14 Nov 2024. The Spirit of the Dead Weighs Heavily on the Technology of the Living’: Transport, Communications, and Technology in the Twentieth Century and its Cold Wars with Daniel RQ Villamarin
14 November 2024
2 - 3 pm
In person
‘The Spirit of the Dead Weighs Heavily on the Technology of the Living’: Transport, Communications, and Technology in the Twentieth Century and its Cold Wars
Daniel Ricardo Quiroga Villamarin
For European and North Atlantic elites, the last years of the nineteenth century are fondly remembered as a time of tremendous socio-technical innovation. This is especially true when it comes to the blossoming of technologies of transport and communication. Indeed, the belle époque was particularly belle for those invested in the business of moving goods, peoples, and information across the world. In my contribution to the Cold War volume of the Cambridge History of International Law, I argue that a laissez-faire approach to the regulation of those technologies was one of the victims of the wreckage of the Great War of 1914. As the battle lines ossified in trench lines along the Western front, European empires became increasingly aware of the strategic importance of infrastructures that could allow for the maintenance of critical supply lines, the quick redeployment of military assets, and the gathering of accurate information. As such, transport and communication technologies found themselves intimately increasingly entangled in imperial (and later, national) state-building polices. With this in mind, in my talk I provide an overview of the militarization of transport, communication, and technology throughout the century —with important repercussions for the relationship between international law and the increasingly bellicose global corporation.