Participant Info
- First Name
- Liat
- Last Name
- Spiro
- Country
- United States
- State
- MA Massachusetts
- spiro@fas.harvard.edu
- Affiliation
- PhD Candidate, History, Harvard University
- Website URL
- https://scholar.harvard.edu/liat-spiro
- Keywords
- capitalism, technology, labor, engineering, political economy, infrastructure, finance, economic thought, capital goods, tariffs, United States, Germany, material culture, design, depiction, drafting, migration
- Availability
- Media Contact
- Additional Contact Information
- PhD
- other credentials
Personal Info
- Photo
- About Me
- I am a doctoral candidate in Harvard’s History Department with a twofold focus on industrial understandings of international economic space and the intersection of capitalism with design, especially in the United States and Germany.
My dissertation, “Drawing Capital: Depiction, Machine Tools and the Political Economy of Industrial Knowledge, 1824-1914,” analyzes class formation and shifts in the international technology trade via the practice of mechanical drawing in the capital goods sectors of Britain, France, the United States, and Germany during the long nineteenth century. “Drawing Capital” connects the histories of the knowledge economy and intellectual property to processes of class formation and international trade to explain the increasing global mobility of machines. Focused on the historical reformatting and legal regulation of mechanical knowledge, my work on drafting and design practices uncovers how experience became image or scientific artifact, and how images and data become commodities—freely circulating or enclosed in monopolies. Using the archives of engineers, technological print culture, and firms that constructed machinery, metalworking tools, and metrological devices such as Cockerill, Gutehoffnungshütte, Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg, Borsig, Mannesmann, J.E. Reinecker & Co., Ludwig Loewe & Co., William Sellers & Co., Baldwin Locomotive Works, Pratt & Whitney, and Brown & Sharpe, I tell the story of how firms and nation-states transitioned from attempting to monopolize technologies to allowing their export to actively organizing cartels to pursue the mechanization of transport, extractive, and industrial enterprises globally by World War I.
- Recent Publications
- Media Coverage
- Social Media
- Country Focus
- United States, Germany
- Expertise by Geography
- Germany, United States, Western Europe
- Expertise by Chronology
- 19th century, Modern, 20th century
- Expertise by Topic
- Capitalism, Economic History, Material Culture, Technology
