How engineers and agricultural scientists became key actors inFranco's regime and Spain's forced modernization. In this book, Lino Camprubí argues that science and technology were at the very center of the building of Franco's Spain. Previous histories of early Francoist science and technology have described scientists and engineers as working “under” Francoism, subject to censorship and bound by politically mandated research agendas. Camprubí offers a different perspective, considering instead scientists' and engineers' active roles in producing those political mandates. Many scientists and engineers had been exiled, imprisoned, or executed by the regime. Camprubí argues that those who remained made concrete the mission of “redemption” that Franco had invented for himself. This gave them the opportunity to become key actors—and mid-level decision makers—within the regime. Camprubí describes a series of projects across Spain undertaken by the civil engineers and agricultural scientists who placed themselves at the center of their country's forced modernization. These include a coal silo, built in 1953, viewed as an embodiment of Spain's industrialized landscape; links between laboratories, architects, and the national Catholic church (and between technology and authoritarian control); vertically organized rice production and research on genetics; river management and the contested meanings of self-sufficiency; and the circulation of construction standards by mobile laboratories as an engine for European integration. Separately, each chapter offers a fascinating microhistory that illustrates the coevolution of Francoist science, technology, and politics. Taken together, they reveal networks of people, institutions, knowledge, artifacts, and technological systems woven together to form a new state.
When, after years of geological and geophysical exploration, a phosphate mine was discovered at Bu-Craa in 1964, Western Sahara received renewed geopolitical attention. Several countries competing for the control of the world fertilizer market, including Morocco, Spain, France, and the United States, developed diverging strategies to gain control of the mineral. After intense negotiations revolving around the materiality of mining technologies and involving reserve estimations, sabotage, and flexing of diplomatic muscles, Morocco took over the Spanish colony in 1975. While this secured Morocco's place in the world market, it condemned the local population to exile and domination. This article explores three technological stages of the exploitation of phosphate in Western Sahara that underpin the geopolitical history. This perspective yields new visions of cold war technology and postcolonial markets.
This paper aims to show the links between rice genetics and the corporatist political economy of early Francoism. After investigating the transition from prewar rice producers' associations to a new federation embedded in a vertical union, I identify three main novelties of the new organization: its national scope, its need to address lack of supply rather than overproduction, and its hierarchical functioning. I then focus on the one state-owned agricultural station devoted to rice research, showing how its agricultural scientists shaped, and relied on, the state-controlled unions, both for producing and distributing new varieties of rice and for controlling the seeds farmers used. Finally, I explore how this relationship made it possible for the scientists to test, multiply, and distribute throughout the Spanish landscape the seeds they produced at the laboratory, thus putting hierarchical unity and autarky to work and demonstrating the role of scientists as active agents of state formation and landscape transformation within a corporatist political economy.
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