The Winners
Laudatio
On behalf of the jury which includes Klaus Staubermann, Irina Gouzévitch, Jacopo Pessina, Matti La Mela, and myself I would like to officially announce that we have decided that the 2024 ICOHTEC Turriano Prize is to be granted to two early career researchers: Jacob Ward and Francesco d’Amaro.
Their brilliant works have been chosen from among high quality monographs that arrived from the USA, Spain, Mexico, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, and other countries and deal with different geographical settings, from Europe to Mexico or Palestine, and focus on different historical periods. I would like to encourage you all to spread the word about the new call of the Turriano Prize for published or unpublished monographs, including PhD theses, written by researchers in the early stages of their careers. We welcome works beyond the narrow definition of history of technology. We accept works in English, German, French, Spanish and Russian.
The Turriano ICOHTEC Prize bears the name of Juanelo Turriano. He was a man born in Milano who spent many years of his life living in the Spanish city of Toledo, working for the emperor Charles I. He was a man of great inventiveness, assembling all kinds of machinery and finding ingenious solutions to architectural and mechanical challenges. He was a practitioner and left few traces in writing. He would have been puzzled had he known that a prize for the best book-length work in the history of technology written by early-stage scholar bears the name of a man that, most probably, wrote no book himself. He would, however, have been happy to know how the work of many people like himself is being better known and understood thanks to the historians of technology, such as our two awardees. They fully deserve the acknowledgement and the financial reward provided by the Juanelo Turriano Foundation in Madrid, that has given its unwavering support to the ICOHTEC. On behalf of the jury, I would like to thank their team.
It was not easy to pick the winner this year, and, finally, the jury members have decided to split the prize between two high-quality contributions. Both are published monographs based on PhD theses.
Jacob Ward for his Visions of a Digital Nation. Market and Monopoly in British Communications.
Francesco d’Amaro for his Antipatriotas del Agua. Conflictos y grupos de interés en el Franquismo, that is Antipatriots of Water. Conflicts and interest groups during Francoism.
I can actually praise the two monographs together for several virtues they share. Besides being well written and easy to read, both books are product of a thorough research but also of extensive knowledge of other geographic contexts. This allows the authors to better interpret the national cases they focus on, Great Britain and Spain. Moreover, both books are intrinsically interdisciplinary works. For many decades, there was a gap between history of technology and political history, a gap caused by the growing specialization in every scholarly discipline, but deepened by the institutional separation that exists in many countries between general historians and those who focus on history of science, technology and medicine. I am glad to bear witness, as the chair of the ICOHTEC Turriano Prize jury, of the magnificent bridges being built over this gap.
Jacob Ward’s book stands on the crossroads of political history, business history and history of technology. Ward shows how digitalization shaped and was shaped by national ownership of the British Telecom in the post-War Britain and how this process changed with liberalization and privatization. He contributes to a better understanding of both state ownership and privatization, by de-naturalizing the British case and introducing comparisons with the USA, France, Japan, Chile and the USSR. Historians of technology will be particularly interested in two issues addressed in Ward’s book. He stresses that prediction analyses have been crucial to marketization when the Post Office’s Long Range Planning Department went from inventing digital futures to forecasting market futures, using corporate modeling and simulations. This informed BT management’s plans to use predictive computing to surveille and simulate customers’ total information needs. The other great contribution of the book to the history of technology concerns two basic features of a telecom network, switching and transmission, and how digitalization affected these components. Ward argues that switching shows how digitalization preserved and even extended the telecom business’s power across privatization and liberalization, while transmission shows how privatization and liberalization inverted engineers’ vision of digital integration. Overall, by a close examination of technical, economic and ideological aspects of digitalization in the UK, Ward’s book brings more meat onto the bones of the notion of techno-politics. If the author wishes to pursue this line of inquiry further, the jury recommends him to better integrate the geopolitical and economic asymmetries of an increasingly globalized world in his reading of the late 20th and early 21st century transformation of the telecommunications in Great Britain.
Francesco d’Amaro’s book is a major contribution to social and political history of right-wing dictatorships in Southern Europe. At the same time, it shows how hydraulic works not only shaped political landscape of the mid-twentieth century world but were shaped by clashes of different interest groups. The ways in which these conflicts were expressed in Spain were conditioned by the clientelar nature of Francoist dictatorship. Recently, many works have been published on the resistance to big engineering works by indigenous populations and environmentalist movements. D’Amaro’s book is thought-provoking in that he focuses on conflicts between the different privileged groups that were fundamental parts of the Francoist regime. These were, basically, the elite group of civil engineers specialized in dam construction, who wielded great power from the Ministry of Development, and the associations of irrigation users, that counted among their members and supporters many influential landowners. In a country where agriculture was one of the most important sectors of economy and water management had been an essential part of communitarian governance for centuries, civil engineers specialized in hydraulic works and the politicians who endorsed their agenda needed to negotiate with water users both at the state level and sur le tas, on the construction site of the great works of hydraulic engineering. D’Amaro’s book brings forward the mobilizing power of water in dry regions and helps us understand how big engineering works were negotiated in a clientelar dictatorship. The jury recommends him to examine the technical implications of these negotiations more closely in his future research. On a personal note, I must say that I am happy that this year, after many, many years, one of the winning books is in Spanish.
Darina Martykánová
Committee members:
Dr. Darina Martykánová (Chairperson)
Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
darina.martykanova@uam.es
Dr. Irina Gouzévitch
Centre Maurice Halbwachs
École Normale Supérieure
irina.gouzevitch@ens.fr
Dr. Klaus Staubermann
German Port Museum
k.b.staubermann@gmail.com
Dr. Matti La Mela
Uppsala University
Matti.lamela@abm.uu.se
Dr. Jacopo Pessina
Department of Civilisations and Forms of Knowledge
University of Pisa
japessina@tiscali.it