Knowledge Flows in a Global Age: A Transnational Approach

Knowledge Flows in a Global Age

Knowledge Flows in a Global Age

A Transnational Approach

Edited by John Krige

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2022 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2022

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81994-5 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82038-5 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-82037-8 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226820378.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Krige, John, editor.

Title: Knowledge flows in a global age : a transnational approach / edited by John Krige.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021061665 | ISBN 9780226819945 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226820385 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226820378 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Technology transfer—History—20th century. | Technology transfer—Cross-cultural studies. | Diffusion of innovations—History—20th century. | Technology and international relations—History—20th century. | Globalization.

Classification: LCC T174.3 .K565 2022 | DDC 338.9/26—dc23/eng/20220110

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021061665

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents

Introduction

Writing the Transnational History of Knowledge Flows in a Global Age

John Krige

Chapter 1

Knowledge, State Power, and the Invention of International Science

Jessica Wang

Part I   Regulating Transnational Knowledge Flows

Chapter 2

Harnessing Invention: The British Admiralty and the Political Economy of Knowledge in the World War I Era

Katherine C. Epstein

Chapter 3

Culture Diplomacy: Penicillin and the Problem of Anglo-American Knowledge Sharing in World War II

Michael A. Falcone

Chapter 4

Dangerous Calculations: The Origins of the US High-Performance Computer Export Safeguards Regime, 1968–1974

Mario Daniels

Chapter 5

Regulating the Transnational Flow of Intangible Knowledge of Space Launchers between the United States and China in the Clinton Era

John Krige

Part II   Facilitating Transnational Knowledge Flows

Chapter 6

Beyond Borlaug’s Shadow: Mexican Seeds and the Narratives of the Green Revolution

Gabriela Soto Laveaga

Chapter 7

Moving Coffee from the Forests of Colonial Angola to the Breakfast Tables of Main Street America, 1940–1961

Maria Gago

Chapter 8

Statistics and Emancipation from New Deal America to Guerrilla Warfare in Guinea-Bissau

Tiago Saraiva

Chapter 9

Security versus Sovereignty in a Palestinian Seed Bank

Courtney Fullilove

Chapter 10

How Data Cross Borders: Globalizing Plant Knowledge through Transnational Data Management and Its Epistemic Economy

Sabina Leonelli

Conclusion

Decentering the Global North

John Krige

Acknowledgments

Contributors

Index

Introduction

Writing the Transnational History of Knowledge Flows in a Global Age

John Krige

The Global, the Transnational, and the National

Transnational history as method emerged along with a renewed interest in global history in the late twentieth century. It was one of a variety of intellectual responses to the convergence of two developments.¹ First, the process of economic globalization itself, manifest in changes in the organization of the world economy that exploited new technological infrastructures to increase the mobility of capital, goods, and people across national borders. Second, this tectonic shift was accompanied by frustration in academia with a genre of historical scholarship that was professionalized in the late nineteenth century along with the process of state formation and that took the territorial boundaries of the nation-state as framing its object of inquiry.² National borders were being dissolved in global imaginaries and rendered permeable in practice by the increased mobility of capital, goods, and people. The writing of history had to adapt to new realties and to cosmopolitan life experiences. Changes that occurred nationally began to be analyzed through the lens of transnational connectivities that intermingled people, goods, ideas, and cultures as they moved back and forth across receding national borders.³ The history of science and technology was not indifferent to these developments. For historian of science Fa-ti Fan, instead of looking at science and technology as products in a particular nation or civilization, the main focus of global history of science [was] on the transmission, exchange and circulation of knowledge, skills and material objects.⁴ David Edgerton contrasted technonational historians of technology that took the state as the key unit of analysis with technoglobalists, who regarded nation-states as at best a temporary vehicle through which the forces of techno-globalism operate but are always about to disappear through the advance of globalizing technology.⁵

