La Escuela Especial de Ingenieros Industriales de Bilbao, 1897–1936: Educación y Tecnología en el Primer Tercio del Siglo XX (review)

In the past two decades, technical education has attracted the attention of historians in Spain, and a good example of their work is this monograph deriving froma doctoral thesis. Isabel Garaizar focuses on the history of the Special School of Industrial Engineers in Bilbao—in Spain’s Basque Country— from its establishment until the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. Besides a substantial secondary bibliography, Garaizar has based her extensive research on diverse archival sources and wide-ranging periodical literature.

There are eleven chapters. The first chapter locates the antecedents of industrial education in Spain as well as the legislative changes related to it. This enables Garaizar to establish connections between the Special School in Bilbao and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century institutions, particularly the Basque Patriotic Royal Seminary, set up in 1776, and the Scientific and Industrial Royal Seminary, dating to 1851. The second chapter deals with the creation in the Basque Country of new educational centers during the second half of the nineteenth century, framing them in the context of the industrialization of Bilbao. In chapter 3, Garaizar addresses the gestation of the Special School in Bilbao between 1893 and 1899, beginning with an initiative by the County Council of Biscay and later joined by the City Council of Bilbao. The aim was to create a school different from the model established by the Industrial School of Engineers in Barcelona. It was to combine official recognition by the state with the maintenance of a certain degree of independence.

The core of the work (chapters 4 to 9) is devoted to the history of the Special School as it sought to fulfill the aim of providing competent technical staff for Bilbao’s factories and industrial concerns. Here Garaizar emphasizes the importance of the Junta de Patronato or Board of Patronage. The Special School was organized between 1899 and 1902, then enjoyed a long period of stability between 1902 and 1936, when contacts were arranged with other technical schools and publications were exchanged with educational institutions in France, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, England, Canada, and the United States. Early in its history, the Junta de Patronato sent two professors, Emilio Horstmann and Leopoldo Elizalde, to visit technical schools in Paris, Liège, Zurich, and Grenoble. Garaizar includes a study of the faculty as a whole and an analysis of the curriculum and the ways in which the laboratories were equipped—the electromechanics laboratory, for example, modeled on the Institute Montefiori of Liège.

The final chapter is a hitherto unpublished study of the political “purification” of the faculty during the repression that took place after the occupation of Bilbao by pro-Franco troops. There are three appendixes, with information on the Special School’s professors and their publications, as well as the names of the industrial engineers who were trained there between 1902 and 1935.

Throughout the book, Garaizar emphasizes that the Special School was created in order to address the needs of the industrial bourgeoisie in a region firmly resolved to maintain independence from directives from the central government. The Junta de Patronato managed to keep control of the appointment of professors and to model regulations and curricula on prestigious institutions in other parts of Europe. By providing a new understanding of the role played by the industrial sector of the Basque Country in the development and modernization of Spain during the first third of the twentieth century, this book fills a substantial gap in the historiography of technology.