Review of Camprubí, Lino, Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2014, 320 pp., 40 monochrome illustrations and photographs

Abstract

Both as a (cutting edge) piece of scholarly work in the arena of the History of Technology and as a (very refreshing) contribution to the much debated History of Spain during the years of the francoist regime, Lino Camprubi’s Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime (2014) makes a no so usual read within either academic milieu. Perhaps the best way to capture what is new to the manifold signification of the book would be to interpret Camprubi’s analysis as lying in the intersection of two historiographic planes which, notwithstanding their multiple intertwinings, need to be kept conceptually separate with meticulosity. Namely: the political and economical History on the one had and the History of devices which has been in the center of the attention of much recent research in the studies of science and technology on the other.