There is now an extensive body of literature that has enriched these framing principles. It is marked by a strong pushback against the implicit assumption that the economic globalization that inspired these new approaches was an irresistible historical force dissolving national boundaries and destroying national sovereignty. The subterranean impact of assumptions that makes the ever-closer integration of the world appear a more or less natural development has been thoroughly dissected.⁶ Proponents of world history Charles Bright and Michael Geyer insist that, rather than thinking about transnational and global flows in terms that tend to presume the (relative) openness of the world, we need to excavate the structured networks and webs through which interconnections are made and maintained—as well as contested and renegotiated.⁷ Africanist Frederick Cooper adds that detailed study of the movement of people, as well as capital, reveals the lumpiness of cross-border connections, not a pattern of steadily increasing integration, obliging us to put as much emphasis on nodes and blockages as on movement.⁸ Fa-ti Fan warns us that when we use language that implies that the flow through networks is laminar and unperturbed, we need to be aware that a term like circulation can conceal what may have been really a series of negotiations, pushes and pulls, struggles, and stops and starts.⁹ He argues that to write a robust history of transnational knowledge flows it is imperative to investigate the historical reasons and circumstances that fostered or hindered the movement of knowledge or material objects and to find out how and why certain mechanisms were introduced to control the coming and going of people and things.¹⁰ Global imaginaries that dissolve boundaries evacuate a transnational history of content. There is no transnational knowledge flow without friction at national borders.

This book builds on the foundations laid in my previous volume on how knowledge moves, but consolidates them theoretically with these insights in mind.¹¹ The global is embraced not as an explicit object of analysis but as an extension of the spatial dimensions through which knowledge moves across national borders.¹² To sharpen, but also to simplify the distinctions at work here, we can say that national histories describe social changes that take place within the confines of national borders, that transnational history analyzes what happens at borders as knowledge moves across them, and that global histories explore social interconnections and interdependencies at a scale beyond national borders. The last are also often written within a contemporary imaginary that foresees the eventual elimination of national borders altogether by a relentless process of globalization, anticipated methodologically by decoupling the global from the national. The chapters in this volume resist that methodological move, seeking rather to analyze the factors that facilitate or impede the movement of knowledge-bearing people, ideas, and things across national borders. Patricia Clavin has written that the challenge before historians interested in transnational phenomena . . . is whether, and how, to engage with the nation-state.¹³ This book responds to that challenge by insisting on the centrality to the transnational project of transactions that occur at national borders.

The approach taken here occupies a quite different terrain to the majority of works on transnational history by the mainstream discipline.¹⁴ These tend to limit the role of transnational flows of science and technology to providing the technological infrastructure that make global networking possible. For example, Ian Tyrrell, who has written an illuminating transnational history of the United States from 1789 to the present, defines transnational history as dealing with the movement of people, ideas, technologies and institutions across national boundaries. However, technology enters his narrative as providing the communications systems that brought different nations and peoples together. Tyrrell settles on satellite communications, ubiquitous jet transport, optic fiber cables and the internet as the means of integration in the current global era.¹⁵ Emily Rosenberg, who is engaged with science, technology, and expertise in the first age of globalization from 1870 to 1940, begins her book with a quote from the British missionary- explorer and agent of imperialism David Livingstone: The extension and use of railroads, steamships, telegraphs, break down nationalities and bring people geographically remote into close connection. . . . They make the world one.¹⁶ By contrast, in this volume, science and technology, or more generally knowledge, do not simply provide the material infrastructure that makes transnational connectivity possible. The movement of knowledge embodied in people, ideas, institutions, and things across national borders is itself the object of transnational analysis.

In my previous edited collection of essays on this theme I regretted the rather heavy emphasis placed on both the United States and on the Cold War. The chapters presented here expand our field of vision beyond those in both space and time. They cover the broad sweep of the twentieth century up to the present day. They deal with major global powers like China, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union, as well as the United States, and also with colonial Portugal and the Palestinian authority on the West Bank. They cover high-performance computers, naval and space technologies, scientific fields like agriculture and statistics, and production and marketing systems for coffee and for penicillin. Moving knowledge across borders remains a social accomplishment. However, whereas in the previous volume I emphasized impediments to transnational knowledge flows, in this collection the inclusion of case studies that highlight the sharing of (agricultural) technologies—as distinct from the regulation of military and civil dual-use knowledge and know-how—introduces actors, agendas, and institutions that facilitate border crossings. They also enrich our understanding of borders as institutions by moving beyond nationally constructed legal regimes that inhibit knowledge flows to include international organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and corporate and nonstate actors whose mission is to promote cross-border movement. And they provide material for me to briefly decenter the Global North in the conclusion to this book. Taking knowledge as the object of transnational history has not only thrown new light on the political economy of science and technology in an interconnected, interdependent world of nation-states. Through our collective work in this volume it has also forged personal and intellectual bonds between scholars with otherwise very different research agendas, enabling a truly multidisciplinary approach to a topic of considerable historical and contemporary interest.

