Histories of Technology, the Environment and Modern Britain (eBook)

Jon Agar, Jacob Ward (Herausgeber)

eBook Download: EPUB

2018
UCL Press (Verlag)
978-1-911576-60-0 (ISBN)

Infos

Histories of Technology, the Environment, and Modern Britain brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technologies are modified environments, just as nature is to varying extents engineered. Furthermore, technologies and our living and non-living environment are both predominant material forms of organisation - and self-organisation - that surround and make us. Both have changed over time, in intersecting ways.Technologies discussed in the collection include bulldozers, submarine cables, automobiles, flood barriers, medical devices, museum displays and biotechnologies. Environments investigated include bogs, cities, farms, places of natural beauty and pollution, land and sea. The book explores this diversity but also offers an integrated framework for understanding these intersections.

Autor

lt;p>Jon Agar is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at UCL. He has written on the history of radio-astronomy, computing, and mobile phones, and his most recent book, Science in the Twentieth Century and Beyond, surveys the history of science across the twentieth century.

Jacob Ward is a PhD candidate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies, UCL, and the Science Museum, London. His PhD thesis addresses the history of the so-called ‘information revolution’ in the British telephone network in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Inhalt

1 Technology, environment and modern
Britain: historiography and intersections
Jon Agar

2 Encroaching Irish bogland frontiers: science, policy and
aspirations from the 1770s to the 1840s
Esa Ruuskanen

3 Landscape with bulldozer: machines, modernity and
environment in post-war Britain
Ralph Harrington

4 Locality and contamination along the transnational
asbestos commodity chain
Jessica van Horssen

5 A machine in the garden: the compressed air bath and the
nineteenth-century health resort
Jennifer Wallis

6 The Agriculture Gallery: displaying modern farming in the
Science Museum
David Matless

7 About Britain: driving the landscape of Britain (at speed?)
Tim Cole

8 Crops in a machine: industrialising barley breeding in
twentieth-century Britain
Matthew Holmes

9 Plants are technologies
Dominic J. Berry
10 Oceanscapes and spacescapes in North Atlantic
communications
Jacob Ward

11 The Thames Barrier: climate change, shipping and the
transition to a new envirotechnical regime
Matthew Kelly

12 The woods for the state 
Mat Paskins

13 The UK government’s environmentalism: Britain, NATO
and the origins of environmental diplomacy
Simone Turchetti

14 Simulating the global environment: the British
Government’s response to The Limits to Growth
Thomas Turnbull

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 9.4.2018
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
• Themenwelt: Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Technikgeschichte
• Themenwelt: Naturwissenschaften
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften
• Schlagworte: brings together historians with a wide range of interests to take a uniquely wide-lens view of how technology and the environment have been intimately and irreversibly entangled in Britain over the last 300 years. It combines, for the first time, two perspectives with much to say about Britain since the industrial revolution: the history of technology and environmental history. Technologies are modified environments, just as nature is to varying extents engineered. Furthermore, technologies and our living a • British history • Histories of Technology, the Environment, and Modern Britain • History • history of Modern Britain • History of Science • History of technology • history of the Environment • Science • Science and Technology Studies
• ISBN-10: 1-911576-60-7 / 1911576607
• ISBN-13: 978-1-911576-60-0 / 9781911576600