Dirk van Laak – författare

Over the course of 150 years, Europe's protean technologies inspired and underpinned the globalizing ambitions of European nations. This book aims to show how technology mediated European influence in the rest of the world and how this mediation in turn transformed Europeans. Europeans mapped, they exploited, and they exchanged - their interactions ranged from technological and biological genocide to treaties of cooperation and the construction of elaborate colonial infrastructures. Quite aside from the enormous variety of political settings, cultures and colonial programs, interrelations created dependencies on both sides. Cultural transfers were rarely unidirectional, and often a kind of Pidgin-knowledge emerged, a hybrid fusion of European and local knowledge and skills. As observers have rightly pointed out, Europe played both the role of 'Prometheus unbound' and the 'Sorcerer's apprentice'.

Over the course of 150 years, Europe's protean technologies inspired and underpinned the globalizing ambitions of European nations. This book aims to show how technology mediated European influence in the rest of the world and how this mediation in turn transformed Europeans.

Infrastructures are fundamental means through which societies create spaces, but little is known about the precise ways in which this occurs. How have infrastructures animated certain understandings of space? How do infrastructures stabilize, or undermine, the spatial formats in which we live, which shape our everyday practices and which regulate access to services and resources? And, conversely, how do spaces frame the ways infrastructural provision is organized? How do existing spaces shape infrastructural development and the scope and forms of access to vital services such as transport and water? In this volume, historians and sociologists draw on a range of fascinating case studies and provide compelling answers to these questions. Exploring, among others, the provision of irrigation water in nineteenth-century Los Angeles, the invention of airport transit zones, and the infrastructural practices of homeless people in Berlin, the book demonstrates how the making of spaces through infrastructure is deeply political. Intent on revealing uneven geographies of provision and hierarchies of access, the contributors highlight how infrastructures are products of global entanglements.