Borders and/as Institutions

What is a border? For historian Charles Maier, a border is partially a virtual construction. It is as much a site of the demonstrative extent of power as a real barrier. It regulates an exchange as much as it excludes.¹⁷ Borders are not necessarily aligned with the geographical limits of the nation-state, though they presuppose them. (That said, much of the analysis developed here can apply to any centrally governed geographical space, or territoriality, and not only that identified with the nation-state as such.) Their presence is made manifest, as Maier suggests, by an historically evolving assembly of institutions and policies mobilized by the state, and politically aligned social actors, that have the authority to impede or to facilitate traffic across them. The concept and institution of the border, write sociologists Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, are constituted by multiple (legal and cultural, social and economic) components.¹⁸

National borders are crucial variables in global studies of phenomena like migration but are otherwise often ignored in global history.¹⁹ They are also sidelined in the global history of science and technology.²⁰ Yet this is the body of literature that I draw on extensively in this methodological introduction. The translation between the scales is made by treating the local sites of knowledge production that are major analytical units in global history as being nationally situated and by thinking about the networks through which knowledge circulates from one locality to another as making transnational connections across borders.²¹

As pointed out above, much transnational history, perhaps seduced by the aspirations of globalization to eliminate national borders altogether, is written as if people, ideas, and things circulated freely across them. By contrast, the studies in this volume draw our attention to the importance of national borders as sites of interventions that facilitate or resist transnational movement. Ironically, a mode of writing history that emerged along with the neoliberal, market-driven pursuit of building a borderless world in the late 1980s here reinserts national borders into the heart of the analysis when knowledge in motion is the object. In doing so it also problematizes the epistemic scale and scope of scientific internationalism.

Transnational Connnectivities: Scientific Internationalism

The factors that impede or facilitate the flow of knowledge across national borders depend on the nature of the knowledge that is shared between members of the research community, and on the political relationships between the collaborating states, that demarcate the scope of internationalism in response to changing national and geopolitical circumstances. Generalities are difficult to make. However, the role of scientific internationalism in facilitating transnational connectivities since at least the late nineteenth century needs particular attention.

Scientific internationalism is an ideology, and a practice, that promotes transnational cooperation between researchers who share new knowledge, regardless of national affiliation, in the name of scientific progress.²² It is also readily invoked as an explanation for why knowledge moves across national borders. It has been given additional weight in the age of globalization. Indeed, the scale of its implementation today in international conferences, international journals, and international visitors led James Secord to suggest that modern scientific inquiry seems to many to be the closest thing to a perfectly globalized system that we possess, a system in which it is easy to assume that knowledge simply travels by itself across borders.²³

The transnational approach taken in this book resists a characterization of scientific (and technological) collaboration as a perfectly globalized practice that has abolished national borders. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, science and technology became increasingly associated with the state, both because science needed the state and because the state could draw advantages from science.²⁴ This entanglement has led to ongoing negotiations between national authorities and corporations heavily engaged in research and development (R&D), as well as the academic research community, over the boundaries between knowledge and know-how that could circulate freely and that whose movement could be restricted by a state keen to protect a key resource in a competitive world order. In Cold War America in particular, the epistemic space for the uninhibited transnational flow of knowledge has been the subject of intense negotiations that define the social contract between the government and corporate and academic actors. My enthusiasm for the genre of transnational history performed in this and my previous edited collection is a consequence of the shift in my perspective that was needed when I made detailed studies of these negotiations over the terms of the transnational circulation of knowledge and know-how throughout the Cold War and beyond.²⁵

The Cold War paradigm characterizing American research has bequeathed an administrative distinction between two categories of knowledge: classified (including the special category of restricted data in the nuclear domain) and unclassified.²⁶ It maps onto a dichotomy between knowledge that must be kept secret and remain protected behind a high wall and that cannot be shared transnationally (except under tightly controlled circumstances, as in the Manhattan Project) and knowledge that is open and that can circulate freely across national borders propelled by the ideology of scientific internationalism.²⁷ It also allows for the protection of commercializable knowledge by patents, though unless the patent is a state secret, in a liberal democratic society control over its circulation is vested in individuals, firms, and corporations that produced the knowledge, often in close consultation with the state and with its political and financial support.

This simple open/secret dichotomy needs to be revised fundamentally.²⁸ Perhaps because of an overemphasis on academic science, the bulk of the scholarship on knowledge in motion does not reckon with a gray zone of sensitive, unclassified knowledge that lies in the epistemic space between classified and open. It can be shared transnationally because it is unclassified, but only under strict conditions because it is sensitive, and is deemed a threat to national security.

