An edition of Engineering empires (2004)
Engineering Empires
A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth-Century Britain
By Ben Marsden
Publish Date
August 7, 2007
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Language
eng
Pages
256
Description:
"Engineers are empire-builders. James Watt, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Robert Stephenson and a host of less well known figures worked to build and expand personal and business empires of material technology founded on and sustained by durable networks of trust and expertise. In so doing these engineers and their heirs also became active agents of political and economic empire. Indeed, steamships, railways and electric telegraph systems increasingly complemented one another to form what one early twentieth-century telegraph engineer aptly termed 'our most powerful weapon in the cause of Inter-Imperial Commerce'. This book provides an exploration of the cultural construction of the large-scale technologies of empire."--Jacket.