History of Technology Volume 34

Ian Inkster

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781350085596
• eBook ISBN: 9781350085619
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Despite having undergone major advances in recent years, the history of technology in Latin America is still an understudied topic. This is the first English-language volume to bring together a variety of critical perspectives on the history of technology in Latin America from the early-19th century through to the present day. This special issue, assembled by guest editor David Pretel, brings together a range of experts to explore a plethora of topics in Latin America's technological history. Papers include a study of rural telephony in in 20th-century Latin America; the rise of the 'Techno-class' in modern Brazil; an analysis of the rise and fall of three Caribbean commodities; the history of educational technology in Latin America, and science and technology in Cold War Chile. Special Issue: Technology in Latin American History
Edited by David Pretel (Colegio de Mexico, Mexico) and Helge Wendt (Max Plank Institute for the History of Science, Germany)

Technology in Latin American History: Perspectives, Scales and Comparisons

DAVID PRETEL, IAN INKSTER AND HELGE WENDT

Anyone teaching or researching the Latin American history of technology has probably faced the following criticism: Latin America is not home to an innovative technological culture; it is not a cohesive technological region – so why study this? These commonly held views may explain why (until recently) the history of technology in Latin America has been considered of secondary importance. There are at least two additional reasons that have constrained the development of the field: one, a narrow definition of technology associating it with formal science and disruptive high-tech innovation; two, the invisibility of the scattered Latin American historiography written in Spanish and Portuguese. Certainly, the latter connects with the tacit idea that narratives from the standpoint of the ‘Global South’ are less theoretically and methodologically sophisticated. That said, the interest and research in the role of technological change in the economic, political and social history of the region are not new nor small in scope. It is a growing field, particularly in regard to the development of English-language scholarship.¹ However, as Juan José Saldaña observes, technology and technological activity still receive relatively modest attention from historians working in Latin America compared to other subdisciplines.²

As demonstrated in recent historiographical surveys by Kreimer and Vessuri as well as Medina and Lemon, among others, there has been a scholarly shift in the historical study of Latin American science and technology.³ Over the past three decades, there has been a new trend in the field, one that privileges the study of technologies in a socio-cultural context, factoring in local communities of expertise, hybrid knowledge and domestic technical capacities in infrastructure, agricultural production, nuclear energy and computers, just to name the foremost sectors. However, such historiographical essays – from the disciplinary position of the history of science and technology and science and technology studies – exclude seminal contributions by economic and business historians. Take, for instance, the work of Edward Beatty on technology transfer and patents in Porfirian Mexico, Alan Dye’s analysis of the rise of continuous-process technologies for mass sugar production in Cuba between 1899 and 1929, and Aurora Gómez-Galvarriato’s case study of the mechanization of the textile industry during the Mexican Revolution.⁴ Similarly, older histories of invention and technical education – such as Ramón Sánchez Flores’ monumental work on Mexico – are also ignored in recent historiographical surveys.⁵

Although important in its own right, the full debate over what lies behind the lack of attention to the Latin American history of technology is beyond the scope of this editorial introduction. Whatever the explanation may be, recent historiography is making clear that the history of technology in Latin America is not only an important field of enquiry but one that addresses broader historiographical issues of the region: from national innovation systems to commodity production in mining and agriculture, and from Cold War science to everyday technologies and infrastructures. The contributors to this special issue study these and many other central themes in historical perspective. By covering such varied topics, this volume offers a number of views of Latin America’s technological past. It brings together authors approaching the history of technology from varied disciplines, including the history of science, economic history, historical sociology, and science and technology studies. The contributors to this collection do not explicitly share a common research agenda or historiographical perspective, nor do they offer a comprehensive synthesis of the field. If anything, the authors share the appreciation that a historical examination of technology in Latin America might offer a novel entry point into some of the region’s most pressing debates. Instead of advancing a common view – no matter how critical or persuasive this might be – this volume has the modest objective of offering essays that explore some of the most intriguing aspects of Latin America’s technological history from the nineteenth century through to the present day. It reflects the plurality of research questions, methodologies and perspectives that have characterized recent historiography on Latin American science, technology and industrialization. Taken together the essays presented here shed light on the complex history of technology in Latin America, which is characterized by a tension between autonomy and dependence as well as transformations at different scales, that is, at the intersection of local, national, regional and global histories. This special issue itself is not only proof of the diverse background of the authors but, more important, of the ambiguous and contradictory role of technology in Latin American history. We believe that the eclectic nature of this special issue recognizes the plurality of Latin America’s history of technology, which is characterized by, in María Portuondo’s words, a mingling of ‘triumphs with failures, interdependence with dependence, and progress with decay’.⁶