Anthropologist Joseph Masco has recently drawn our attention to the vast scope of sensitive unclassified knowledge embedded in what he calls the US counterterrorist, regulatory state since the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001.²⁹ Masco’s focus is on the use of this epistemic category by the government as an instrument of domestic social control. The concept of sensitive unclassified knowledge also applies to restricting the scope of knowledge that can move freely across national borders in the name of national security. In fact, concerns that America’s enemies were exploiting the nation’s values of openness and freedom of information to acquire knowledge that could be exploited for nefarious ends have accompanied the national security state from its birth in the aftermath of World War II.³⁰ As early as 1947 the Truman administration was looking for ways to regulate information that was not deemed classifiable but that should not be allowed to circulate freely either. The Export Control Act of 1949 took a major step in this direction. It imposed regulations on the circulation of unclassified dual-use civil and military technology by corporations that included advanced technical data, including industrial ‘know-how’ and strategically important scientific discoveries . . . [that] may have a war potential significance equal to, if not greater than, strategic commodities.³¹ It soon also expanded the definition of the term export to cover sharing that data with foreign nationals within the territory of the United States on the grounds that they could take it back home. Universities protested. The regulation threatened to make it impossible to teach any foreign national in an American university without first acquiring an export license. To protect academic freedom, the vague epistemological distinction between basic science that was openly published and applied science that had practical implications was invoked to resolve a political dilemma.³² The field of knowledge was carved up into three sectors: a domain of fundamental research that is still in force today, a space where knowledge can be shared internationally; a field where secret knowledge is classified and nationalized; and an intermediate gray zone of sensitive unclassified knowledge that is regulated by export controls.³³ Over subsequent decades a labyrinthine legal system embedded in social institutions and practices, and built on an immensely sophisticated and constantly negotiated concept of what sensitive knowledge is and how it travels, has been put in place. It inhibits or regulates transnational flows of sensitive unclassified knowledge (typically dual-use civil and military knowledge) in the name of national and economic security to ensure America’s global scientific and technological preeminence or leadership.

The introduction of this third, gray zone of knowledge has important implications for our understanding of the scope of scientific internationalism that facilitates transnational flows of unclassified knowledge. It implies that, when sensitive unclassified knowledge crosses borders to select countries, the range of scientific internationalism is bounded by regulatory instruments invoked by the national-security state. These impose epistemic limits on the scope of scientific internationalism, and its explanatory value, that have to be established empirically, along with the political scope of international collaboration itself. There are also political limits.

Scientific internationalism is premised on universalism, the epistemological conviction that scientific collaboration and consensus are possible despite national allegiances, and other ideological differences between people, because knowledge of the world is imposed by robust truths —facts—that all can agree on. Eliding the tensions between national competition and international collaboration, which is especially intense when sensitive, unclassified knowledge is in motion, scientific internationalism glosses over the changing alliances between nation-states that enable the ideology to gain purchase and to have material effects or, alternatively, to lose traction when international rivalry tears the collaborative network apart.

In this volume and elsewhere, Jessica Wang insists on the importance of recognizing the specific clusters of political relations at work behind more general allusions to global or international phenomena. She has argued that international science itself should be understood as arising from the heyday of high imperialism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and treated as a contingent response to a particular configuration of global alliances that limited the scope of who was included under the umbrella of international cooperation.³⁴ I discuss her contribution to this volume in more detail below. For the present, the point to retain is that the politico-geographical scope of the international, and so of scientific internationalism, is a constantly (re)negotiated terrain whose scope fluctuates with the alliances that bind, and the centrifugal forces that dissolve, relationships between nation-states in an anarchic world system, and by the field and sensitivity of the knowledge in motion.

Knowledge, Power, and the Mangle of Movement

Knowledge empowers.³⁵ Indeed, ever since the Enlightenment multiple forms of knowledge (of astronomy, of cartography, of botany, of geography) have been yoked to the ambitions of monarchies or national governments to secure legitimacy at home and to project power abroad. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, state and corporate actors became systematically engaged in, and supportive of, scientific research and technological applications to both commercial and military ends. They were central to the first wave of globalization, they animated imperial rivalry, and they transformed manufacturing industry and the conduct of warfare. In 1945 they moved definitively to the heart of the political process in advanced industrialized economies. The ensuing political and ideological Cold War was also a competition for scientific and technological preeminence. Decolonization and economic modernization went hand in glove with faith in science and technology to lift millions out of poverty. Today the production and control of new knowledge is even more critical to the so-called fourth industrial revolution, in which a nation’s capacity in 5G wireless communications, artificial intelligence, robotics, autonomous vehicles, and a range of other critical emerging technologies, and their underlying science, will define its relative position in the global distribution of power in the mid-twenty-first century.³⁶

