ABSTRACT The Republic of Plants network researches the histories of agricultural technologies through the conceptual framework of cropscape, a method that breaks open boundaries of periodization and place, direction of historical flow and any limitations on who and what matters in global historical processes. Cropscape denotes the ever-mutating assemblages of non-humans and humans, material, social, and symbolic elements, within which a particular crop in a particular place and time flourishes or fails. Authors choose which elements to include, playing with historical scales and creating narratives to challenge received teleologies of global history: that production and cultivation (methods, products, markets) have grown from small to large scale, from local to global, from pre-modern to modern behavior and interests, from underdevelopment to development; that human history has resulted in the triumph of the West over the Rest, while the Global North has superseded the South, and causes of human history can still be found in the metropole rather than the periphery. Republic of Plants authors investigate well-known crops such as sugar but also entries like millets, milpas, and pineapples. They invite readers into a worldwide, cross-disciplinary conversation among the history of technology and agriculture, economic development and history of capitalism, and global history literatures.

ABSTRACT Our studies of invention are dominated by a narrative that sees independent inventors replaced as the source of technical novelty by corporate research labs. Born of practical considerations, this narrative has become so normative that some studies are hemmed in by it without their authors even being aware of it. Refusal to update the old concept of invention creates a gap between what we tell students about how invention happened and what our research says. Indeed, young historians are so estranged by the old narrative that they don’t even frame their work as a contribution to the study of invention. The dominant invention narrative reproduces several problematic focuses of the field: the individual, particular American industries in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a particular understanding of what institutions make important contributions to technology, and what technology is. By updating the narrative, we stand to enrich a deeply embedded and alienating narrative that shapes where and how we look for technical change.

ABSTRACT Vazhakulam, a small town in the south Indian state of Kerala, is popularly known as ‘Pineapple City’. The name reflects its pineapple-based economy that got the name, driven by the large-scale cultivation of ‘Vazhakulam pineapple’, a distinct cultivar grown in that region. This article elaborates how the perpetuation of pineapple and the establishment of a pineapple processing factory by the European Union in this region were closely linked to the centuries-old Indo-European relationship. It explores the ethnographical anecdotes linking the fruit (pineapple) and the factory (processing plant) with the faith (Catholicism). By trying to engage with the complex settings that shaped the making of the ‘Pineapple City’, and by following the actors across time and space with the help of Actor-Network Theory, this article narrates how this introduced crop, along with multiple human and non-human actors, altered the landscape in the region into a pineapple-based cropscape and reconfigured existing networks during this transition.

ABSTRACT The landscape of the ancient Maya flourished with investment in the dynamic resources of tropical Maya forest of lowland Mesoamerica. Unfamiliar to the Western eye, Maya traditions were literally overlooked at the time of the brutal conquest and have been degraded as primitive and destructive since. Far from simple, this sophisticated system is one of keen observation of nature and the structuring of human needs in tune with the nature of the forested landscape. At the crux of the problem of understanding the nature of the Maya forest is the imposition of the Eurocentric view without regard for the Indigenous knowledge. The Maya cultivated nature, embedding their needs by observing nature, demonstrating a mastery of nature and cultivating the biological capital as a product of their culture. The result is a landscape with cycles from productive poly-cultivated fields and varied regenerative and marure forest habitats that sustained everyday life.

ABSTRACT This essay examines the intertwined histories of Native Hawaiian and Euro-American cropscapes of sugarcane within the broader history of the Hawaiian sugar industry. Long before European contact, Native Hawaiians cultivated sugarcane in a complex agricultural system that sustained ecological and social relationships. Following Captain Cook’s 1778 arrival, Euro-American interest in sugar transformed cane into a potential commodity, fueling the growth of plantations that reconfigured Hawaiian landscapes, labor, and sovereignty. Drawing on oral traditions and Hawaiian-language newspapers, this study highlights both continuity and rupture: while plantation monoculture reshaped the islands, Native Hawaiians engaged with sugar on their own terms – resisting exploitative labor, experimenting with independent cultivation and forging partnerships with foreign planters. By foregrounding Native agency, the essay argues that Hawaiʻi’s sugar industry was not solely a colonial transplant but a contested cropscape where indigenous knowledge, ecology, and politics converged.

