Technology & State Power
Railroads, Rifles, and Rockets: Technology and State Power
Listed in: Political Science, as POSC-417
Jonathan M. Obert (Section 01)
This research seminar investigates the links between the material and political worlds in the U.S. and around the world. In particular, it tries to understand the way that technology and material objects have constrained and enabled the making of state power, while also being the product of policy choices. Since states are not merely abstract institutions, but also constellations of things like weapons, highways, computers, railroads, buildings, monuments, and even paper, to understand how infrastructure affects state formation (and vice versa), we need to explore the links between the construction of political authority and technological life as tied up in a complex process of socio-material evolution and stasis. Drawing from a wide variety of works (including literature from historical sociology, social studies of science, "big history," anthropology, political economy and economic development, among others), this seminar will thus explore historical and contemporary case studies and theoretical accounts of the influence of key infrastructural technologies on political development from around the world, as well as examine the often incomplete attempts of historical states to redeploy or construct technological systems to extend their authority.
Limited to 18 students. Spring semester. Professor Obert
If Overenrolled: Priority to juniors and seniors.
Attention to Writing
POSC 417 - L/D
Tu 01:00 PM - 03:45 PM FROS 211
9780300078152 Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed Yale University Press James C. Scott Amherst Books From $11.88-$32.16
9780393317558 Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies W. W. Norton & Company Jared M. Diamond Amherst Books From $5.98-$18.95
9780520282261 The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the Nineteenth Century University of California Press Schivelbusch, Wolfgang Amherst Books From $15.82-$42.32
9780674980860 Policing the Open Road: How Cars Transformed American Freedom Harvard University Press Seo, Sarah A. Amherst Books From $17.98-$31.49
9780691154329 Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World (41)) Princeton University Press Headrick, Daniel R. Amherst Books From $18.65-$33.64
9780691172798 The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation Princeton University Press Frey, Carl Benedikt Amherst Books From $17.19-$32.44
9781595589750 A Theory of the Drone The New Press Chamayou, Grégoire Amherst Books From $12.88-$29.59
These books are available locally at Amherst Books.
Other years: Offered in Spring 2020