In the previous section I distinguished between different administrative categories of knowledge. Epistemologically speaking, the term knowledge in this book includes both science and technology. At the most general level it refers to both propositional knowledge (knowing that) and tacit knowledge (knowing how). It does not reduce technology to applied science but takes it to be a form of knowledge, including know-how, that is embedded in material objects and practices that are designed to transform the world around us.³⁷ In the case studies below, as in my previous volume, knowledge emerges as an historically and socially constructed assemblage of ideas, concepts, theories, techniques, practices, facts, information, and data that are appropriated and produced in response to local needs, aspirations, and agendas. It does not necessarily move as a bounded whole. It is best treated as an assemblage that can be disaggregated into different elements that travel on a variety of platforms. These elements can be embedded in commodities and things, like genetically modified seeds, an inertial guidance system, or a semiconductor manufacturing plant. They can be carried in the heads and hands of knowledgeable bodies—as Robert Oppenheimer said, The best way to send information is to wrap it up in a person.³⁸ And they can be inscripted in a material support like articles and preprints, technical reports and blueprints, or on a digital platform.

How does knowledge move through networks connecting distinct geographical spaces? The question long predates the transnational turn. It was posed in a classic paper by George Basalla in 1967 entitled The Spread of Western Science that adopted a three-stage model to explain how the values and institutions of science diffused from the West to the Rest.³⁹ It was addressed by Bruno Latour, who suggested that data acquired at the periphery was stabilized at its source and conveyed as immutable and combinable mobiles to metropolitan centers of calculation, where it was integrated into the existing pool of knowledge.⁴⁰ It has been discussed extensively by historians of science and empire, and of scientific travel, and by scholars of science, technology, and society (STS).⁴¹ The recognition that scientific knowledge is socially constructed and locally produced, and that making it universal and portable requires human intervention, gave the question of how knowledge moves an additional epistemological twist.⁴² The chapters here show that the process whereby knowledge produced in one context moves across borders and is embedded in another varies with the kind of knowledge that it is, as well as its reproducibility and manipulability (that enable its selective appropriation at its new location), and the social and political interests at stake. The accounts of how knowledge and skills are produced locally and disseminated transnationally are so heterogeneous, and each case is so specific, that no single analytic framework can adequately explain how knowledge moves transnationally, and the changes in meaning that such knowledge and skills assume as their context changes. To take the transnational approach is essentially to stop thinking of knowledge circulating freely and immutably from one side of a border to another and to ask how its flow is facilitated, as well as regulated, impeded, reshaped, and reconstituted in new settings.⁴³

There is no intrinsic reason why knowledge should move transnationally.⁴⁴ Sujit Sivasundaram warns us that mobility should not be stressed to the extent that immobility, disjuncture and the workings of the local are forgotten.⁴⁵ Some kinds of knowledge are labeled classified so as to restrict their circulation to a small, authorized group of people and to stop them moving across national borders at all. If knowledge moves, it is because people who build the network have the power and the motivation to set it in motion, to navigate the institutions that impede or facilitate its move across borders, and to creatively adapt it to local needs at the receiving end. The negotiations at border crossings are underpinned by the understanding that knowledge empowers, and that its acquisition and deployment by the other opens new possibilities (and imposes constraints) that can reshape the relationship between the nodes in the network and reconfigure the local settings in which it was produced and used. Knowledge that crosses borders is saturated with power by the very fact that it is set in motion to serve a transformative goal.

The concept of contact zone is widely used by historians of science and empire to characterize a local site of encounter in an asymmetrical field of power. It was coined by Mary Louise Pratt in her analysis of travel writing, in an attempt to invoke the spatial and temporal copresence of subjects previously separated by geographical and historical disjunctures, usually involving conditions of coercion, radical inequality and intractable conflict.⁴⁶ Kapil Raj took these contact zones to be sites of shared learning in his study of the encounter of British imperial actors with Indian literati. He described them as sites for the making of scientific knowledge through co-constructive processes of negotiation between different skilled communities and individuals from both regions, that reconfigured existing knowledges, skilled practices, and subjectivities for both partners.⁴⁷ If contact zones are understood as local sites of spatial and temporal co-presence and of knowledge co-construction, they can be used more generally to describe any face-to-face encounter in which knowledge, tacit skills, and intangible knowledge are transferred between the participants in an asymmetric field. As such, the concept serves as a useful bridge between transnational histories of knowledge in motion and global histories of science and technology.

