From the Suez Canal to Hoover Dam: Infrastructure & Empire in World History

3 units

Do bridges, dams, or clocks have a history? How can we read the histories of mobility and segregation from the built environment? In this seminar we will explore the co-mingled history of infrastructure and empire in their political, economic, cultural, and scientific dimensions from the 1860s through the early 1940s. We will situate projects such as the Suez Canal and St. Louis' Ead's Bridge, the standardization of international time in Beirut under Ottoman rule and Bombay under British authority, and the Boulder/Hoover Dam project within meta- and counter-narratives of imperial and colonial activities around the world, ending with the Manhattan Project in St. Louis. Students will select their own sites and project to research for the final project. Past research topics have included the Manhattan subway system and the 1918 influenza pandemic; the Aberfan mining disaster in Wales; Indonesian rubber production and the first transatlantic cable; and crosswalks in post-WW2 Tokyo.