ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

A Jesuit Engineer in a Wired World: Faith, Electricity, and the Transnational Making of Spanish Power, 1910s–1920s

• In Event: Wires Across Borders: Transnational Perspectives on Electrical Histories

English Abstract

Marked by uneven regional development that prevented a large-scale national supply, Spain’s electrification in the early 20th century was shaped by a paradox: the drive for technological self-sufficiency in a climate of heightened nationalism following imperial collapse, alongside a dependence on cross-border technology transfers that effectively made the country a subsidiary of AEG (Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft). These contradictions were intensified by divisions within engineering communities over how to institutionalize electrical engineering, even as foreign technicians played decisive roles in local and regional industrialization. Within this context—marked by ambitious but often unrealistic efforts to replace foreign expertise—the Catholic Institute of Arts and Industries (ICAI) was founded in Madrid in 1908.

This paper follows the international travels of ICAI’s founder, Jesuit Father Agustín Pérez del Pulgar, a distinguished physicist and engineer embedded in the technical networks of his time far beyond Jesuit circles. His journeys to New York, Berlin, and Sweden reveal the intersecting forces shaping both the trajectory and cultural narratives of electrification in Spain, including transnational Catholic concerns about the social and domestic disruptions caused by large-scale industry, local anxieties over Spain’s limited coal reserves and their implications for national development, and the crucial transnational flow of technologies and expertise that underpinned the country’s industrial modernization.

Author

• Daniel Pérez-Zapico, Autonomous University of Madrid