In This Issue

Five places appearing in January—Niger, Namibia, China, South Korea, Spain—expand the world in which Technology and Culture operates. They mark another encouraging sign that SHOT/T&C is outgrowing its original geographical heartland, the Western Civilization template that rose to prominence in U.S. engineering schools at the time of SHOT/ T&C's beginning. By their choices of research sites, January's group of authors—in particular, Gabrielle Hecht, Hsien-chun Wang, Chihyung Jeon, and Albert Presas I Puig—pushed our editorial team to find readers with expertise new to our expanding referee database. We hope their writing will have the same effect on T&C's readers.

"Only a bird's-eye view can reveal the patterns, flows, and imbalances that map the distribution of technologies and the powers they serve or exert. Yet the view from above is always partial; it runs the risk of deceiving us into thinking that some places don't matter enough to deserve our attention. This is a dangerous illusion. We must land in unfamiliar places and study them on their own terms." Gabrielle Hecht ("The Power of Nuclear Things," quote on p. 3) delivers on this promise and provides readers with a tutorial about things nuclear and things African. She tracks both as their meanings have been defined and redefined by pressures of political and market competition. Her argument's complexity transcends the brief-synopsis format typical of "In This Issue." Fortunately, Hecht's narrative clarity renders these tangled stories remarkably accessible, allowing the editor to follow a rubric introduced in October 2009: I will single out a handful of quotations to pique readers' interest for both insight and rhetorical grace.

"The problem with the trade in nuclear things was the exceptionalism of things nuclear. How to buy and sell technologies that carried such heavy moral baggage and destructive potential?" (p. 6).

"Malagasies, Gabonese, and Nigériens who worked with uranium barely thought about the nuclearity of their work. . . . Uranium, for them, enacted continuities in practices and structures that had become utterly mundane under colonialism: mining and its horrifying accidents; corporate capital and its modes of discipline" (p. 11).

"We cannot fully account for the power of nuclear things without understanding the many histories of uranium from Africa. Rendering these histories visible requires us to grapple with multiple performances of nuclear exceptionalism, and with the ongoing tensions between those performances and the mundanity of markets, the exigencies of poverty, and the sovereignty of states. Any commitment to analyzing technologies that lay claim to global power—nuclear or not, exceptional or mundane—demands a transnational approach fully grounded in local and regional histories, however fractured or fragmented" (p. 29).

Hsien-chun Wang ("Discovering Steam Power in China, 1840s–1860s") locates his study of China's encounter with western engineering in the shockwaves caused by European "fire-wheel ships" as they appeared in Chinese waters. For China, a sophisticated tradition of drawing, of three-dimensional models, and a shop culture rooted in oral communication led to years of misunderstanding the culture of precision mechanical-drawing fluency on which steam-powered ships depended. One T&C referee summarized Wang's achievement as follows: "The author gives us an entirely new and challenging perspective of the delay in the mastery of the production of the steam engine in China, which does not appeal to that old and tired story of the 'failure' of late imperial China in all aspects of social, political, economic, intellectual, and technological development. The author convincingly demonstrates that the Chinese were interested in the 'fire-wheel ship' from the start, but they initially could not figure out that it was the steam produced that was driving the ship's wheels, not the fire itself."Wang invites the reader to recognize the story of China's discovering steam technology as a profound and pervasive cultural transformation. "To catch up, China needed more than technical drawings and machine tools: it required the ability to train large numbers of engineers, and also the financial resources to maintain an ever-expanding industry. China's discovering [how] steam [worked] is...