Engineering Empires: A Cultural History of Technology in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Engineers are empire-builders: active agents of political and economic empire, they have worked to build and expand personal and business empires of material technology founded on and sustained by durable networks of trust and expertise. It is our aim in this book to re-examine, from within, the cultural construction of the large-scale technologies of empire. Beginning with an analysis of collective adventures in exploration, mapping and measurement, we consider technologies of power (especially steam), the recruitment and refinement of these powers in steamships and in railways, and the mechanisms of communication (especially electrical telegraphy) by which those powers, and their applications, were surveyed and controlled.