Book Launch | An Engineered World: The Role of Engineers in Global Modernity

An Engineered World examines the dramatic and global expansion of modern professional engineering between roughly 1870 and 1950. Over these decades, the number of people who called themselves “engineers” (or who were recognized as such by others) expanded from a small and eclectic number of individuals to one of the most numerous, mobile, and influential professional groups of the twentieth century. Tens of thousands of university-trained engineers and other professionalized technical experts—a few famous but most anonymous—became critical to the technological, organizational, and political development of global capitalism and socialism. This was the case in Western Europe and the United States, but it was also true in colonial settings and independent countries around the world, where the institutions of modern engineering were often established in the same era.

Co-sponsored by the Program in history and Philosophy of science, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, Patrick Suppes Center for history and Philosophy of Science, the Department of History, and the Bill Lane Center for the American West