 41 [October 2000]: 641–68).

51 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: “The Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession (New York, 1988), chaps. 15–16.

52 As Wisnioski (n. 19 above, p. 780 n92) says: “STS, history of science, and technology programs still pursue liberal learning for engineers, but often at cross-purposes with their own academization. For a survey, see Stephen H. Cutcliffe, ‘The STS Curriculum: What Have We Learned in Twenty Years?’ Science, Technology, and Human Values 15, no. 3 (1990): 360–72.”

53 Rosalind H. Williams, Retooling: A Historian Confronts Technological Change (Cambridge, Mass., 2002).

54 Andrew Abbott, The System of Professions: An Essay on the Division of Expert Labor (Chicago, 1988); Gary Lee Downey, “Are Engineers Losing Control of Technology? From ‘Problem Solving’ to ‘Problem Definition and Solution’ in Engineering Education,” Chemical Engineering Research and Design 83, no. A8 (2005): 584; André Grelon, “French Engineers: Between Unity and Heterogeneity,” History of Technology 27 (2006): 107.

55 See Kline, “From Progressivism to Engineering Studies” (n. 5 above) and Noble (n. 6 above).

56 Corporations often looked to engineering groups like the Society for Automotive Engineers to resolve technical matters and set industry-wide standards. Major corporations like General Motors or General Electric also subsidized the engineering professional societies by paying the membership dues of their employees and compensating them for time spent on society business—such as attending the annual meeting. These two practices are rare today.

57 Quoted from Downey, “SHOT 2007 notes” (n. 4 above).

58 Gary Lee Downey, “What Is Engineering Studies For? Dominant Practices and Scalable Scholarship,” Engineering Studies: Journal of the International Network for Engineering Studies 1, no. 1 (2009): 58.

59 See (accessed 12 August 2009).

60 See (accessed 12 August 2009).

61 Konstantinos Chatzis, “Coping with the Second Industrial Revolution: Fragmentation of the French Engineering Education System, 1870s to the Present,” Engineering Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 79–99; Downey, “What Is Engineering Studies For?”; Vivian Lagesen and Knut Sørensen, “Walking the Line? The Enactment of the Social/Technical Binary in Software Engineering,” Engineering Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 129–49; Juan Lucena, “Imagining Nation, Envisioning Progress: Emperor, Agricultural Elites, and Imperial Ministers in Search of Engineers in 19th Century Brazil,” Engineering Studies 1, no. 3 (2009, forthcoming); Lisa McLoughlin, “Success, Recruitment, and Retention of Academically Elite Women Students without STEM Backgrounds in U.S. Undergraduate Engineering Education,” Engineering Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 151–68; and Carroll Seron and Susan S. Silbey, “The Dialectic between Expert Knowledge and Professional Discretion: Accreditation, Social Control, and the Limits of Instrumental Logic,” Engineering Studies 1, no. 2 (2009): 101–27.

62 Atsushi Akera, Maria Paula Diogo, Ann Johnson, Scott Knowles, Ronald Kline, Eda Kranakis, Antoine Picon, Bruce Seely, Amy Slaton, Rosalind Williams, and Matthew Wisnioski.

63 Thomas P. Hughes, “A Usable History for Engineers: The First Morison Prize Lecture,” in Working Papers, Program in Science, Technology, and Society (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 3. Thanks to Matt Wisnioski for calling this lecture to our attention.

64 Ibid., 2 and 3.

65 Gary Downey, “SHOT 2007 notes” (n. 4 above), 2.

66 Longtime SHOT stalwart Eugene Ferguson showed one model for this kind of writing in “How Engineers Lose Touch,” American Heritage of Invention and Technology 8 (winter 1993): 16–24—an article widely assigned in engineering design coursework. Two fine sources that explore the ethics of design failure are: Eda Kranakis, “Fixing the Blame: Organizational Culture and the Quebec Bridge Collapse,” Technology and Culture 45 (July 2004): 487–518, and William D. Middleton, The Bridge at Quebec (Bloomington, 2001). For some of the ethical challenges of modern bioengineering, see Michael Bess, “Icarus 2.0: A Historian’s Perspective on Human Biological Enhancement,” Technology and Culture 49 (January 2008): 114–26. Some of these fine studies can work well in the engineering classroom, but others would need reworking to condense historical detail while bringing hard analytic questions to the fore. John Staudenmaier has done this work in his textbook for the University of Detroit Mercy, The Politics and Ethics of Engineering (1998), funded by the Greenfield Coalition for New Manufacturing Education, National Science Foundation, E.E.C. 9630951.