A transnational history that takes border crossings as key sites of analysis does not readily engage with dyadic colonizer-colonized relationships in which the reach of imperial power is undisturbed by national boundaries. It gains traction rather in colonial and neocolonial projects dedicated to nation building, modernization, and development, in which peripheral entities have acquired a degree of autonomy vis-à-vis metropolitan centers and affirm their national sovereignty in the face of neoimperial and global pressures.⁴⁸ Emily Rosenberg has suggested that within the friction of contact zones between transnationally connected sites there was creativity as well as oppression, coproduction as well as imposition of ‘imperial knowledge.’⁴⁹ This formulation is a useful starting point but it needs to be unpacked. Creativity and coproduction have often marked the transnational flow of knowledge between elites at nodes of the networks (in an asymmetric field of force). By contrast, oppression and imposition frequently characterized the local mobilization of useful knowledge to refashion practices on the ground (at the expense of indigenous knowledge and ways of doing). Knowledge moved across two borders, horizontally between different national centers of power and vertically, top-down, between local social strata. We can separate them analytically; in practice they were often intertwined. The mission to reform, improve, and modernize was embodied in the knowledge that traveled, and facilitated its mobility across borders and into the new ecological niche that was constructed to appropriate it—not without local resistance—at the receiving end.⁵⁰

The sources that historians use, and the absence of subaltern voices in them, complicate immensely the effort to recapture the transformation of traditional forms of knowledge and best practices that are imposed from above, producing a lacuna that turns the transnational network into a sort of iron cage through which no native can break.⁵¹ That cage is sometimes constructed by transnational actors themselves, who devise policies that deliberately make no allowance for engaging with their indigenous targets at all. Matthew Connelly has described how population control experts strived to produce policy programs for needy countries standardized like a Model T Ford. As one critic put it, no need to speak the language, or even to meet a non-Ph.D.-holding native. Visits to the country, if required at all, could be confined to short stays in Western luxury hotels.⁵² Historians concerned with knowledge flows can fruitfully collaborate with anthropologists, postcolonial studies, feminist studies, and STS scholars who have sought to break down the walls of that political and epistemological cage.⁵³

Encountering Materiality: Networks and Travel

Transnational historians focus on networks that cross national borders. Communications technologies constitute the hard backbone of networks.⁵⁴ The physical interconnection of different geographic spaces on the globe has been made possible by increasingly sophisticated technological infrastructures, from steamships and undersea cables to commercial jet aircraft and the internet. Today’s communication technologies, which connect handheld smartphones and personal computers via the internet and the World Wide Web using fiber-optic cables and telecommunications satellites, allow instant real-time communication between individuals on a planetary scale. They have rendered the global an evocative shorthand for claims for the ‘death’ of distance and time.⁵⁵ All national borders have not vanished into thin air, however.⁵⁶ Indeed, historical sociologist Saskia Sassen points out that the national is often one of the key enablers and enactors of the emergent global scale.⁵⁷ Historian Jeffrey Byrne agrees that an ever more observant and pervasive sovereign state might even be the essential facilitator of globalization, rather than its victim.⁵⁸ The national and the global are not mutually exclusive.⁵⁹ On the contrary, the capacity of nation-states (and regions like the European Union) to close their borders to travel in an attempt to contain the spread of COVID-19 affirmed their power to impose limits on the reach of globalization. The national and the global are coproduced, to use Jessica Wang’s felicitous formulation.⁶⁰

