Epilogue: Technology’s Activists and Global Dynamics

The Epilogue tries to expose some of the connections between the individual contributions by focusing on how they address the relations between individuals, networks and particular institutions at points of technological advancement, crisis or failure. This volume’s editors are firm in their contention that the engineering, legal and managing experts from around the mid-nineteenth century were far more central to the dynamics of global economic and cultural change than earlier analysts have allowed. To an extent this perspective is becoming more dominant as a result of the very fine detailed work done in the area of history of science by a wide range of intellectual, social and cultural historians, as well as in the history of technology by new historians who are first recognising and then stressing networks, institutions, intellectual property rights and, perhaps in particular, the intervening power—both limiting and stimulating—of developmental states.