Workshop: Backstages of Globalization: New Perspectives on Infrastructure and Power in the 20th Century

Workshop of the DFG Emmy Noether Group “Cooling the Global South” organized by Dr. Carolyn Taratko and Dept. 5: Globalizations in a Divided World of the ZZF Potsdam

Recent decades have seen a resurgence of interest in the history of infrastructures, broadly speaking. Attention to the study of material infrastructures, including the construction of ports and pipelines, has been complemented by studies of less visible immaterial and institutional infrastructures, including the proliferation of technical standards, educational pathways, and financial institutions over the course of the twentieth century. 

The workshop sets out to interrogate the role of these less visible, sometimes invisible, infrastructures in processes of transnational and global transfer and governance. Enriched by perspectives from global history, the history of knowledge, the history of capitalism, and science and technology studies, participants seek to understand what studies of infrastructure might contribute to understandings of power in specific societies, as well as to understand the broader appeal of “infrastructure” as a category throughout the twentieth century. 

The group aims to take stock of recent developments in the field with particular attention to the interconnections between material constructions and human organization to better understand processes of global integration as well as disconnect.

Monika Dommann (University of Zurich) will deliver the keynote lecture at 17:30 on Thursday, Nov. 28.

Central questions: 

What counts as a global infrastructure? How did "infrastructure" as a category develop with respect to modernization theory and economic planning? How did plans and practices for construction and/or implementation change in different geographic, environmental, political, and cultural contexts? 

What role did local or indigenous knowledge play in planning of various projects? Which sorts of new geographies of power and expertise emerged over the course of war, decolonization and independence in the twentieth century?

Backstages of Globalization: New Perspectives on Infrastructure and Power in the 20th Century

Workshop of the DFG Emmy Noether Group “Cooling the Global South” organized by Carolyn Taratko and Dept. V of the ZZF Potsdam.

Program:

Thursday, November 28

14:00 | Coffee and arrival

14:30 | Introduction, Carolyn Taratko
 

15:00–16:30 | Panel 1 Interwar and Late Imperial Infrastructures

Chair: Isabella Löhr

• María Jeldes Olivares (IRS Erkner), “Infrastructures of (De)Globalisation: The Construction of the National Cement Industry by German Contractors in Interwar Argentina”.
   
• Andreas Greiner (GHI Washington), “Expanding Imperial Infrastructure into Sovereign States: Persia and Siam as Opponents, Facilitators and Beneficiaries of Imperial Aviation, 1920s-1930s”.

16:30–17:30 | Break

17:30–19:00 | Keynote Lecture

Monika Dommann (University of Zürich) 
“Following Material Flows and Supply Chains Through Societies: A Methodological Travelogue”.
 

19:30 | Workshop Dinner (for official participants)

Friday, November 29

8:45–10:15 | Panel 2: Financial Infrastructures 

Chair: Rüdiger Graf

• Marcus Dietrich (University of Heidelberg), “Red Finance? East Germany's Experience in International Financial Markets”.
   
• Mariusz Lukasiewicz (University of Leipzig), “Rural Capitalists, 'Indigenous' Finance and Co-operative Movement in Late-colonial Nigeria, 1945-1966”.

10:15–10:30 | Coffee break 

10:30–12:30 | Panel 3: Materializing Internationalist Infrastructures 

Chair: Carolin Liebisch-Gümüş

• Daniel Quiroga-Villamarin (Geneva Graduate Institute and Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law), “Architects of a Better World? Democracy, Law, and the Construction of the International Order (1919–1998)”.
   
• Nadja Klopprogge (University of Tübingen), “Encyclopedia Africana: A Pan-African Knowledge Infrastructure”.
   
• Dara Orenstein (George Washington University), “Waste Management: The Role of the World Trade Center in the Social Metabolism of the Global City after 1973”.  

12:30–13:45 | Lunch
 

13:45– 15:45 | Panel 4: Infrastructures and Logistics 

Chair: Christopher Neumaier
 

• Felix Mauch (TUM), “When Logistics Took Command: A Singapore Story 1848-1942”.
   
• Claudia Eggart (University of Manchester and ZOIS Berlin), “The Container: An Archaeology of Infrastructure at the Dordoi Bazaar in Kyrgyzstan and the 7km Market in Odesa”.
   
• Selvihan Kurt (TU Istanbul), “Burial Spaces, Public Health and Infrastructure in 20th Century Izmir”.

15:45–16:15 | Final Wrap-up Discussion 

16:15 | Departure from ZZF