Technical and Scientific Training in the Construction of Empires (Routledge Studies in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine)

This book proposes a comparative reading between formal, or non-formal, structures of learning and individual agency abilities, highlighting influences and entanglements in different geographies from multiple spheres of knowledge and practices.

“Learning Places” is an expression that intends to underline the very nature of technical and scientific knowledge transmission related to the built environment transformation of imperial colonial areas. This volume proposes an approach that emphasises the crucial role of the connection between individual and institutional levels, forming a complex network of Learning Places. By comparing different case studies in fields of knowledge and transformation of the built environment―military engineering and cartography, among others―the book establishes a comparative frame of the political-scientific enterprise of empires, across geographies and times.

Technical and Scientific Training in the Construction of Empires is of key interest to researchers, teachers, and students of a variety of disciplines, including the history of science and technology, architecture and urban studies, and colonial and post-colonial studies.

Alice Santiago Faria is an auxiliary researcher at the CHAM – Centre for the Humanities, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa and Universidade dos Açores, Portugal. She was the PI of the research project "TechNetEMPIRE - Technoscientific Networks in the Construction of the Built Environment in the Portuguese Empire (1647–1871)" with Renata Araujo (Co-PI). Her research focuses on colonial public works across the Portuguese Empire during the long nineteenth century.

Renata Malcher de Araujo is a professor at the Faculty of Human and Social Sciences at the University of the Algarve and an integrated researcher at CHAM – Centre for the Humanities, FCSH, Universidade Nova de Lisboa and Universidade dos Açores, Portugal. She conducts research mainly in the areas of the history of urbanism, especially in the scope of Portuguese expansion, history of cartography, and heritage studies.

Margarida Tavares da Conceição is an assistant professor at the Department of Art History, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa, Portugal, and a full researcher at the Institute of Art History / IN2PAST – Associate Laboratory for Research and Innovation in Heritage, Arts, Sustainability and Territory, in the same university. Her research is focused on urban and fortification history, and architectural knowledge transmission in the early modern period.