Chair: David Sicilia, University of Maryland
Rick Woten, Iowa State University, “Navigating Improvement in a Settler Society: Constructing the Des Moines River Improvement Project, 1846-1902″
Betsy Mendelsohn, University of Maryland, “Legal Construction of Air as a Preliminary to State Technological Systems: Public Health and Agriculture, 1865-1930.”
Srinivasao Rao, Indian Institute of Technology – Madras, “Legal Mechanisms and Technological Determinism: Role of Law in the Expansion of Electricity Network in Madras Presidency, 1900-1947″
Comment: Jessica Wang, University of British Columbia

Many technological systems arose as governments grew in their administrative capacity during 1850-1950.  The same law that authorized state expansion therefore shaped the technological systems administered by the state.  These papers have extricated law from complex stories about the state and technology, and have established law as a distinct actor, a tool of society, in the management of public resources and utilities.  In each case, society became dependent on the legally authorized, public technological systems created during particular periods of fervent, public activity.  The papers examine how law authorized, shaped, and at times constrained technological systems during their establishment and evolution.

The papers examine the shaping roles of law for basic concerns of the modern state: transportation (navigation) for regional development, urban public health, food agriculture, and electrification.  Each author has consulted documents generated by the administrative state, including those describing the limits of state power to shape private action relative to publicly funded technological systems.  Each therefore examines historical arguments about the appropriate role of state power to manage particular systems technology on which the welfare of societies depended.

This combination of papers permits the session to question the proper exercise of a state’s legal power in shaping past technological systems.  Each focuses on the inception of a new state power, and its early decades of establishment and adaptation to particular circumstances.  Rick Woten focuses on the Iowa frontier, and the use of legal instrumentalism in the creation of public power for navigation improvement that would link the regional economy to the developing national economy.  As adversarial land claims, lack of funding, and corruption stymied the construction of the river improvement, the state subsequently used the legal apparatus intended for improving Des Moines River navigation to pursue railroad development in the state.  Betsy Mendelsohn focuses on the initiation of state-authorized technological systems related to air quality for human and agricultural health.  This authorization of state intervention rested on the legal definition of air as a public good, or something outside of private control that required state attention.  Srinivasao Rao considers the legal basis and logic for Great Britain’s electrification of the Madras region of India.  Subsequent decades saw the need for this network to be modified to fit not the needs of empire, but rather local economic development.  Together, the papers highlight the constructive role of law in shaping technologies; legal systems may have been vehicles for fast-moving political movements, but once established they become the apparatus of state power, and therefore difficult to dislodge or change radically.