I’m afraid I’ve neglected this website during spring, but here’s an update on what has been my favorite reserach topic for the past couple of months: Swedish resource colonialism in Turkey. It all started some time ago when my PhD student Hanna Vikström brought to my attention the intriguing question of how the Swedish steel industry has historically gone about securing access to critical alloying metals. Swedish steel has long been the subject of national pride, but the focus in terms of the material basis for this industry has, in the existing literature, almost always been on domestically abundant iron ore, charcoal, and waterpower. But what about a critical input such as chromium, which in the 1920s started to used in the production of stainless steel? Chromium ore was not available domestically.
To answer this question Hanna and I together with my colleague Dag Avango took the train to Sandviken, home to the famous steel company with the same name. Helped by the municipality’s excellent archivarian we started to track down one of the craziest chapters in Sweden’s natural resource history. The short version reads something like this: In 1928 the head of the Swedish legation in Istanbul, Gustaf Wallenberg, contacted Sandviken and other Swedish steel companies pointing to the excellent opportunities regarding investments in chromium ore mining in Anatolia. A year later a consortium of steel companies joined forces with a Swedish citizen of Turkish origin, Orhan Brandt, in forming a mining company that quickly seized control over a vast number of chromium ore deposits. Local farmers and their ox carts were hired to bring thousands of tons of chromium ore to the railway and thence to the port of Derince for further shipment to Sweden. The venture seemed on its way to become the world’s largest chromium ore exporter, supplying not only the Swedish steel industry but much of the world market as well. But then the steel companies, realizing that they were about the were about to assume leadership in a segment of global resource colonialism, stepped back. Or would they have acted differently if chromium ore prices had not dropped by 40% in conneciton with the Great Depression?
In any case the whole thing ended in disaster: Brandt and a number of other people involved in the project ended up in court and some were jailed. “Thanks God that I have no responsibility in this,” exclaimed Wallenberg’s successor Boheman in 1935. But during the time the dream lasted, the chromium affair actually contributed in a highly significant way to strengthening Swedish-Turkish political relations and to opening up Turkey as an export market for Swedish goods – including our excellent stainless steel.
Hanna is now taking the lead in writing up this story, which she intends to present at the upcoming Tensions of Europe conference in Stockholm, to be held in September.
In January the University of Zürich arranged a workshop on the seemingly narrow theme of the Soviet Union’s energy history: Oil, Gas and Pipelines: New Perspectives on the Role of Soviet Energy during the Cold War. I presented some work based on my book, Red Gas, and above all I enjoyed the presentations and ideas brought forward by other historians interested in the topic of Soviet-era energy issues. I was thrilled to learn that a significant number of research projects are currently being carried out in which academics from several countries enthusiastically dig into the rich archival material that is available in the archives of Russia and other ex-Soviet republics.
The political economy of Soviet energy in its national and international context was clearly a central discussion theme during the conference, whereby it became clear that Soviet, East European, and West European energy developments must be analyzed and understood as a whole. The conference papers also contributed in an excellent way to the analysis of the intriguing dialectics between East-West cooperation in the energy field and competition in the geopolitical arena.
Less represented were the material and technological dimensions. This surprised me, since it is obvious to everyone that nothing can happen in the field of oil and gas without science and technology – from the geology of oil and gas exploration to the complex metallurgical challenges for the steel industry in their attempts to produce large-diameter gas pipes for use in harsh Arctic environments. Another issue that remains to be dealt with is how Soviet energy can best be theorized.
It remains to be seen what the community of 25-30 workshop participants can come up with in terms of further research on Soviet energy during the next couple of years.
I’m back in Stockholm after a brief visit to San Antonio, Texas, which hosted this year’s annual convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES). This is a big conference featuring some 1,500 participants and 30 parallel sessions in its program (which is big at least compared to those with which I’m more familiar, like the Society for the History of Technology). And like all proud US-based academic associations it also awards a number of prizes in connection with its convention.
Unexpectedly, my book Red Gas: Russia and the Origins of European Energy Dependence was named the winner of this year’s Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize, which is awarded by ASEEES for the best monograph dealing with “the international relations, foreign policy, or foreign-policy decision-making of any of the states of the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe.” I received the prize at a ceremony last Saturday evening at San Antonio’s Marriott Rivercenter Hotel. Noting that ASEEES is an “area studies” association, I view the prize as a recognition of my argument that the history of technology may contribute in a fruitful way to the study of regional and world history and international relations more generally, and that in-depth historical studies can shed new light on controversial and burning issues in current affairs.
