Abstract

"Engineering Standards: Infrastructures of Development and Debt in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries"

Liat Spiro, College of the Holy Cross (lnspiro@holycross.edu)

This paper will examine trade in capital goods, civil engineering projects, and debt regimes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from the vantage of standards. The overseas projects of engineers such as William Barclay Parsons (now Parsons-Brinckerhoff, the multinational civil engineering firm responsible for the “Big Dig” among other projects) and the American International Corporation of National City Bank (now Citibank) reveal the importance of infrastructure in unearthing the roots of international financial architectures. At the fin-de-siècle, sociétés anonymes had begun reconstructing cities globally with tramways, light, and power. Beginning with railroading in southeastern Europe prior to the First World War, future Weimar and Nazi central banker Hjalmar Schacht developed continental visions of standardized technologies and currency securing unequal exchange. In the U.S., financial missionaries accompanied infrastructure projects, seeking to bring countries and colonies from Mexico, Panama, and Nicaragua to the Philippines and China onto the gold or gold-exchange standard. While there is a growing literature on international financial governance cutting across the “decolonization divide” (as termed by Christy Thornton) and invoking imperial and interwar origins of economic policymaking (Jamie Martin’s The Meddlers, for instance), few works have explicitly delved into how the construction of infrastructure formed ideas of economic space, developmental time, and social governance. Standards–technical and depictive, cultural and monetary–would galvanize debates about developmental paths, demarcate zones of integration, and potentially structure forms of lock-in and dependency. By situating the analysis within engineering projects as much as in the aims of professional engineering organizations, this research extends recent work on standards (such as JoAnne Yates’s and Craig Murphy’s Engineering Rules) to reckon with contested forms of political economy.