This book deals with the simultaneous making of Portuguese engineers and the Portuguese nation-state from the mid seventeenth century to the late twentieth century. It argues that the different meanings of being an engineer were directly dependent of projects of nation building and that one cannot understand the history of engineering in Portugal without detailing such projects. Symmetrically, the authors suggest that the very same ability of collectively imagining a nation relied on large measure on engineers and their practices. National culture was not only enacted through poetry, music, and history, but it demanded as well fortresses, railroads, steam engines, and dams. Portuguese engineers imagined their country in dialogue with Italian, British, French, German or American realities, many times overlapping such references. The book exemplifies how history of engineering makes more salient the transnational dimensions of national history. This is valid beyond the Portuguese case and draws attention to the potential of history of engineering for reshaping national histories and their local specificities into global narratives relevant for readers across different geographies.

Autorentext

Maria Paula Diogo is Full Professor of History of Technology and Engineering at the NOVA School of Sciences and Technology and member of CIUHCT - Interuniversity Centre of the History of Science and Technology. She publishes regularly in reputed international journals and publishers. She is a founding member of international research networks, organized numerous national and international conferences and workshops and participates in international H2020 projects. Her most recent co-authored book, Europeans Globalizing: Mapping, Exploiting, Exchanging (Palgrave Macmillan 2016) is part of the Making Europe: Technology and Transformations book series, which was awarded the Freeman Prize by the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology. She recently co-edited the volume Gardens and Human Agency in the Anthropocene (Routledge, 2019). Her research in history of science and technology brings together topics such as globalization, circulation and appropriation of expertise, networks, centers and peripheries and more recently the concept of Anthropocene. In 2020 she was awarded the Leonardo da Vinci Medal, the highest recognition from the Society for the History of Technology.Tiago Saraiva is an Associate Professor of History at Drexel University, coeditor of the journal History and Technology, and author of Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism (2016), winner of the 2017 Pfizer Prize awarded by the History of Science Society. He recently coedited Capital Científica (Imprensa Ciencias Sociais, 2019) and Nature Remade (University of Chicago Press, 2021). His work intersects history of science and technology, political history and global history

Inhalt
Introduction.- Making Engineers Portuguese.- Engineering the Liberal State.- Engineers, Industrial Workers, and the Bourgeois City.- The Colonial Face of Portuguese Engineering.- The Modernist Engineer.- Engineering the Fascist New State.- Conclusion.- Authors' Biographies.