Pub Date : 2021-01-02DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2021.1905354
G. Mateos, E. Suárez-Díaz
ABSTRACT In 1958, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) saw the need to organize international surveys on nuclear development. Latin America was chosen as the region to host the first Preliminary Assistance Mission, planned to build the engagement of countries with nuclear technologies and knowledge. The mission’s goals included the assistance to request future assistance. Teams sent abroad were composed of administrative staff and scientific experts who acted as atomic ambassadors. Nuclear diplomacy infused collaboration and cooperation in international relations by the use of paper technologies and by implementing the missions as actual travels and face-to-face contacts. The IAEA was able to ground policies and projects devised by the interconnected interests of Vienna and each Latin American country, while maintaining the deep asymmetries of the Cold War era. This paper aims to contribute to the visibility of actors and mechanisms designed to create the need for nuclear technical assistance.
{"title":"Atomic ambassadors: the IAEA’s first Preliminary Assistance Mission (1958)","authors":"G. Mateos, E. Suárez-Díaz","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2021.1905354","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2021.1905354","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In 1958, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) saw the need to organize international surveys on nuclear development. Latin America was chosen as the region to host the first Preliminary Assistance Mission, planned to build the engagement of countries with nuclear technologies and knowledge. The mission’s goals included the assistance to request future assistance. Teams sent abroad were composed of administrative staff and scientific experts who acted as atomic ambassadors. Nuclear diplomacy infused collaboration and cooperation in international relations by the use of paper technologies and by implementing the missions as actual travels and face-to-face contacts. The IAEA was able to ground policies and projects devised by the interconnected interests of Vienna and each Latin American country, while maintaining the deep asymmetries of the Cold War era. This paper aims to contribute to the visibility of actors and mechanisms designed to create the need for nuclear technical assistance.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"35 1","pages":"90 - 105"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2021-01-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79487892","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2020.1863623
Dora Vargha
ABSTRACT From the establishment of the World Health Organization in 1948, the question of technical assistance was hotly debated by Eastern European countries. Recuperating from the war and undergoing radical political change, they were both recipients and donors of technical assistance in a newly forming system of international health. These countries had specific ideas about the obligations of states and the role of technical aid that did not necessarily map on the dominant, US-led interpretation. While there is a growing literature on technical assistance between Eastern Europe and the so-called Third World, the role of technology and expertise at the intersection of liberal and socialist international health has been little explored. Through the case of hospital-building projects and expert networks from a Hungarian perspective, this paper asks how we can understand socialist engagement in international health, and how technical assistance among the Second and Third worlds fitted into broader systems.
{"title":"Technical assistance and socialist international health: Hungary, the WHO and the Korean War","authors":"Dora Vargha","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2020.1863623","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2020.1863623","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT From the establishment of the World Health Organization in 1948, the question of technical assistance was hotly debated by Eastern European countries. Recuperating from the war and undergoing radical political change, they were both recipients and donors of technical assistance in a newly forming system of international health. These countries had specific ideas about the obligations of states and the role of technical aid that did not necessarily map on the dominant, US-led interpretation. While there is a growing literature on technical assistance between Eastern Europe and the so-called Third World, the role of technology and expertise at the intersection of liberal and socialist international health has been little explored. Through the case of hospital-building projects and expert networks from a Hungarian perspective, this paper asks how we can understand socialist engagement in international health, and how technical assistance among the Second and Third worlds fitted into broader systems.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"169 1","pages":"400 - 417"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73463228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2020.1862989
G. S. Laveaga
ABSTRACT Origin narratives of the Green Revolution have been periodized to influence who is seen as an expert and memorialized as such. This article pushes us to reframe technical assistance to include in country agricultural aid activities needed for many foreign assistance initiatives to succeed. Many agricultural-based technical assistance projects of the twentieth century trace their origins to the emergence of a Rockefeller Foundation-led Green Revolution. This essay argues that in Mexico the arrival of so-called foreign technical assistance was not new but rather a continuation of socialist-based agricultural initiatives based on transforming rural life thru science. In addition to missing the influence of pivotal national institutions and scientists, key transnational, pre-exisiting relationships are often overlooked. This essay illustrates the importance of pushing back the time-line by using the case of Pandurang Khankhoje, an Indian agronomist working in Mexico before the arrival of Norman Borlaug and the Rockefeller Foundation.