67 McMahon (n. 8 above); Reynolds, 75 Years of Progress (n. 8 above); Sinclair and Hull (n. 8 above).

68 Among U.S.-based organizations, IEEE has the most active role in sponsoring historical awareness and publications through its History Center. But ASCE, ASME, AIAA, and most other engineering societies also see value in history-related activities that mix celebration, public relations, historical awareness, and professional consciousness.

69 These remarks are based on Jack Brown’s service (2000–present) on the History and Heritage Committee of ASME, where he has served alongside another SHOT member, Robert Friedel. The distinguished and prolific engineer/historian Henry Petroski chairs the ASCE’s History and Heritage Committee. Among their many activities, these committees often have a celebratory mission that is alien to academic history, but they also seek legitimacy as sponsors of historical awareness.

70 Dan H. Pletta, The Engineering Profession: Its Heritage and Its Emerging Public Purpose (Lanham, Md., 1984), 127.

71 For a history and overview of ABET, see (accessed 4 June 2009).

72 The criteria can be found at (accessed 4 June 2009).

73 The eleven outcomes are: (A) Ability to apply knowledge of math, science, and engineering; (B) Ability to design and conduct experiments, as well as to analyze and interpret data; (C) Ability to design a system, component, or process to meet desired needs; (D) Ability to function on multi-disciplinary teams; (E) Ability to identify, formulate, and solve engineering problems; (F) An understanding of professional and ethical responsibility; (G) Ability to communicate effectively; (H) The broad education necessary to understand the impact of engineering solutions in a global and societal context (“economic and environmental” added in 2004); (I) Recognition of the need for, and an ability to, engage in life-long learning; (J) Knowledge of contemporary issues; (K) Ability to use the skills, techniques, and modern engineering tools necessary for engineering practice. The seven areas in which liberal studies are essential are outcomes D through J.

74 A given engineering school undergoes a full assessment and (re)accrediting process once every six years. The professional societies—such as IEEE and ASME—train the accreditors, as ABET itself is a small organization with limited resources. Then the accreditors in turn conduct their campus visit as a team, although each degree program is reviewed separately (albeit concurrently) and accredited individually.

75 ABET has an interest in gauging the effectiveness of its EC 2000 approach, andit commissioned a study that showed overall improvements in student learning. See http://www.ed.psu.edu/educ/ec2000 (accessed 4 June 2009). Liberal studies educators, however, who met at a 2002 conference on EC 2000 at the University of Virginia (funded by the National Science Foundation) had a more nuanced view of the problems and opportunities for liberal studies in the new accrediting system. See (accessed 4 June 2009).

76 One specific proposal: SHOT, in company with other societies including the Liberal Education Division of the American Society for Engineering Education, could offer a summer institute to train accreditors to recognize best practices in the uses of history in engineering education.

John K. Brown is an associate professor in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society in the School of Engineering and Applied Science at the University of Virginia. Gary Lee Downey is alumni distinguished professor in the Department of Science and Technology in Society at Virginia Tech. Maria Paula Diogo is associate professor in the Department of Social Sciences in the Faculty of Science and Technology at New University of Lisbon, Portugal.

©2009 by the Society for the History of Technology.

—Lewis Mumford, The Myth of the Machine

The young man in this photograph, right hand calmly resting on a traumatically bent and twisted keyed shaft, exudes a comfortable confidence that, bad as it looks, this humpty dumpty is family and will be put back together again. Machinery in its infancy, like an errant child, needed the steady and loving guidance of a parent. And we were a mechanically enamored people. As John Steinbeck observed in 1945: “Two generations of Americans knew more about the Ford coil than the clitoris, about the planetary system of gears than the solar system of stars.”

On a factual basis, not much is really known about the photograph. I found it between the pages of my grandfather’s notebook a year after his death. Nobody recalled ever seeing it. For forty-two years he was the superintendent of the city light company in my hometown of Centralia, Washington, so his interest in power-generating machinery was natural. I have shown the eight-by-ten glossy photograph to dozens of knowledgeable friends, and the best guess that has emerged is that the scene is a water turbine whose governor failed, allowing it to over-rev, to the splendid departure of parts.

An equally if not more interesting question is why we are no longer drawn to be photographed next to the disastrous failures of man-made structures. The past century is littered with pictures of entire families next to derailed steam locomotives, exploded farm tractor boilers, fallen railroad trestles, and beached ocean vessels. Coded within the silver nitrate lie volumes about humankind’s changing relationship with technology. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out, unlike other media the photograph isolates a single moment in time. We have the benefit—and the challenge—of studying that moment at a later date.

Putting the harder cultural question to those knowledgeable friends produced even more guarded speculation: You can see it on TV in real time, why drive? Everything is so dependable now that when man-made structures do fail the tragedy overshadows any desire to be associated with it. Who cares? Throw it away and get another. In today’s “me” world, who wants to be associated with failure? Hey, the machines don’t need our help, they can self-diagnose, like a new car with its onboard computer.