Travel through global networks crosses national borders. It is not frictionless. To speak of friction is not only to speak of obstruction: friction also makes movement possible, as in the colloquial phrase the rubber meets the road. Travel involves physical movement that successfully navigates the sticky materiality of practical encounters and that foregrounds the affirmation of national sovereignty and the policing of national borders in transnational narratives.⁶¹ At the mundane, everyday level, multiple obstacles—insufficient funds, late buses, security searches, and informal lines of segregation—disrupt it, as Anna Tsing reminds us.⁶² Passport and visa restrictions, complemented by export controls, are invoked at borders that are policed by immigration and customs officials who affirm a state’s sovereignty within its territorial limits. They were particularly important as instruments of control and surveillance by the US national security state in the early Cold War, when they were used to target the movements of knowledgeable bodies, as Mario Daniels calls them.⁶³ Nonhuman actors like the environment can also constrain movement and shape trajectories of travel, especially in regions of the globe that lack a sophisticated communications infrastructure. Gisela Mateos and Edna Suárez-Díaz have described the multiple obstacles (including environmental) faced by a truck driver tasked with transporting a mobile radioisotope exhibition through a number of countries in Latin America.⁶⁴ The truck was built at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee with the US federal highway system in mind. It was totally ill-adapted to the winding, hilly, narrow roads of some host countries, and was too wide to be loaded as cargo on local trains. The powerful earthquake in Valdivia, Chile, in 1960, measuring 9.5, made access to the country physically impossible. Travel during the globalization era of the early twentieth century was equally perilous. In 1915 David Fullaway, an American entomologist working in Hawai‘i, took a ten-month ocean voyage in search of parasites that would kill melon flies on the islands. His journey was facilitated by the interimperial links established between the botanic stations that he visited in Java, India, and the Philippines and the local knowledge of government officials that he could tap into. It was disrupted by his detention for four days by the authorities in Dhanushkodi in India, by another delay in Colombo in British Ceylon, by poor-quality coal that slowed his steamship’s voyage to Singapore, and by a typhoon from the Philippines that swept across his path on his way home.⁶⁵ His need to protect his specimens led him to prefer to travel in a rugged transport ship rather than an ocean liner. It avoided northerly ports of call where lower temperatures would threaten his specimens and it was equipped with cabins that were more suited to handling parasites en route.⁶⁶

Microstudies of the friction and resistance that accompany travel are an essential dimension of transnational histories that are concerned not only with why but also with how knowledge moves through networks. They do not simply remind us that knowledge does not circulate freely. Methodologically they oblige an engagement with the nation-state as transnational actor, with the negotiated boundary between national allegiance and scientific internationalism, and with the coproduction of national border-making/-suppressing institutions and the global networks that they disrupt/facilitate. They also cast light on global inequalities that leave their mark on the construction and maintenance of transnational networks and the epistemic communities of experts that do not have access to the resources of the Global North. I address this issue at greater length in the Conclusion.

The Specificity of This Volume and a Summary of the Chapters

This volume shares with other forms of transnational history a conviction that national borders are porous. It decouples these borders from geographical territorial boundaries and understands them as performed by institutions that impede or facilitate the movement of knowledge across them. It resists any formulation that suggests that knowledge moves by itself and seeks instead to excavate the sites of friction knowledge encounters on its journey through a network.⁶⁷ Where it differs from other genres of transnational history is in taking knowledge itself, embodied in people, ideas, and things, and in knowledge-based practices, as well as tacit knowledge and know-how, as its object of analysis, asking not only how and why scientific and technological knowledge move across borders, but what transnational transactions take place at borders. In the remainder of this introduction I briefly describe the individual chapters in this book, which cover many scientific and technological fields, and a diversity of national constellations, over a century of transnational transactions. They amply demonstrate the new vistas opened up for historians of many stripes, and for historians of science and technology in particular, who make this methodological choice.

The chapters are divided into two main groups. Those in Part I deal with the transnational circulation of military or civil-military dual-use knowledge and technologies whose flow is regulated by nation-states in the name of national security or national economic competiveness in the Global North. Those in Part II deal with the transnational circulation of agricultural things, knowledge, and know-how and the factors that foster their movement across national borders between the Global North and the Global South. They are bookended by a survey by Jessica Wang, who historicizes the collegial transnational behavior expressed in scientific internationalism, and by a Conclusion, in which I touch on some of the political and intellectual aspects of decentering the Global North in several of the chapters.

Wang (chapter 1) announces her aim as being to to situate the rise of international science as both ideology and practice within the history of the international system as a whole. To that end, she traces the codependency of scientific nationalism and internationalism from the early modern period up to the eve of World War I. Wang emphasizes that, prior to 1815, rivalry between empires for control over information (especially cartographic) and to monopolize commercially valuable materials (notably botanical) put a premium on secrecy and the use of bureaucratic and legal instruments to regulate the circulation of knowledge that had often been acquired by theft from competitors or by pillage of indigenous resources. Denial coexisted with cooperation in specific situations that enhanced state power, while also fostering the cosmopolitan internationalism of the Republic of Letters, whose members corresponded more or less freely in a parallel denationalized space. These transnational collaborative activities gained momentum after the Congress of Vienna, which helped stabilize a balance of power between imperial rivals and gradually defused tensions between them. Communications revolutions—steam-powered transport on land and on sea, and the telegraph—paved the way to more intimate face-to-face interactions and increased interdependence and interimperial collaboration. State-sponsored networks were put in place to acquire accurate data on the oceans, which enhanced the projection of imperial power for seafaring nations and facilitated international commerce. Spurred on by what Helen Tilley describes as Europe’s pursuit of global colonialism, international scientific conferences proliferated and new permanent international committees, some of them staffed by civil servants, were established from the latter half of the nineteenth century.⁶⁸ Many of these bodies brought together scientists to set regulatory standards in nomenclature and measurement that were essential to sharing knowledge in collaborative ventures as well as in global trade. Wang concludes that the scientific internationalism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries evolved thanks to progressive and egalitarian commitments to the universality of knowledge and its service to the common good, along with the creation of transnational epistemic communities and their professionalization. Scientific internationalism also expressed a pragmatic realm of interstate practice, designed for an era of increasingly globalized and interdependent commercial relations.⁶⁹