{"title":"The socialist origins of the Green Revolution: Pandurang Khankhoje and domestic ‘technical assistance’","authors":"G. S. Laveaga","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2020.1862989","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2020.1862989","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Origin narratives of the Green Revolution have been periodized to influence who is seen as an expert and memorialized as such. This article pushes us to reframe technical assistance to include in country agricultural aid activities needed for many foreign assistance initiatives to succeed. Many agricultural-based technical assistance projects of the twentieth century trace their origins to the emergence of a Rockefeller Foundation-led Green Revolution. This essay argues that in Mexico the arrival of so-called foreign technical assistance was not new but rather a continuation of socialist-based agricultural initiatives based on transforming rural life thru science. In addition to missing the influence of pivotal national institutions and scientists, key transnational, pre-exisiting relationships are often overlooked. This essay illustrates the importance of pushing back the time-line by using the case of Pandurang Khankhoje, an Indian agronomist working in Mexico before the arrival of Norman Borlaug and the Rockefeller Foundation.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"107 1","pages":"337 - 359"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"78255701","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2020.1863622
J. Hamblin
ABSTRACT Drawn from the archives of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the British National Archives, and other sources, the present essay analyzes nuclear technical assistance in central Asia, focusing largely on Pakistan. It discusses collaborations with American and British institutions in the 1960s and later efforts to work under the auspices of the IAEA. The essay suggests that the IAEA’s mission in the 1960s and early 1970s, namely its leaders’ desire to demonstrate the relevance of the IAEA in economic development, aligned with Pakistan’s stated goals of constructing a robust reactor program. Rather than see technical assistance solely as a donor/recipient binary relationship, the essay encourages us to consider the mutuality of interests between a major international organization and a budding nuclear program. Archival documents suggest that the IAEA provided the endorsement for a major nuclear program for electricity production that Pakistan was unable to find with other partners.
{"title":"Aligning missions: nuclear technical assistance, the IAEA, and national ambitions in Pakistan","authors":"J. Hamblin","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2020.1863622","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2020.1863622","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Drawn from the archives of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the British National Archives, and other sources, the present essay analyzes nuclear technical assistance in central Asia, focusing largely on Pakistan. It discusses collaborations with American and British institutions in the 1960s and later efforts to work under the auspices of the IAEA. The essay suggests that the IAEA’s mission in the 1960s and early 1970s, namely its leaders’ desire to demonstrate the relevance of the IAEA in economic development, aligned with Pakistan’s stated goals of constructing a robust reactor program. Rather than see technical assistance solely as a donor/recipient binary relationship, the essay encourages us to consider the mutuality of interests between a major international organization and a budding nuclear program. Archival documents suggest that the IAEA provided the endorsement for a major nuclear program for electricity production that Pakistan was unable to find with other partners.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"61 1","pages":"437 - 451"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"76683613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2020.1862991
Hiromi Mizuno
ABSTRACT By using the genealogy of hybrid rice, Mahsuri, developed in Malaysia by Japanese agronomists in the 1960s, this article tells a story of agricultural modernization in Asia that challenges the US-centered narrative of the Green Revolution. Cross-racial hybrid Mahsuri’s parent is Taichung 65 from colonial Taiwan, and its off-spring is irradiated Mahsuri Mutant. By highlighting the deep connection between colonial development and post-World War II technical assistance, the role of intra-Asia networks in crop improvement programs in Asia, and the agency of postcolonial Asian nations, this article critiques the ironies embedded in the mutant rice and in the concept of development.
