ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Technical Professions and the Making of Middle Classes: Transnational Perspectives from the 19th to the 20th Century

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This panel examines how technical and professional occupations—engineers, physicians, and other expert practitioners—shaped emerging middle-class identities across diverse historical and geographical contexts from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. By bringing together case studies from the Czech lands, the late Ottoman Empire, Early Republican Türkiye, and Postwar Italy, the panel explores how expertise, professionalization, and state-building intersected to produce new social classes defined by technical competence, public responsibility, and evolving cultural values.

The contributions reveal how modernization projects, whether imperial, national, or developmental, relied on technical experts who gained authority not only through their specialized knowledge but also through their participation in shaping public institutions, infrastructure, and national imaginaries. In the Czech lands before 1848, physicians emerged as key actors in early civil society as medical institutionalization and public health initiatives elevated their social prestige and enabled upward mobility. In the late Ottoman Empire, growing investment in mining and infrastructure fostered a cosmopolitan community of engineers whose professional associations, sociability, and networks linked global expertise with local contexts. Early Republican Türkiye illustrates how engineering became a cornerstone of nation-building, including the gendered transformation that integrated women into the profession and contributed to the formation of a new, ideologically defined middle class. Finally, postwar Italy offers a view into the internal crises of engineering identity amid democratization, social criticism, and rising concerns about technological responsibility.

Taken together, these papers seek to illuminate the transnational dynamics through which technical professions negotiated authority, articulated civic roles, and anchored emerging or questioned middle classes. By foregrounding mobility, state–expert relations, and shifting notions of public accountability, the panel provides a comparative framework for understanding how technical expertise has historically shaped—and been shaped by—broader social transformations.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Daniel Pérez-Zapico, Autonomous University of Madrid

Individual Presentations

• Negotiating Medical Authority: Physicians, Local Societies, and Emerging Middle-Class Identities in the Czech Lands before 1848 - Tereza Liepoldová, Institute of History of the Czech Academy of Science; Center for Theoretical Study, Charles University Prague

• Foreign Engineers in the late Ottoman Empire - Darina Martykanova, Autonomous University of Madrid

• Shifting Perspectives on Engineering, Gender, and Middle-Class Formation: Early Women Engineers in Republican Türkiye - Gül Aydın, History of Science and Technology Department. Istanbul Technical University

• “It is not necessary to emphasize the general interest in these works”: Italian Civil Engineers and the Discourse about their Professional Role (1950-1980) - Francesco D'Amaro, Autonomous University of Madrid

Session Organizers

• Darina Martykanova, Autonomous University of Madrid

• Francesco D'Amaro, Autonomous University of Madrid

• Daniel Pérez-Zapico, Autonomous University of Madrid