Read more about Red Gas here!
I’m back in Stockholm after ten days in Baku, Azerbaijan’s fascinating capital city and probably the richest spot in the Caucasian region. To the north is wartorn Chechnya, to the south Iran and Iraq, where the Islamic State is advancing, but Azerbaijan, just like Armenia and Georgia, sees its future linked to Europe and, by way of possible oil and gas flows, to Central Asia. Baku was once an oil center of far-reaching importance, with a share of some of some 50% of total world production. The key people who made this happen were Swedes: Ludvig and Robert Nobel, brothers of the more famous Alfred Nobel, came here in the 1870s, invented new, superior methods for refining and transporting oil, and soon conquered the Russian and large parts of the world market. Their son Emmanuel later on took on what by then had become a vast industrial empire, and earned a reputation as the richest man in Europe.
I went to the National Archives of Azerbaijan to find out more about this unusual Swedish foreign history, which is also crucial to understanding Azerbaijan’s, Russia’s, and the Soviet Union’s industrial history. The material looks very fine, is in good shape, and would clearly make it possible to write not only one or a few articles, but a couple of books as well – if one could find the time to do that. The collections of the Nobel Brothers Company (Branobel) are clearly underutilized. The only scholar who has so far actually used them in earnest is Parvan Ahanchi of Azerbaijan’s National Academy of Sciences, who, apart from being an expert on the archive’s Branobel collections, has written several articles and books about the Swedish-owned company’s story in Russian language. I was lucky to meet Parvin while in Baku, learn from her experience, and discuss possibilities for future cooperation.
I also paid a visit to the recently restored Villa Petrolea, which served as Branobel’s Baku headquarters in the old times and where I was generously received by the Baku Nobel Heritage Fund’s Chairman Tugril Bagirov, a professor of political science, UN energy expert, and oil businessman with far-reaching philantropic ambitions and historical interests.
What makes Baku so fascinating today, however, is the way in which this historical oil capital has experienced a second oil boom after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Industrial oil producers have done their best to quickly exploit the region’s oil for about a century and half, but in the outskirts of Baku you can still marvel at whole forests of active oil pumps, oftentimes small ones awkwardly placed in backyards and other unexpected places. And in the Caspian Shipyard the enormous towers of offshore drilling platforms compete with minarets and skyscrapers for dominance in the skyline. When will the age of oil finally come to an end?
I’m trying to catch up here with recent events, and one of the most important is certainly the unexpected news that our book series Making Europe: Technology and Transformations, 1850-2000 (6 books, published 2013-2015) was recently named the winner of the Freeman Award by the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST). On behalf of the Making Europe team, series editor Johan Schot received the award at the EASST conference held in Torun, Poland, in late September. Thirteen authors have contributed to the Making Europe book series. Together with Arne Kaijser and Erik van der Vleuten I have written the volume Europe’s Infrastructure Transition: Economy, War, Nature (to be published in early 2015).
The Freeman Award is given in recognition of a publication that reflects a significant collective contribution to the interaction of science and technology studies with the study of innovation. The prize is awarded by EASST in honour of Chris Freeman, who passed away a few years ago. I personally never got the chance to meet Freeman, but I recall that he actually reviewed my book The Dynamics of Innovation in Eastern Europe in connection with its publication in 2005. I also took inspiration from much of his work on innovation in historical perspective, and used it in my teaching.
Read more about the Making Europe project here!
It comes to my mind that I haven’t reported here about two conferences I participated in this past summer, both of which had a “world history” or “global history” flair: the World Congress of Environmental History, held in Portugal in early July, and the US-based World History Association’s annual meeting, organized in Costa Rica a week later.
In Portugal I organized, together with Swedish and Swiss colleagues, a session on global resource colonialism from a small-country perspective. This related to a VR-funded project that I have written about here earlier. Both Sweden and Switzerland, it turns out, have played much more significant roles in colonial-style resource extraction in different parts of the world since the onset of the industrial age – and they continue to do so today. Lea Haller from Switzerland provided an intriguing analysis of her country’s national style in this respect, which shows both similarities and differences with the Swedish style. Publications will follow. As for the Swedish case, my colleague from KTH, David Nilsson, presented the overall scope of our project, whereas I attempted to scrutinize the intimate links between Sweden’s foreign natural resource interests and key changes in the country’s evolving foreign policy from the 1870s (with political “neutrality” as a key concept). We were fortunate to have Corey Ross from Birmingham as session chair and Paul Warde from the University of East Anglia as commentator.
