Introduction: Technology, Science and Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century

Abstract

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.

It may be safely averred that railways, steamships, and telegraphs are combinedly our most powerful weapon in the cause of Inter-Imperial Commerce.

— Charles Bright affirms the mutually supporting role of the three nineteenth-century technological systems fundamental to the commerce of the British Empire (1911) ¹