Such guesses hint at the disconnect, but they fail to satisfy. My own conclusion is that the machine has grown up. It is no longer the cute baby we love and marvel at, whose transgressions we forgive because of its infinitely bright future. It is an adult child we don’t fully understand, a paradox. Raised in a liberal household, it grew into a conservative whose failures disappoint or even frighten. And for many, it’s simple and sad. As B. B. King sings, the thrill is gone.

Tom Hull teaches manufacturing at Marshfield High School in Coos Bay, Oregon.

©2009 by the Society for the History of Technology.

I said yes (surely confusing him more), just as he eats food for energy, the train “eats” coal. He still seemed puzzled, so I tried a line from one of his books, “The tender carries the coal that burns in the firebox.” With that, he gave up on me and returned to the sounds of a train whistle.

While there are important differences between digestion and combustion, they do indeed both represent the transformation of energy from one form into another. Chemical to kinetic to heat and so on and on—these transformations constrain and enable everything from plate tectonics to photosynthesis to the material development of human societies (and, of course, locomotives). But is it correct to state, as did the physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald in 1892, that “In the last analysis everything that happens is nothing but changes in energy?”1 Can energy serve as the fundamental common denominator for understanding the universe, from the galactic scale to the cellular and the natural to the social?

Such a comprehensive analysis forms the basis for Vaclav Smil’s Energy in Nature and Society, a complete revision of his General Energetics: Energy in the Biosphere and Civilization, published by Wiley in 1991.2 While the new book is not a work of history, it is informed by Smil’s knowledge of the past. Smil is not himself a historian, but a scholar reaching across disciplines to understand the role of energy in the physical and human worlds, past, present, and future.

Others before Smil have developed holistic studies of energy in natural and social contexts, and their works have proved provocative but also deeply flawed. In the early 1890s, for example, Ostwald constructed an elaborate and controversial theory of “General Energetics” to embrace not only the unification of natural phenomena, but human consciousness, eugenics, and pacifism.3 In the 1970s, the ecologist Howard Odum became the most prominent advocate of a kind of energy determinism in which “energy is the source and control of all things, all value, and all the actions of human beings and nature.”4 Neither Ostwald nor Odum saw their energetic views widely accepted. There is simply too much history—human, natural, and planetary—inexplicable in energetic terms alone.

Unlike Ostwald and Odum, Smil constructs a more plausible analysis by making energy central without being determinative. Smil is unequivocal that the world, natural or social, historical or contemporary, cannot be reduced merely to energy considerations. He justifies focusing on energy as a unit of analysis because “everything in the observable universe can be seen, analyzed, and explained in energy terms.” Tempering this universality, “even such a fundamental entity as energy . . . cannot be an adequate surrogate for valuing space, time, qualitative attributes of materials, biodiversity, mental labor, ideas, social order, cultural riches, and morality” (pp. 366, 345–46). Smil’s work, then, may be read as a demonstration of both the ubiquity of energy and its limits as a conceptual tool for understanding the world.

The chapters of Energy in Nature and Society progress from cosmic to human scales and, as in previous works, Smil makes good on his promise of interdisciplinarity.5 After introducing his (extensive) terminology and providing a potted history of the concept of energy in chapter 1 (in its simplicity one of the weakest in the book), Smil turns in chapter 2 to describing the energetics of planet Earth—its solar fluxes, internal heat, and the geophysical processes powered by these energy flows. Chapters 3 through 5 present energy in living organisms, first in plants (photosynthesis and the ecologies it creates), then animals (metabolism and the forms of life biological energy systems make possible), and finally humans (metabolism and the energy costs of basic activities). Chapters 6 through 9 explore energy in human societies. Smil traces human history through traditional food production; the preindustrial prime movers of muscle, wind, water, and phytomass power and the technologies they made possible; and lastly, fossil-fueled civilization. The final chapters, 10 through 13, present the consequences and challenges of contemporary energy consumption.

At the factual level, the book is impressive. Open nearly any page and discover gems: as a consequence of improved nutrition, the average height of eleven-year-old Japanese boys has increased almost twenty centimeters during the twentieth century (p. 126). Running barefoot consumes 4 percent less energy than with footwear while also preventing some ankle and lower leg injuries (p. 139). The Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 does not rank even in the top thirty largest oil spills since the 1960s (the largest was nearly eight times larger), but the larger spills were located either outside the United States or in deep water (p. 323). Taken individually, this material is little more than trivia; in the framework of the book as a whole, it points to the omnipresence of energy as both a constraint and an enabler for natural and social phenomena.
The book has its limitations, however. Readers familiar with Smil’s previous works may be disappointed at times (as I was) by the recycling of examples, charts, and illustrations. New material and new citations are there, but the book also absorbs what has already appeared elsewhere.

