Engineering Labor, Class Conflict, and State Building in Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Industrialization and Development

• In Event: The Politics of Science and Technology in International Development 1

Abstract

The social and political tensions of the “Second” Industrial Revolution around 1900 were national and global phenomena whose ramifications we can feel to this day. One exemplary class conflict was fought between engineers as a new profession as well as elite institution, and traditional elites that were rooted in pre-industrial ages (such as the aristocracy, military, traditional professions law/medicine, and senior members of state administrations). I propose a panel contribution that takes a fresh look at this conflict through the lens of colonial and post-colonial global politics, engineering labor, theories of “modernization,” and development, for the pre- and the post-1945 eras. Throughout the twentieth century, engineers and traditional elites were struggling to define proper places for new engineering labor and expertise, invoking and imagining the work that engineers did, contrasting it to the work of traditional, pre-industrial elites. State administrations were not only key places where colonization and post-colonial modernization were thought up, designed, and executed; they were also the place where traditional bourgeois, male, elite identities were formed, specifically in early modern and modern Europe, but also in East Asia, South Asia, North America, and the Soviet Union. In my talk, episodes from this twentieth-century conflict serve as a background for analysis of current post-Cold War rhetoric, which makes claims about contributions that engineers make to the well-being of citizens, states, and global order, and the ingenuity and selflessness this necessitates. I connect this rhetoric to its roots in state building and social contracts of the Second Industrial Revolution.

Author

• Adelheid Voskuhl, University of Pennsylvania