Part I begins with chapter 2, in which Katherine Epstein describes the efforts made by the British Admiralty to regulate the flow of knowledge produced by several inventors in the first two decades of the twentieth century across an internal border between the public and private sectors, from where it could more easily flow abroad, and an external border between Britain and foreign nations. She focuses on three important inventions that secured the technological advantage of the Royal Navy’s onboard weaponry: a gunnery-targeting system, a torpedo propulsion system, and a gyrotechnology that served as master gun sight when situated high on the ship to maximize visibility. The new knowledge that could be controlled took several forms—it could be encoded in documents, embodied in individual inventors, or embedded in devices—leading to disputes over what could and should be regulated. The navy wanted to secure rights to both present and future patents, and to protect them with secrecy, arguing that upgrades and improvements drew on knowledge acquired at the navy’s expense, for instance in sea trials. Inventors, for their part, were wary of granting the navy a monopoly on their discoveries and could threaten to sell their inventions to a foreign power. In an effort to ensure that the knowledge remained a national asset under its control, the navy developed two foundational legal technologies in peacetime, decades before the United States: secret patents and the Official Secrets Act. If these legal instruments failed to ensure control, the navy resorted to other means, like smearing an inventor’s name or striking him off the list of government contractors. These measures were anything but the routine bureaucratic procedures that were put in place after World War II. The Admiralty discussed particular arrangements with each inventor as it thought fit, choosing whatever mix of carrots and sticks it deemed necessary to maintain its control over his knowledge. This involved an ongoing process of negotiation over the terms of the agreement between multiple stakeholders—including a sometimes recalcitrant Treasury that was responsible for compensating inventors financially.

In chapter 3, Michael Falcone describes the first halting steps taken by American officials during World War II to construct the bureaucratic apparatus needed to protect and exploit new knowledge of penicillin shared with them by British researchers. While penicillin has already been widely studied by historians, the chapter investigates in detail a somewhat ignored aspect of its biography, namely, the ways that transnational technology flows led the US government to construct a knowledge regime that served the interests of both American capitalism and American hegemony . . . and the transition from Pax Britannica to Pax Americana. Falcone quotes Vannevar Bush, head of the wartime Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), as saying in 1945 that American and British scientists have worked so closely together that it will be utterly impossible, and a matter of no vital interest, to attempt to assign many explicit accomplishments to one or the other. In fact, the OSRD played a major role in ensuring that the transnational flow of knowledge from Britain to America was almost exclusively one-way, infuriating British researchers, pharmaceutical companies, and the government, who were expecting reciprocity. To incite skeptical American companies to invest in the production of an unknown new drug, Bush and his close collaborators, including MIT president Karl Compton, allowed the corporations to control most penicillin-related intellectual property (IP) and helped them gain near exclusive access to global markets. The American government sacrificed the harmony of the international US-UK political and military alliance to encourage and then to protect its domestic industry, and pursued commercial avenues for strategic penicillin sales, even if it meant driving a wedge between London and its crumbling empire. As war turned to peace, it also opened new markets to US corporations in the name of public health, using penicillin as a political instrument to further the implementation of the Marshall Plan and to consolidate American global hegemony in the postwar period.

Mario Daniels’s study of the contested sales of high-performance computers (HPCs) to the Soviet Union in the early days of détente (chapter 4) throws entirely new light on the creative development of instruments by allied governments to regulate the circulation of sensitive technology and knowledge. Trade in HPCs to the Soviet bloc was strictly curtailed by export controls and had to be agreed to by the members of CoCom, the allied Coordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls. The Soviets wanted to