ABSTRACT Oil is deeply entangled with art. Through their art, contemporary artists play key roles in community organizing and social justice activism in response to the environmental effects of oil. Systematically considering artworks engaged with science and technology has the potential to add new dimensions to STS studies, including on studies of oil. Ethnographic and aesthetic work concerning the sociotechnical systems around petroleum and petrochemicals is becoming increasingly prominent. In this paper, I adopt tools from the emerging interdiscipline of Art, Science, and Technology Studies (ASTS), which takes the art-science phenomenon as its principal subject, for a close reading of artwork exploring the influence of the petrochemical industry on the region known as ‘Cancer Alley’ in Louisiana. Such science and technology-engaged artworks have the potential to reveal the cultural, social and political meanings of subjects like oil and are useful to ASTS scholars not only as examples for analysis but as potential tools of analysis.

ABSTRACT This article explores the other side of hegemony – a concept central to John Krige’s work on co-production and transnational history. Focusing on the case of Gerald Bull, university professor-turned-weapons dealer, it examines how individuals working on the edges of Cold War empires cobbled together practices, objects, and geographies that evaded and exploited the power of nation-states. Tracing those concerns from North America to Barbados and Iraq, the article suggests how we might avoid reproducing (or producing anew) the hegemonies we study.

ABSTRACT Export controls, such as through the lists of embargoed goods drawn up by the Co-ordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) from the 1950s until the 1980s, were a means by which the West sought to put economic and strategic pressures on the communist East. This paper explores a tension within the historiography of Cold War export controls provoked by the recent scholarship of Mario Daniels and John Krige, who place knowledge control as a central aim, by focusing on the perspective of the UK to the US-led system. The paper argues that British companies, civil servants and politicians worked within the export control system established by the United States but strained against its restrictions on trade; that the UK nevertheless had to balance a host of other demands, including encouraging trade, preservation of sterling, regulation of transborder movement of goods, widely understood; and that while the UK recognised the framing of export controls as a matter of knowledge control, the framing was not central to the complaints made against the system.

ABSTRACT Using the construction of the Wuhan Yangtze River Bridge as a case study, this paper explores transnational co-production of technology between the Soviet Union and China in the 1950s. Focusing on the invention of the non-caisson method, it argues that non-state actors played an important role in the process, because successful construction of the bridge could not be separated from reciprocal wills and long-term face-to-face interactions between Chinese and Soviet engineers. Moreover, by examining Chinese workers’ contribution, this paper enriches the idea of hybrid technology, including not only the mingling of national identities in the process of knowledge making but also the combining of knowledge of both elites and masses. As a core project of China’s First-Five-Year Plan, the cooperation boosted China’s confidence in technological development and the Chinese Communist Party started to re-evaluate the Soviet technical aid, which to some extent influenced China’s science and technology policies afterwards.

ABSTRACT This paper is inspired by recent analyses of the nature of imperial power that unbundle it from the modes of global governance performed by European rulers in the ‘Age of Empire’. While maintaining the defining features of the concept, it argues that today’s global Pax Americana is constituted by a variety of legal regulatory instruments that define the topography of an imperial regime through strategies of inclusion/exclusion that dilute the national and economic sovereignty of the targeted community or state. The argument is fleshed out by applying it as a grille de lecture to four existing case studies published by historians of science and technology, including my own. The regulatory systems they describe evolved from a classic metropolitan-periphery mode of colonial subordination (in the case of Hawaiʻi in the early twentieth century), through a US–UN brokered legal status of strategic trusteeship to legitimate the use of the Marshall islands to destructively test weapons after World War Two, to the use of export controls and other regulatory instruments to control the transnational flow of US-origin knowledge, know-how and technical data in the nuclear and commercial fields.

ABSTRACT In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Smithsonian Institution, in collaboration with other partners in the US scientific establishment, sought on multiple occasions to oversee the preparation of a Philippine flora. Boosters originally conceived of the project in 1903 as a means of showcasing US colonial prowess and aiding the economic and cultural development of the Philippines as part of a benevolent civilizing mission. By the 1920s, however, the justification for the Philippine flora increasingly emphasized the US-Filipino partnership, although US officials immediately undercut this collaborative rationale by suggesting that Philippine institutions lacked the skill and infrastructure to preserve and care for specimen collections. This account of how visions of nation-building and imperial power shaped the Smithsonian’s quest for a Philippine flora contributes to ongoing scholarly efforts to integrate the United States into the global history of botany and empire.

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the French communist scientists’ attack, executed in 1953, on US initiatives for the promotion of science in Europe. Collated in the anonymous booklet Un plan U.S.A. de mainmise sur la science, these accusations caused a sensation in the already tense political climate of the early 1950s by alleging that American initiatives offered cover to intelligence operations, and a chokehold on the development of European science. While US government agencies never offered an official comment on these indictments, in great secrecy their officials sought to find out about the booklet’s authors, identify potential leaks of restricted information that might have informed its completion, and reorient science initiatives in Europe because of what the communist propaganda exposed. This essay thus argues that US efforts to reduce the impact that the publication had in France (and Western Europe more generally) played a role in shaping American hegemony, since finding ways to deflate the influence of dissenting voices in European science, at times stealthily, was as decisive as consensus building through the strengthening of transatlantic scientific relations.

ABSTRACT This article places the US–Japanese controversy over the co-development of the FSX jet fighter in the context of US debates about ‘economic security’. During the 1980s, this concept became the widely used shorthand for describing a new calculus of national security and foreign economic policy, closely linking defense economics, competitiveness in commercial global markets and the crucial role of dual-use technologies in both spheres. The article shows that the dangers of sharing dual-use know-how were at the heart of the US security concerns in the FSX case, prompting the US government to use export controls – during the Cold War the sharpest economic weapon against the Eastern bloc – against its close ally Japan.

ABSTRACT In consultation with The Department of State and the USAEC, and other state and non-state actors – including the Atomic Industrial Forum Inc. and the Fund for Peaceful Atomic Development – organized the first international missions to investigate if and how nuclear technologies could be mobilized as commodities and symbols of possible futures to the rest of the world, with a special focus on underdeveloped countries. Nevertheless, they soon realized that selling atomic development required a set of skills, tools, and knowledge not found in the usual and tested aid programs for agriculture and public health. Based on John Krige’s reflections on the co-production of knowledge and the writing of transnational history, we will explore how knowledge for nuclear development was co-produced in countries like Egypt, Turkey, Mexico, and the United States.