Made Modern

Science and technology have shaped not only economic empires and industrial landscapes, but also the identities, anxieties, and understandings of people living in modern times. Made Modern: Science and Technology in Canadian History draws together leading scholars from a wide range of fields to enrich our understanding of history inside and outside Canada’s borders. The book’s chapters examine how science and technology have allowed Canadians to imagine and reinvent themselves as modern. Focusing on topics including exploration, scientific rationality, the occult, medical instruments, patents, communication, and infrastructure, the contributors situate Canadian scientific and technological developments within larger national and transnational contexts.

The first major collection of its kind in thirty years, Made Modern explores the place of science and technology in shaping Canadians’ experience of themselves and their place in the modern world.

Edward Jones-Imhotep is a cultural historian of science and technology and an associate professor of history at York University. He is the recipient of the Sidney Edelstein Prize in the history of technology for his book The Unreliable Nation: Hostile Nature and Technological Failure in the Cold War. He has held visiting fellowships at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and was the Northrop Frye Visiting Fellow at the University of Toronto.

Tina Adcock is a cultural and environmental historian of modern Canada and an assistant professor of history at Simon Fraser University. She has published work in Swedish, Norwegian, Canadian, and American scholarly journals and volumes. She is an associate of the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University.

Contributors: Stephen Bocking, Dorotea Gucciardo, Jan Hadlaw, James Hull, Dolly Jørgensen, Eda Kranakis, Daniel Macfarlane, Beth A. Robertson, Efram Sera-Shriar, Blair Stein, Andrew Stuhl, David Theodore

The editors of this splendid collection argue, in a sly nod to Bruno Latour, that ‘We’ve always been modern,’ or at least liked to describe ourselves as such… Bocking’s dense and accomplished piece on "landscapes of science" is alone worth the price of admission.

The coherence of such awide-ranging collection is achieved because ‘modernity’ within Canada – as expressed alongside the formation and definition of the idea of ‘Canadian,’ the legacies of imperialism within rational, Liberal, individualist Western nationhood, and of imperial/territorial conflict – remains central throughout.

These are excellent case studies of historical realities that may in some sense be very Canadian, insofar as they touched upon sensitive geopolitical and power relations… They enrich our knowledge about the social function of field science, expertise, science-policy relations, and about Canadian history in ways that would have made Jarrell proud.