At times, the onslaught of facts and data prevents Smil from rendering a clear judgment. Take his account of coal in the twentieth century. He begins by noting the extraordinary increase in global coal production between 1900 (800 megatons of hard coals and lignites) and the year of peak production, 1989 (4.9 gigatons), a more than fourfold increase. New machines like walking draglines and new modes of production like longwall mining increased productivity while dramatically decreasing the required labor. At the same time, with the rise of oil, natural gas, and nuclear power, coal’s share of the global energy mix decreased from about 95 percent in 1900 to a low of 23 percent a century later (pp. 217–21). Yet if we are to draw any conclusions from “coal’s absolute rise and relative decline,” Smil does not tell us. What factors shaped the introduction of new mining technologies? What was the connection between governments, corporations, and labor in this process? Even more basically, did coal become more or less important between 1900 and 2000? These may not be the right questions, but, if not, we are not told what we should ask instead. While coal has decreased its relative share of the energy mix, this seems to me a far less significant fact than its absolute increase. Americans alone today burn more than twice the coal they did in 1950, with all the labor and environmental problems this consumption entails, but with much less awareness of the fact.

Historians of technology may be particularly troubled as well by the relative absence of social, political, or economic context for much of the history covered in the book. In this regard, the historical portions of Energy in Nature and Society remain more a classic history of machines. For example, Smil describes various waterwheels and windmills from antiquity through the nineteenth century with about six pages on their design, efficiencies, geographic diffusion, power they produced, and marvelous illustrations from Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, but the closest we come to how they were used and why is Smil’s observation that “both kinds of machines eventually assumed important roles in the economic life of preindustrial Europe, which helped to energize the beginnings of industrialization” (p. 180). This focus on machines helps explain the bibliographic absence of important historians of energy-related topics who adopt more social, cultural, and political approaches, and why “Standard Oil” and “United Mine Workers” do not appear in the index.6

Nevertheless, this is a valuable book that I anticipate referencing often. Smil has not written a work of history, or of thermodynamics, or even a blueprint for dealing with the vexing social and technological problems of energy use in the twenty-first century. He has produced more of a work of philosophy, a way of contemplating the interconnectedness of the world. Our future choices about energy use are constrained by the choices of the past, which were themselves constrained by physical law. Within those constraints lie enormous ranges of action. In our choices, we will be wise to profit from Smil’s erudition.

1. Wilhelm Ostwald, “Studies in Energetics: II. Fundamentals of General Energetics,” trans. R. Bruce Lindsay, in Applications of Energy: Nineteenth Century, ed. R. Bruce Lindsay (Stroudsburg, Pa., 1976), 339.

2. Vaclav Smil, Energy in Nature and Society: General Energetics of Complex Systems (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008, pp. xi+480, $32).

3. After all, once Ostwald adopted his “energetic imperative”—“Do not waste energy, but convert it into a more useful form”—war appeared as a terrible “waste of energy.” Niles R. Holt, “A Note on Wilhelm Ostwald’s Energism,” Isis 61 (1970): 386–89; R. J. Deltete, “Wilhelm Ostwald’s Energetics 1: Origins and Motivations,” Foundations of Chemistry 9 (2007): 3–56.

4. Howard T. Odum and Elisabeth C. Odum, Energy Basis for Man and Nature (New York, 1976), 1–2.

5. For Smil’s other works, see for example Energy in World History (Boulder, Colo., 1994), Energies: An Illustrated Guide to the Biosphere and Civilization (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), Enriching the Earth: Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), and Energy at the Crossroads: Global Perspectives and Uncertainties (Cambridge, Mass., 2003).

6. For examples of recent works in energy history, see David Nye, Consuming Power: A Social History of American Energies (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), Anson Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (New York, 1990), Gabrielle Hecht, The Radiance of France: Nuclear Power and National Identity after World War II (Cambridge, Mass., 1998), Paul Sabin, Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900–1940 (Berkeley, Calif., 2005), Allison Fleig Frank, Oil Empire: Visions of Prosperity in Austrian Galicia (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), Brian Black, Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom (Baltimore, 2000), and James C. Williams, Energy and the Making of Modern California (Akron, 1997). Williams, in fact, made a similar point in his review of Smil’s Energy in World History for Technology and Culture (July 1995, pp. 690–92).

Dr. Shulman is an assistant professor of history at Case Western Reserve University, where he is working on a book about energy and U.S. foreign relations in the nineteeenth and early twentieth centuries.

©2009 by the Society for the History of Technology.