Engineering progress: Californians and the making of a global economy (India, South Africa, Palestine, Australia)

“Engineering Progress” is a comparative study of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century regional development. It situates nature, technology, ideal of progress spread around the world. In theory, progress promised many things: material and commercial development, scientific and social enlightenment, free markets, and the rule of law. But in practice, these concepts never played out as they were intended. The diaspora of California's engineers and their tools, ideas, and models of development provide one of the best illustrations of the uneven outcomes of the application of new technologies and their motivating ideas. In the 1850s, California became a hub for the global spread of mining and irrigation technology, as well as ideas about labor, property rights, government, society, and modern rural life. Over the next decades, Californian engineers fanned out across the globe with blueprints for change. Some of their tools and ideas were indigenous to California. Others evolved from experiences learned abroad, were modified to fit California's conditions, and then re-exported to other settler societies. For Californian engineers, progress entailed pulling distant regions into a Western economy. It also meant remaking the world in ways that affirmed their own personal politics and beliefs, as well as those of their society. Their mining and irrigation projects in India, California, Australia, South Africa, and Palestine—which together form the comparative basis of this study—show the geographically distinct variations that the supposedly universal progress created. Far from fulfilling a set of universal ideals, progress brought about terrible inconsistencies in some regions and unexpected consequences in others.