Political Engineering: Science, Technology and the Francoist Landscape (1939--1959)

The principal thesis of the dissertation is that scientists and engineers were active participants in shaping the Francoist political economy. I reach this conclusion by examining the relationships between laboratories and the Spanish political economy. Special attention is paid to the circulation of material objects between laboratories and landscapes. In promoting this circulation, engineers exploited state resources. Both state and laboratory products were transformed in the process. I argue that the history of the state's political economy in early Francoism can and should be rewritten as a history of science and technology.;The dissertation's narrative is spatial rather than chronological: it follows objects and peoples from laboratories out to the Spanish landscape. In the process, engineers emerge as key players in promoting postwar reconstruction through coal and cement, as well as the industrialization of the Spanish political economy. They also emerge as deeply linked to the National-Catholic ideology, which informed some of their most important choices and which they in their turn helped shape. Agronomy engineers appear at the top of a vertical chain of production, distribution, and consumption, and rice hybrids became techno-political commodities. Of course, Spanish engineers were not of one mind. I follow their controversies as they developed in technical terms and reinterpret them as political debates and power struggles. The competition to shape the political economy also involved private producers. As the last chapter shows, this and other factors led Spanish engineers to become active in the technological integration of Europe.;Each chapter captures a larger picture of these networks and sets out to understand their detailed functioning. Following these networks as they changed the Spanish visage provides the dissertation with an operational path into the making of the Francoist state.