Technology, Empire, and Internationalism in Eastern Europe

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel investigates the historical role of technology as a mediator of regional power hierarchies within Eastern Europe, and between Eastern Europe and the world. Even when they are intended to equalize them, technologies often create or exacerbate these imbalances.

Spanning historical periods and geography, this panel puts into conversation three examples of technologically-mediated trans-national and -regional interactions in Eastern Europe. Moving from the core of the Habsburg Empire, to the Kutaisi region in late-imperial Russia, to East Germany’s international socialist world, this panel contraposes railroads, handicraft, and vinyl records as three technological media all equally capable of structuring relationships. Henry Blood reveals how informal contacts with American and British engineers facilitated the growth of Habsburg rail infrastructure. Sohee Ryuk centers carpet-weaving and agriculture in order to show how the implications of technology scale differently across local, regional, and state levels in the rural Caucuses. Claudia Lonkin argues that musical records were a deeply globalized medium that increased East Germany’s dependence on Western markets, even as they generated prestige as an export in the second world.

This panel explores how state control was mediated by technological means, elucidating the differences between formal imperialism and hierarchical internationalism. Our discussant, Aro Velmet, whose current project deals with Soviet cybernetics and digital statecraft, is well-positioned to speak to this relationship.

Sub Unit

• History: 1900-1945

Chair

• Claudia Lonkin, New York U

Papers

• Study Abroad: Habsburg Railway Engineers in America - Henry Blood, New York U

• Instruments and Knowledge: Towards a Model of Technology in the Rural Caucasus in the Late Russian Empire - Sohee Ryuk, U College Dublin (Ireland)

• Double-Edged Internationalisms and the Production of Vinyl Records in East Germany - Claudia Lonkin, New York U

Discussant

• Aro Velmet, U of Southern California