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  • Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War
  • David C. Engerman (bio)
Entangled Geographies: Empire and Technopolitics in the Global Cold War. Edited by Gabrielle Hecht. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2011. Pp. ix+337. $30.

Based on a series of workshops held in the United States and the Netherlands, Entangled Geographies offers a window into the latest work on cold war technopolitics. Wide-ranging and generally incisive, the articles expand the geographical range of studies of cold war technologies while at the same time showing how this broader geographical frame requires a reconsideration of the history of technology in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Like most edited collections, the contributions vary widely in topic and approach, though here there is an impressively high level of quality throughout. One set of particularly strong essays covers nuclear issues in one form or another—what Gabrielle Hecht in her introduction calls one of the "flashy flagships" of the history of technology during the cold war. Sonja Smid examines the Soviet Union's reluctant sharing of civilian nuclear technology with its Eastern European allies. Itty Abraham shows [End Page 729] how the presence of "rare earths" shaped the making of independent India. And Hecht's own contribution explores the politics of South Africa's involvement in international atomic institutions. All three of these essays pay close attention to the materials and technologies involved, as well as to the ways in which seemingly minor definitions—calling relatively common elements "rare earths," for instance, or distinguishing between "source materials" and "fissionable materials"—had important national and international implications.

Two other essays cover aviation—not one of Hecht's "flashy flagships," but perhaps not so far below them—as both means and metaphor. Ruth Oldenziel offers a fascinating exploration of the ways in which American geographers—especially in government—re-envisioned the world in the context of airplanes' steadily increasing ability to traverse wider and wider distances. And Lars Denicke shows how the new capital of Brasilia—a favorite subject of scholars interested in incarnations of modernism—both relied on and embodied aviation.

The other five empirical essays, while they do not necessarily cluster neatly, cover a wide array of technologies. Indeed, three of the most important contributions to the volume examine rather mundane technologies that nevertheless wielded extraordinary impacts in the late twentieth century. Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga's essay on the Zimbabwean independence movement's ability to navigate between cold war powers (in this case, China and the Soviet Union) is about simple field weapons (like the AK-47) and the conversion of sponsors (not clients) into weapons.

An article jointly authored by Donna Mehos and Suzanne Moon compares two institutions in which agricultural expertise circulated widely: a private Dutch company, HVA, which made a transition from plantation ownership to provision of consulting services in the aftermath of Indonesian independence; and the United Nations Expanded Programme of Technical Assistance (EPTA). Rightly challenging the now-familiar distinction between techne and metis (universally applicable vs. local knowledge), Mehos and Moon wisely introduce the term"place-based knowledge." This last term refers to knowledge that is not meant to apply universally but that is not indigenous either. Rather, it is often generated by outsiders seeking solutions to specific local problems.

Martha Lampland's piece convincingly demonstrates that the rise of economic planning in cold war Hungary was not simply due to the country's "Sovietization" in the late 1940s, but instead had an important indigenous genealogy. Among the many strengths of the latter two essays, in particular, is their periodization; beginning their analyses well before the emergence of the militarized American-Soviet tensions in the 1940s, Lampland, and Mehos and Moon, are able to show how some forms of technopolitics that emerged during the cold war were not simply creatures of the geopolitical conflict. [End Page 730]

To push this chronological point further, at least four of the essays have only tenuous links to the cold war as a global phenomenon (as opposed to a chronological descriptor). Mehos and Moon's account of the UN's EPTA as essentially tied to cold war concerns is unconvincing, while the cold war remains in the...

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