{"title":"Mutant rice and agricultural modernization in Asia","authors":"Hiromi Mizuno","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2020.1862991","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2020.1862991","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT By using the genealogy of hybrid rice, Mahsuri, developed in Malaysia by Japanese agronomists in the 1960s, this article tells a story of agricultural modernization in Asia that challenges the US-centered narrative of the Green Revolution. Cross-racial hybrid Mahsuri’s parent is Taichung 65 from colonial Taiwan, and its off-spring is irradiated Mahsuri Mutant. By highlighting the deep connection between colonial development and post-World War II technical assistance, the role of intra-Asia networks in crop improvement programs in Asia, and the agency of postcolonial Asian nations, this article critiques the ironies embedded in the mutant rice and in the concept of development.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"10 1","pages":"360 - 381"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81972391","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2020.1862990
John P. DiMoia
ABSTRACT In standard accounts of the origins of the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), or intermodal, shipping container, including Marc Levinson’s The Box and Alexander Klose’s The Container Principle, the story remains centered in Europe and North America, reflecting the issue emerging on the continent in the prewar era, and the post-war growth of the American trucking industry, associated with the expansion of federal highways. In contrast, this essay moves the focus to East and Southeast Asia, reflecting the significance of the Korean War and the Vietnam War as factors driving the shift from break-bulk shipping to containers, here motivated by military logistics. The post-war 1945 reconfiguration of Japan’s wartime empire, involving the reconstitution of relationships deriving from imperial connections, meant that new sites such as Busan, South Korea (1952) and Cam Ranh Bay, South Vietnam (1965 to early 1970s) became the focal points for vast infusions of war-related materials.
{"title":"Reconfiguring transport infrastructure in post-war Asia: mapping South Korean container ports, 1952–1978","authors":"John P. DiMoia","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2020.1862990","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2020.1862990","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In standard accounts of the origins of the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), or intermodal, shipping container, including Marc Levinson’s The Box and Alexander Klose’s The Container Principle, the story remains centered in Europe and North America, reflecting the issue emerging on the continent in the prewar era, and the post-war growth of the American trucking industry, associated with the expansion of federal highways. In contrast, this essay moves the focus to East and Southeast Asia, reflecting the significance of the Korean War and the Vietnam War as factors driving the shift from break-bulk shipping to containers, here motivated by military logistics. The post-war 1945 reconfiguration of Japan’s wartime empire, involving the reconstitution of relationships deriving from imperial connections, meant that new sites such as Busan, South Korea (1952) and Cam Ranh Bay, South Vietnam (1965 to early 1970s) became the focal points for vast infusions of war-related materials.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"47 1","pages":"382 - 399"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73815763","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2020.1864116
G. Mateos, E. Suárez-Díaz
ABSTRACT Nuclear technologies and skills were not easily sold as tools for development for the less developed countries. Beginning in 1958, the International Atomic Energy Agency, as part of the United Nations Expanded Program of Technical Assistance, looked to create the need for nuclear technical assistance around the world, with the expectation that countries would climb a supposed developmental ladder that went from radioisotope applications in medicine, agriculture and industry among others, and up to the construction of nuclear power reactors. The case of Mexico reveals the heterogenous levels of professionalization of the different nuclear disciplines existing in the country, and the lack of meaningful connections between technical assistance requests and the developmental model favored by the Mexican government during the 1960s. We oppose the historicity of nuclear physics, radiochemistry, and nuclear engineering in this country, to the telos of development.
核技术和技能不容易作为发展工具出售给欠发达国家。从1958年开始，作为联合国扩大技术援助计划(United Nations Expanded Program of Technical Assistance)的一部分，国际原子能机构(International Atomic Energy Agency)希望在全球范围内创造对核技术援助的需求，期望各国能够爬上一个所谓的发展阶梯，从放射性同位素在医学、农业和工业等领域的应用，一直到核反应堆的建设。墨西哥的案例揭示了该国现有的不同核学科的专业化水平各不相同，并且在技术援助请求与墨西哥政府在20世纪60年代所青睐的发展模式之间缺乏有意义的联系。我们反对核物理、放射化学和核工程在这个国家的历史性，以达到发展的目的。
{"title":"Creating the need in Mexico: the IAEA’s technical assistance programs for less developed countries (1958-68)","authors":"G. Mateos, E. Suárez-Díaz","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2020.1864116","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2020.1864116","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Nuclear technologies and skills were not easily sold as tools for development for the less developed countries. Beginning in 1958, the International Atomic Energy Agency, as part of the United Nations Expanded Program of Technical Assistance, looked to create the need for nuclear technical assistance around the world, with the expectation that countries would climb a supposed developmental ladder that went from radioisotope applications in medicine, agriculture and industry among others, and up to the construction of nuclear power reactors. The case of Mexico reveals the heterogenous levels of professionalization of the different nuclear disciplines existing in the country, and the lack of meaningful connections between technical assistance requests and the developmental model favored by the Mexican government during the 1960s. We oppose the historicity of nuclear physics, radiochemistry, and nuclear engineering in this country, to the telos of development.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"9 1","pages":"418 - 436"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77244263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2020.1864118
A. Siddiqi
ABSTRACT This essay explores the origins of the Satellite Instructional Technology Experiment (SITE), a project that used a NASA satellite to beam educational programs to over two thousand villages in India in the mid-1970s. Touted as a major success in using advanced technology for the purposes of poverty alleviation, the results of the project remain contested. I argue that the causes of its ambiguous outcome can be traced to the late 1960s when Indian and American scientific elites mobilized support for this project by uniting a coalition of diverse actors that each imagined a different ‘India’. Although each of these ‘Indias’ represented a starkly different vision of the nation, they were consonant for a brief historical moment, thus enabling SITE to come to reality. Their ability to do so depended on framing as monolithic and passive, the one population central to the project, the ‘poor and illiterate’ of India.
