Delivery of geophysical equipment in the horizontal section by means of a down hole tractor

The article deals with the geophysical technology delivery device in the horizontal well bore via a down hole tractor British firm Sondex. A comparison of analog devices domestic developments, showing the competitive advantages of domestic and foreign manufacturers.

Intermediary Elites in the Treaty Port World: Tong Mow-chee and His Collaborators in Shanghai, 1873–1897

This article examines the functions of Chinese and foreign intermediary elites in the commercial and political world of Shanghai, an international city in the nineteenth century mainly consisting of British, American, European and Chinese residents. Specifically, it focuses on the formation of the socio-economic network of Tong Mow-chee (Tang Maozhi 唐茂枝) (1828–1897), a well-known Chinese comprador-merchant serving the British firm Jardine Matheson & Co. and other anglophone and Chinese figures, including William Venn Drummond and Tong King-sing who supported Mow-chee's commercial and political activities. My research mainly draws on English and Chinese sources and enables a deeper understanding of the unofficial figures who contributed to the management of the international society of Shanghai in the late nineteenth century, offering new insight into social roles of the middlemen operating in an area of Britain's informal empire in China.

MERCHANTS, MANDARINS, AND THE RAILWAY: INSTITUTIONAL FAILURE AND THE WUSONG RAILWAY, 1874–1877

This article is an institutional study on the history of the ill-fated Wusong Railway, China's first operational railway. The nine-mile light railway was built by the British firm Jardine, Matheson & Co. without the Qing government's permission. After negotiations with British diplomats, the Qing government agreed to purchase the line but the reformist governor-general Shen Baozhen later ordered it to be removed to Taiwan. Unfortunately funds were never provided for the rebuilding work. This article argues that it was the Qing government's failure to raise funds for capital-intensive projects that led to the railway's final destruction.

Revisiting the Niuzhuang Oil Mill (1868–1870): Transferring Western Technology into China

In 1868, the prominent British firm, Jardine, Matheson & Co., opened the Niuzhuang Oil Mill, one of China’s earliest mechanized factories, but closed it in 1870. The mill faced no oppositions from local government officials but suffered from some technical defects. It produced better quality products that obtained higher prices. This essay argues that the mill’s failure had to do with high capital costs and low profitability.

The Engineering of Herbert Hoover

This article offers a revisionist account of Herbert Hoover's career as a mining engineer, looking particularly at his activities in Australia and China where he first established his reputation and his fortune. The young Hoover went to Western Australia in 1897 to work for the British firm of Bewick, Moreing. Hoover's employers sent him to China in early 1899. He became a partner two years later and returned to Australia to direct Bewick, Moreing's operations there. After his return to London, he grew increasingly involved in financial dealings and gradually withdrew from the business of mining. Hoover's career as a mining engineer coincided with a period when the authority of engineers assumed a new significance; American mining engineers in particular became trusted experts. Hoover was one such engineer, although this article argues that his role was more ambiguous and compromised than earlier studies have acknowledged.

Negotiating under the Monroe Doctrine: Weetman Pearson and the Origins of U.S. Control of Colombian Oil

Before World War I, most foreign investment in Latin America came from Britain. By World War II, however, the United States had become the main and unchallenged foreign investor in the region. This analysis of the negotiations that took place between the British firm (Pearson and Son) and the Colombian government over oil contracts reveals the reasons for the shift in influence. The company's lack of awareness that Britain had been overtaken by the United States as the hegemonic power in the hemisphere eventually caused the negotiations to collapse. While talks were proceeding, the company failed to consider how much influence the United States had on Colombian internal politics, and it overlooked the history of U.S.–Colombia relations. As a result, Pearson never received oil concessions in Colombia; instead, they were granted to American companies, consolidating U.S. power in the region.

Rhetoric, Practice, and Context-Sensitivity in Sociotechnical Action

Sociotechnical action, as interpreted in this article, comprises a wide array of elements which shape technological artefacts as socio-material and linguistic devices. Concepts grounded in different theoretical streams are used to account for the ambiguous and multiple process of technology construction. Categories of ‘interpretative flexibility’, ‘inscription’, work-around’, ‘misunderstanding’, are reviewed and used in this account. Starting from the implementation of an intranet-based Knowledge Management System in a 100 staff British firm, different courses of action in technology implementation and appropriation are analysed. Interpretations performed by different actors can rise misunderstanding, failure and innovation in processes of negotiation and are strongly oriented by power issues. The gap between rhetoric of public discourse and practice situated in specific organizational contexts is argued to be crucial in framing expectations and patterns of sociotechnical action. Ambiguity and multiplicity of the Knowledge Management System studied (the Compass) illustrate how the mutual constitution of the social and the technical makes technology a ‘context sensitive’ artefact.

Review of periodical articles: Post-1800

In ‘Shanghailanders: the formation and identity of the British settler community in Shanghai 1843–1937’, Past and Present, 159 (1998), 161–211, Robert Bickers portrays the collective experiences and self-images of an idiosyncratic enclave of ex-patriates who preferred to be known as permanent residents rather than ‘temporary sojourners in a foreign land’. Tracing longue durée relationships between the International Settlement and Shanghai Municipal Council, Bickers has unearthed highly pertinent demographic data. By 1935 the British community numbered approximately 10,000. Between approximately 1850 and 1900 half of the total comprised unmarried males, a figure that fell to 17 per cent by the mid-1930s. Drawing on Saidian conceptualizations of otherness, Bickers probes ethnic and sexual as well as political and cultural boundaries and stereotypes. He suggests that ‘in lieu of the city-state denied them by the diplomats [Shanghailanders] . . . declaimed about their “republic”, which they “imagined” – in Benedict Anderson's term – as meritocratic, egalitarian and democratic’. As communists and nationalists confronted one another in the final battle for the heart and soul of a deeply divided land, the ex-patriate community clung desperately to a collective cultural ethos. But, within three years of Mao Zedong's triumph in 1949, the British Chamber of Commerce had been forced to dissolve itself. By 1953 a number of Shanghailanders had been denied exit visas for more than three years and in 1957 the last British firm was forced to close its doors. A few isolated individuals – quasi-prisoners or converts to the Maoist cause – lived out a shadowy existence in China's greatest industrial and maritime city. Now the settler mentalité ‘survived [only] . . . in the imagination’.