In Costa Rica I presented our colonial project as a whole and was happily surprised to have several leading environmental historians in the audience, including Joachim Radkau, whose work I have long admired (and even written about both once and twice in the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet), and John McNeill, who had come to Costa Rica partly to pick a prize awarded by the World History Association. The intellectual program of the conference turned out to be quite rewarding, including a meeting with Lincoln Paine, author of the much-publicized Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World, and some very thought-provoking discussions on the concept of “Big History” (which takes the Big Bang as the point of departure for history-writing). But why is the World History Association such a small organization? The atmosphere at the annual meeting was surprisingly intimate. I dare not speculate about the likely struggles and intrigues, of which I know nothing, when it comes to competing communities in this academic field. Yet I might well be going to the next WHA meeting.
After a year and a half in China, I’m finally back in Sweden. Looking back upon this time, I must say that it has been a fascinating experience to be part of a Chinese academic environment and to build cooperation with Chinese historians of science, technology and environment. Although originally I arrived in China merely for family reasons, my interaction with Chinese colleagues has been so inspiring that I now seem to have embarked on an academic path that, for the foreseeable future, will involve China as a major region of importance in my teaching and research. In particular, I’m increasingly widening my previous experience of studying the relations between Western Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, and Russia to include the Far East as well. In my last internal seminar presentation at the Institute for the History of Natural Sciences (IHNS) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, which has served as my academic home during this academic year, I presented some of my thoughts so far on this more inclusive definition of “East-West relations.” In my presentation and in a draft journal article on the same subject that I aim to submit later this year, I develop the argument that the notions of “East” and “West” had better be analyzed as three rather than two geographical regions, and that, as far as the history of technology is concerned, there are three research traditions which would need to communicate with each other: (1) studies of East-West transnational “large technical systems”; (2) studies of East-West technology transfer; and (3) comparative studies of technological levels and technological styles in East and West.
In connection with the seminar, IHNS Director Professor Zhang Baichun handed over a beautiful certificate as proof of my serving as “Young International Scientist” at the institute during the 2013-2014 academic year (the definition of “young” often being quite flexible in the academic world!). I’m grateful for having had this opportunity, and I will look back upon this time with many pleasant memories.
Our new edited volume, “The Making of Europe’s Critical Infrastructure: Common Connections and Shared Vulnerabilities“, was recently published, see the publisher’s website. It’s the main outcome of a major European project, Europe Goes Critical: The Emergence and Governance of Transnational European Infrastructures (EUROCRIT), which started in 2007 and now comes to its end. EUROCRIT was in turn part of the ESF programme Inventing Europe. The book features some intriguing stories not only from Western Europe, but also from less well-known (in the history of science, technology and environment) European lands such as Bulgaria, Greece, and the European-Asian borderlands in Russia. A major theme is East-West relations in infrastructures, especially energy systems. On a more theoretical level, we explore in this volume the connections between the history of large technical systems and the more STS-oriented concepts of risk and vulnerability. Contributors, apart from myself, include Anique Hommels, Arne Kaijser, Erik van der Vleuten, Anna Åberg, Vincent Lagendijk, Karl-Erik Michelsen, Ivan Tchalakov, Tihomir Mitev, Ivaylo Hristov, Aristotle Tympas, Stathis Arapostathis, Katerina Vlantoni, Yiannis Garyfallos, Lars Heide, Lars Thue, and Eefje Cleophas – representing eight research groups in seven countries.
This week I have spent in South Korea visiting several universities and research institutes. In Seoul I had agreed with historian of science Sungook Hong at Seoul National University to give a seminar on “The ‘Nuclear Renaissance’ in Historical Perspective” (an updated verison of a talk with the same title that I gave last spring in Taipei) at SNU’s Program in History and Philosophy of Science. The program is very dynamic and Sungook (who is also very active in the US-centered Society for the History of Technology) and his colleagues have impressive track records of publishing their research with leading English-language journals and presses (in marked contrast to the Chinese academic tradition in my field, see my latest post!). A problem, however, seems to be that the scholars in the program are interlinked only through the PHPS program, while having their offices in a variety of different schools (not unlike the Taiwanese STS/history of science scholars at National Taiwan University).
