Engineering Nature: Water, Development, and the Global Spread of American Environmental Expertise - Softcover

Teisch, Jessica B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807871761 ISBN 13: 9780807871768

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011

Synopsis

Focusing on globalization in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Jessica Teisch examines the processes by which American water and mining engineers who rose to prominence during and after the California Gold Rush of 1849 exported the United States' growing technical and environmental knowledge and associated social and political institutions. In the frontiers of Australia, South Africa, Hawaii, and Palestine--semiarid regions that shared a need for water to support growing populations and economies--California water engineers applied their expertise in irrigation and mining projects on behalf of foreign governments and business interests.

Engineering Nature explores how controlling the vagaries of nature abroad required more than the export of blueprints for dams, canals, or mines; it also entailed the problematic transfer of the new technology's sociopolitical context. Water engineers confronted unforeseen variables in each region as they worked to implement their visions of agrarian settlement and industrial growth, including the role of the market, government institutions, property rights, indigenous peoples, labor, and, not last, the environment. Teisch argues that by examining the successes and failures of various projects as American influence spread, we can see the complex role of globalization at work, often with incredibly disproportionate results.

About this title

Book Description

"Beautifully written, deeply researched, and shrewdly argued, Engineering Nature is a model study of the fraught relationship between water and power, between the technocratic impulse and social reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Teisch's superb, compelling book internationalizes a subject that long has needed a global perspective."--Char Miller, W. M. Keck Professor of Environmental Analysis, Pomona College

From the Inside Flap

Teisch examines the processes by which American water and mining engineers exported the United States' growing technical and environmental knowledge and associated social and political institutions to the developing twentieth-century frontiers of Australia, South Africa, Hawaii, and Palestine. Teisch argues that these engineers became early agents of the persistent, uneven spread of technology and wealth to developing nations.

Edition details

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0807871761
• ISBN 13: 9780807871768
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 272