ABSTRACT Plantation economy theorists argue that sugar plantations violently reconstituted societies and environments in the West Indies. What is less clear, however, is how humans and nonhumans adopted and adapted sugar to meet their own needs, values and systems of meaning-making, under the constraints of the plantation system and according to the affordances of land, soil, water and crop. In this paper, we utilise the cropscape method to explore how Trinidadian sugarcane became domesticated by humans and nonhumans in post-emancipation Trinidad. We present oral history research collected from Indian Trinidadians from 2009 to 2016 to provide an alternative framing to global sugar histories presented by Sidney Mintz and others. The paper reveals unique assemblages of people, practices, knowledges, crops and environments that capture Indian Trinidadian experiences of sugar in Trinidad

ABSTRACT Urban contexts and town-based groups have long been associated with creativity, innovativeness, and the dissemination of technical know-how. Studies dealing with early modern European towns have recently added important findings on this subject, examining practices of work and knowledge circulation that contributed to improvements in the spheres of craftwork and manufacturing well before the onset of industrialisation. This article builds on such research contributions, and it does so by exploring developments at the fringes of a pre-industrial European economy, namely in Stockholm, Sweden, during the period c. 1750–1820. Using a large collection of sources from the Swedish state archives, and zooming in on the important metalworking sector, it illuminates transnational itineraries as well as localised activities that made the capital into a key node in the Swedish – and indeed European – metal trades. Integrating a large number of working individuals and knowledge-making practices into the discussion, moreover, it provides a good basis for nuancing traditional assumptions of a long stagnation in the Swedish capital during the end of the early modern era.

ABSTRACT This article traces the origins of critical infrastructure protection by examining the history of the Technische Nothilfe (TN), Germany’s leading technical emergency service, between 1919 and 1963. The TN was established as a strikebreaking force at the end of World War One. It soon found a key area of occupation in disaster response. The organization became central for maintaining flows of energy, goods, information, and people. Emergency maintainers like the TN played an overlooked role in the history of infrastructure. My analysis of this organization, which evolved into a large technological system, provides insights into the politics of critical infrastructure protection and repair. I show how the TN served as an interlocutor in the co-production of state and technology. During the Weimar Republic, the engineer-led organization enabled anti-socialist and militarized visions of a ‘well-ordered’ Germany. Throughout the Nazi era, it supported the colonization of vast regions of Europe by maintaining, repairing, and extending infrastructure. In post-war Germany, strict federal regulations and public critique led to a more communal interpretation of criticality. The article reveals that notions of criticality originate from technocratic thought, target the survival of the state, and do not contain an inherent logic toward safeguarding democratic government.

ABSTRACT Based on archival materials from Guangzhou, Beijing, Xi’an and Shanghai ranging from technical manuals and architectural drawings to published memoirs, this article contributes to existing literature on China’s subtropical modern architecture by offering a nuanced techno-political narrative. Instead of attributing the development of subtropical architecture merely to the genius of certain individuals, it attends to a broader network of state-run institutions in which not only architects, but also meteorologists, sanitary experts, technocratic Party cadres and Soviet ventilating engineers were all active mediators of transnational flows of resources and expertise in the socialist reconstruction and Cold War. Drawing on theories of techno-politics and critical temperature studies, it develops the notion of ‘thermal regimes’ to capture the interdependence between the use of thermal technologies and the exercise of socio-political power. Through case studies of Guangzhou Ramie Textile Factory (1956–8) and Panyu People’s Commune (1958–60), it argues that despite the Leftist radicalism, China’s subtropical architectural production continued to be informed by ‘thermal technocracy’ in pursuit of rationalization and efficiency. It reveals how the globally circulated climatic knowledge and other expertise transcending Cold-War rivalries were driven by the state’s endless appetite for industrial modernity towards the technocratic control of climatic parameters and human labor.

ABSTRACT In 1928, botanist environmentalist Nishimura Makoto created Gakutensoku, a humanoid robot at odds with the Euro-American conceptualisation of humanoid robots as machine slaves and the modern discourse of technology as civilisational departure from nature. Nishimura’s scientific observations of the connectivities between plants, animals, algae, and microorganisms shaped the design and semiotic of Gakutensoku in line with a worldview that everything in the universe is interconnected through mutual aid and symbiosis. I describe this epistemology as ‘multispecies symbiotic cosmos’ to capture the key ideas forming Gakutensoku’s multiracial, multigender, stateless design: symbiosis, mutual aid, symbiogenesis, transnational relations, and indigeneity. Gakutensoku challenged state discourse of progress and evolution through (technological) competition for survival justifying militarism, colonialism, and racism. In contrast with social Darwinism, it conveyed a symbiotic trajectory for technological progress that benefits the earth and future artificial humans. Gakutensoku is symptomatic of a larger context in which scientists against the state politics and Western modernity attempted to redefine the world through science. Gakutensoku thus offers a unique understanding of ‘humanoid robot’ and techno-human relations in the modern and contemporary robotics and the intellectual history of twentieth-century Japan, opening up the idea and narrative of humanoid robots and technology to new understandings and interpretations.