Preliminary Programme

Read a list of names from publications in many fields of American science in the early to mid-twentieth century, and male authors dominate in nearly all cases. But look at photographs of research labs or of field expeditions in that same period. Then one often discovers women actively involved in science: making calculations, cataloguing species, doing laboratory measurements, or digging out dinosaur bones from exposed rock faces in Wyoming.

Historians of science have long known that women often were unacknowledged and invisible partners in the production of knowledge. But it has been harder to understand what the experience meant for them. Oral history allows us to explore the contrasting experiences of male and female researchers. In this presentation, I review the stories of women in science (broadly defined) in the mid-twentieth century, utilizing recent extensive collections of interviews that include not only women researchers but the science-trained (but non-employed) spouses of male scientists. How did women scientists stake out claims for their achievements? What roles did women play in sustaining close-knit research communities? How can we gain new insights into the social dynamics of scientific practice through such interviews? (Show less)

In the last two decades there has been a renaissance of the debate on the relationship between technological change and labour (Caselli, 1999, 2018), but this has a long tradition, since First Industrial Revolution. The debate concerns essentially the relationship between technologies, employment, skills of workers (substitution or complementarity) and wages. In the contemporary debate the different positions as to the role of technology, skills and wages in the modern economic growth are often classified in two different groups (Mokyr, 2014): on one side, there is the “pessimistic view” represented by Smith and Marx, up to McAfee and Brynjolfsson (2011, 2014), who emphasize the general deskilling effect of technological change; on the other hand, there is the “optimistic view” – from Babbage (1835) to Goldin & Katz (1998) and Mokyr (2015) – who argue that new machines increase the skills of workers by the mechanism of the complementarity between skills and technology which substitute some skills and workers but also promoting new ones.
The aim of the paper is to analyse the evolution of this relationship in Italy from 1871 to 2011. The paper uses the Three Industrial Revolutions as a descriptive framework, starting from the qualitative and idiosyncratic features of their technologies. According to this perspective, we describe their effects on employment, sectorial composition and on the skills of workers. We built up a new data set of occupations on a national basis from the professional classification of the Italian population censuses (1871-2011). This data set is reorganized according to the nomenclature elaborated by the HISCO project (Historical International Standard Classification of Occupations) developed by M.H.D. van Leeuwen, I. Maas and A.Miles (2002). In addition, we linked the Italian professions to the HISCLASS (van Leeuwen and Maas, 2011) classification and ATECO 2007, which allow identifying the individual qualification, the social position and the sector in which these occupations are carried out.
Generally, the Italian data confirms in the long run the "deskilling" hypothesis at macrolevel i.e. new technologies substitutes more skilled (medium) work and increase lower skilled workers. The decrease of Medium skilled in the long run is the main trait of labor skills in the Italian experience. A process of polarization of skills occurs in any wave of innovations, with a peak in the mass production technologies era after the WWII up to Seventies. Our analysis of the Italian case at macro level finds that new technologies are introducted to reduce labor skills in the production processes generating a U form curve, an exception for the period entre duex guerres when technological change stagnated. (Show less)

This paper interrogates the relationship between technology, environment, power and narratives of progress within the colonial setting and the context of the Scramble for Africa, through colonial railway projects initiated by Portugal in Angola and Mozambique from their early phases of construction in the 1880s to the eve of World War I. These major engineering efforts were an extension of similar projects that began in mainland Portugal in the 1850s guided by the principles of Saint-simonanism, which emphasized industrialization, science and technology as key elements to direct social change through the construction of large public works and vast transport networks to foster circulation and the creation of wealth (Saraiva, 2007). In this context, railways were expected to promote the exploitation of the colonial resources and at the same time ascertain Portuguese sovereignty over territories that were disputed by other, more powerful, European nations. Additionally, were not only symbols of progress, but also quite tangible forces in the transformation of landscape, economy, power relations and human relationships. The construction and operation of these railways in Angola and Mozambique required thousands of “inexpert” workers, drawing upon local men, women, and children, as well as much smaller number of engineers, contractors, and “skilled” labourers (blacksmiths, carpenters, platelayers, engine drivers, etc.). The latter group left a considerable volume of written material (letters, reports, plants, statistics, etc.), as well as photographs, which are invaluable for the analysis of the implementation of railways, and challenges of constructing and operating railroads in the colonial context. In this paper, we choose to focus primarily on these photographs from Portuguese archives that were taken to document and showcase the construction and operation of those railways. At this time, both railroads and photography were powerful technologies of “social spatialization” that leveraged “the chemical magic of an industrial age” (Foster 2003) and also important tools of Empire. We argue that by considering railways and photographs together, we can interrogate the “mechanical objectivity” of the image and the practice of photography in the colonial context as one of sense-making and co-construction of the new technological landscape, the technical and environmental challenges (Daston and Galison 2007, Macedo 2009), and social context brought about by the colonizing project and the self-proclaimed “civilizing mission” Portugal had for its African overseas territories (Jerónimo 2015).

References:

Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York, NY: Zone Books, 2007.
Foster, Jeremy. “Capturing and Losing the ‘Lie of the Land’: Railway Photography and Colonial Nationalism in Early Twentieth-Century South Africa.” In Picturing Place. Photography and the Geographical Information, edited by Joan M. Schwartz, and James R. Ryan, 141-161. New York, NY: I. B. Tauris, 2003.
Macedo, Marta Coelho de. Projectar e construir a Nação. Engenheiros e território em Portugal (1837-1893). Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 2012.
Jerónimo, Miguel Bandeira. The ‘Civilising Mission’ of Portuguese Colonialism, 1879-1930. Hampshire: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015.
Saraiva, Tiago. “Inventing the Technological Nation: The Example of Portugal (1851-1898).” History and Technology, 23, no. 3 (2007): 263-273. (Show less)