{"title":"Whose India? SITE and the origins of satellite television in India","authors":"A. Siddiqi","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2020.1864118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2020.1864118","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay explores the origins of the Satellite Instructional Technology Experiment (SITE), a project that used a NASA satellite to beam educational programs to over two thousand villages in India in the mid-1970s. Touted as a major success in using advanced technology for the purposes of poverty alleviation, the results of the project remain contested. I argue that the causes of its ambiguous outcome can be traced to the late 1960s when Indian and American scientific elites mobilized support for this project by uniting a coalition of diverse actors that each imagined a different ‘India’. Although each of these ‘Indias’ represented a starkly different vision of the nation, they were consonant for a brief historical moment, thus enabling SITE to come to reality. Their ability to do so depended on framing as monolithic and passive, the one population central to the project, the ‘poor and illiterate’ of India.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"40 1","pages":"452 - 474"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"86563108","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-10-01DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2020.1859775
Jessica Wang
ABSTRACT This essay explores the technical practices of economic development in early twentieth-century Hawaiʻi, where agrarianism, race, and competing colonialisms shaped agricultural experts’ perceptions of the islands’ future. Technical activities in the form of horticultural experiments aimed at introducing new crops, research on soil and fertilizers, work on plant diseases and insect pests, shipping experiments and marketing efforts, analytical testing services, and outreach to farming communities constituted the key means by which the United States Department of Agriculture’s Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station pushed for fundamental economic and social transformations in the Territory of Hawaii. A populist anti-imperialist ideology drove the experiment station’s agenda, in an explicitly stated project of Americanization that sought to break Hawaiian dependence on sugar and plantation agriculture, expand small farming, and remake the islands’ racial order through white settlement from the mainland. Ultimately, the USDA’s brand of settler colonialism failed to supplant the existing plantation economy.
{"title":"Agricultural expertise, race, and economic development: small producer ideology and settler colonialism in the Territory of Hawaiʻi, 1900–1917","authors":"Jessica Wang","doi":"10.1080/07341512.2020.1859775","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2020.1859775","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This essay explores the technical practices of economic development in early twentieth-century Hawaiʻi, where agrarianism, race, and competing colonialisms shaped agricultural experts’ perceptions of the islands’ future. Technical activities in the form of horticultural experiments aimed at introducing new crops, research on soil and fertilizers, work on plant diseases and insect pests, shipping experiments and marketing efforts, analytical testing services, and outreach to farming communities constituted the key means by which the United States Department of Agriculture’s Hawaii Agricultural Experiment Station pushed for fundamental economic and social transformations in the Territory of Hawaii. A populist anti-imperialist ideology drove the experiment station’s agenda, in an explicitly stated project of Americanization that sought to break Hawaiian dependence on sugar and plantation agriculture, expand small farming, and remake the islands’ racial order through white settlement from the mainland. Ultimately, the USDA’s brand of settler colonialism failed to supplant the existing plantation economy.","PeriodicalId":45996,"journal":{"name":"History and Technology","volume":"8 1","pages":"310 - 336"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2020-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89963334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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