I was also happy to meet in Seoul my old friend Seong-Jun Kim, a graduate from Sungook’s program and a specialist on South Korea’s early nuclear energy history. He is now a curator at the newly established National Museum of Korean Contemporary History, a career move that has placed him at the center of bitter controversies over conflicting interpretations of Korea’s twentieth-century history. As a state museum his institution enjoys generous financial support from the government, which, however, would also like to take an influence on the museum’s displays. Academic historians have fiercely criticized the museum ever since it opened last year.
An institution of a totally different kind is the nominally independent Korean Institute of Energy Economics (KEEI). Located in one of Seoul’s large satellite cities, it provides the government and a few other “customers” with research reports on present-day energy trends. One of their divisions, led by Yongduk Pak, deals specifically with international cooperation in the energy field. At a meeting at the institute that I found extremely rewarding, I presented some of my research on the history of international European energy systems. This produced a remarkably lively discussion on the prospects for analogous cross-border electricity and natural gas interconnections in the East Asian region. South Korea is centrally placed here, but the Cold War with North Korea and the tense relations between China and Japan make Pak and his colleagues pessimistic, at least for the moment, about the possible creation of pan-East Asian energy grids.
Apart from Seoul, the much smaller city of Daejeon, 150 km to the south, also enjoys the reputation of a research mecca. Several leading universities are located there, including the young Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), sometimes dubbed “South Korea’s MIT”, set up in 1990. Even younger is KAIST’s Graduate School of Science and Technology Policy, which exists only since 2004. I visited the school lecturing on the history of nuclear power and enjoying a few hours of truly inspiring informal conversations with several of the school’s faculty and doctoral students. It will be interesting to see how the school develops in the future.
Apart from its universities, Daejeon is home to a number of government research institutes, and I was excited about getting the opportunity to visit and lecture at the legendary Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute (KAERI). It’s a huge nuclear research complex where all sorts of novel reactor and nuclear fuel technologies are researched and experimented with. For a European historian of technology, visiting KAERI is almost like experiencing the golden era of atomic energy research in the 1950s and 1960s. While taking quite a critical stance to some of KAERI’s ongoing efforts, I was grateful for nuclear policy research director Maeng-Ho Yang’s generous invitation, which allowed me to discuss trends in spent nuclear fuel management directly with KAERI’s experts in this field – an invaluable experience.
From the beginning of this academic year, I am a visiting scholar in the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute for the History of Natural Sciences in Beijing. Although I originally arrived in Beijing merely for family reasons, not really for academic purposes, the institute has been extremely kind to me, inviting me as a guest researcher despite my near-total lack of knowledge in the field Chinese history of science and technology, and with only rudimentary Chinese language skills.
The institute probably constitutes the largest academic environment of its kind in the world, with a hundred or so active researchers. Ironically, however, it is by far the smallest institute in the Academy of Science’s cluster in Zhongguancun in northwestern Beijing – being outnumbered by most measures by a range of other institutes in fields such as mathematics and physics. It is a great place to be and an ideal starting point for exploring the Chinese academic environment and traditions in the history of science and technology.
Subjects researched at the institute include seemingly everything, ranging from developments dating back thousands of years to burning present-day science and technology policy issues. Its emphasis is, unsurprisingly, on China’s own, rich history, but there is also a dynamic research group studying Western developments. There is a great interest both on East-West comparative aspects and on technology transfer between East and West. To my surprise several researchers even have an explicit interest in China’s relations with my own country, Sweden. Unfortunately, however, Western scholars rarely get to know about research results generated in Beijing, since the institute’s researchers publish their findings almost exclusively in Chinese. This obviously prevents Western-Chinese interaction in the history of science and technology from attaining the dynamics that it deserves.
Some time ago I was also given the opportunity to present some of my own research at the institute’s seminar, and it struck me how valuable it is have to think through the relevance and importance of one’s own findings on European history of technology to a Chinese academic audience! I have the feeling that my time in China will influence my overall thinking in more ways than I initially had expected.
Per Högselius 