Engineers are empire-builders. James Watt, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Robert Stephenson and a host of lesser known figures worked to build and expand personal and business empires of material technology founded on and sustained by durable networks of trust and expertise. In so doing these engineers and their heirs also became active agents of political and economic empire. Indeed, steamships, railways and electric telegraph systems increasingly complemented one another to form what one early twentieth-century telegraph engineer aptly termed "our most powerful weapon in the cause of Inter-Imperial Commerce". This book provides a fascinating exploration of the cultural construction of the large-scale technologies of empire.
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"Smith and Marsden provide here a brilliant and concise analysis of the figure of the Nineteenth-Century British engineer and the social and technical significance of engineering's work...The book will be indispensable for historians, technologists and anyone interesed in the roots of the current relation between applied knowledge and the wider society." - Professor Simon Schaffer, University of Cambridge
"At last! This is the history of British technology we have been waiting for. When we open up the steam machines we find not just the cogs and wheels, but people of all sorts, stories that surprise, and all working in a cultural context of the highest sophistication. Marsden and Smith's cultural history matchs the best in new nineteenth century scholarship." - Dr Jon Agar, author of Turing and the Universal Machine: The Making of the Modern Computer
"Highly recommended." —CHOICE
About the Author
BEN MARSDEN is Lecturer in Cultural History at the University of Aberdeen. CROSBIE SMITH is Director of the Centre for History and Cultural Studies of Science at the University of Kent.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
great engineers,
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This review is from: Engineering Empires (Hardcover)
The history of the British Empire is often narrated in terms of the wars that Britain fought. But when the Industrial Revolution started in the late 18th century, the story of Britain and her empire also became one of technology or engineering. Noted historian Marsden recounts the achievements of several of these luminaries. Such as Watt and Stephenson in railways and mining, and Brunel in steamships. Names still remembered today (at least amongst engineers).Marsden makes some of those days and their travails come alive. In retrospect, we can appreciate the magnitude of their efforts, even if it all seems inevitable nowdays that someone would have performed the same tasks. The book is also somewhat of a rejoinder to those who think engineering is boring or colourless.
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