BETWEEN DEPENDENCE AND AUTONOMY

In 1979, the influential economic historians Ciro Cardoso and Héctor Pérez Brignoli wrote that technological dependence was the most characteristic feature of Latin American industrialization since the region’s political independence.⁷ Similarly, for Andre Gunder Frank technology – together with foreign investment – was a form of imperial control in Latin America. In his influential book Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (1967), Gunder Frank wrote: ‘American technology is becoming the new source of monopoly power and the new basis of economic colonialism and political neo-colonialism’.⁸ These and other authors portrayed the industrial structure of the region as dependent on the transfer of costly foreign industrial technologies due to the lack of domestic capacities and competitive manufacturing. Much of the early works in the history of technology followed a similar line of thinking until at least the 1980s. Until that decade, historical accounts mostly started from the premise that coloniality, neo-colonial situations and foreign economic hegemony were the primary forces explaining Latin American technological development.⁹ Of course, the structural dependency theory did not always remain wedded to the former premise – dependency theory had a life of its own, even if it can be seen as an extension of earlier studies of Latin America’s colonial heritage. Such a politicized economic perspective likewise influenced Latin American social and philosophical studies of Latin American science during those decades.¹⁰

In particular, structuralist and ‘dependence’ theories, widely influential between the 1950s and the early 1980s, characterized Latin American economies as semi-peripheral and ‘victims’ of the historical deterioration of the terms of trade for primary products. Such approaches typically viewed the world economy as asymmetrical and in need of endogenous industrial strategies; they favoured technological autonomy. Such scholarship was concerned with what held back growth and development in economic terms, attempting to demonstrate how Latin America’s technological underdevelopment resulted from unbalanced commercial relations. The problem with this approach was that it did not provide enough empirical historical data to fully support their structural claims in the long term.¹¹ Most social scientists, especially economists and sociologists, tended to present abstract interpretative models of regional dependence that gave only passing acknowledgement to historical contingencies, intra-regional disparities and the precise nature of the technologies employed in the region.

Since the late 1980s, however, explicit references to Latin America’s technological dependence have faded away from the historical scholarship. Latin America’s technological underdevelopment and world asymmetries in knowledge production have been assiduously avoided. Historians have turned their attention to local histories of technology and their diversity.¹² Through a constructivist approach, scholars have moved to the analysis of both socially embedded technologies and alternative epistemologies in historical perspective.¹³ Case studies, micro-history and qualitative analysis are the preferred methodologies. This ‘new’ narrative is primarily concerned with the historicizing of technological encounters, indigenous knowledge systems, co-production of technologies, creole expertise and hybrid practices. From this perspective, technology is no longer considered exogenous to Latin American societies. Representative of this trend is the volume Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology and Society in Latin America edited by Eden Medina, Ivan de Costa Marques and Christina Holmes in 2013, which provided a fine corrective to studies viewing technology used in the region as foreign and transplanted from abroad.

To an extent, the entire focus shifted from technology as a possible development engine to technology as an embedded attribute of local and regional cultures. As valuable as it may be to bringing to light the cultural dimension of technology, such recent studies failed to establish the relationship between indigenous knowledge and Latin American development. At the same time, even when international circulation is acknowledged, the global economic dimension is for the most part ignored. Although cultural studies of the Latin American history of technology are becoming more dominant, there are still many economic historians paying attention to the trends of trade and transfer of mechanized technologies in the most visible economic sectors such as railways, mining, agriculture and product manufacturing.¹⁴ Recent economic historiography contrasts with earlier structuralist studies in that it is mostly concerned with a long-term quantitative study of the patterns of technological change, trade and transfer rather than with presenting an abstract macro-model of world economic relations and pervasive underdevelopment.

Following the insights of Christopher Freeman and Bengt-Åke Lundvall, among others, empirical studies of national systems of innovation have also reached maturity – another scholarly development of note.¹⁵ For this approach, national institutions, actors and policies are the most critical forces in understanding technological developments, particularly addressing questions such as national investment in research and development (R&D), industrial policy and the institutionalization of engineering capacities.¹⁶ Such literature – which concentrates on the second half of the twentieth century – does not negate the idea of technological dependence itself but rather ceases to see it as the teleological result of world economic dynamics. The ‘national innovation system’ perspective grew as a critical reaction to dominant neoliberal policies adopted in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Text
• Title Page
• Contents
• 1 Technology in Latin American History: Perspectives, Scales and Comparisons
• 2 Centrifugal Capitalism: Struggles over Infrastructure in the Sugar Ports of Nineteenth-century Cuba
• 3 Machucados and Salvavidas: Patented Humour in the Technified Spaces of Everyday Life in Mexico City, 1900–1910
• 4 Bringing Communication to the Countryside: Rural Telephony in Latin America, 1900–1985
• 5 Interrelations and Disruptions in the Exchange of Knowledge: Coal, Geology and Industrialization in Mexico
• 6 Machines and Texts: Writing the History of Educational Technology in Latin America
• 7 Technology and the Fates of Three Caribbean Commodities
• 8 Brazil’s Mid-twentieth-century ‘Techno-class’ and the Search for Moderate Reform
• 9 Challenging Martial Masculinity: The Intrusion of Digital Computers into the Argentinian Armed Forces in the 1960s
• 10 Transnational Astronomy: Science, Technology and Local Agenda in Cold War Chile
• 11 The Curious Case of Cuba’s Biotech Revolution
• 12 A Song of Water and Fire: The Brief Coming of Age of the Venezuelan Oil Industry’s R&D Programme at the turn of the Twentieth Century
• List of Contributors
• Copyright