Lino Camprubí
I am a Professor at the University of Sevilla, as well as the PI of the ERC-CoG DEEPMED (Discovering the Deep Mediterranean Environment:
A History of Science and Strategy, 1860-2020) and co-PI of the Spanish-funded project IBEROT@C (Cultura marítima ibérica y prácticas oceanográficas
en el Mediterráneo y el Atlántico: conocimiento tácito, estandarización, conocimiento práctico y geopolítica).
My interests are in the transnational history of Spanish engineering, science, and political economy in the Francoist period, the history of the earth and environmental sciences during the Cold War, the modern Mediterranean, and the philosophy of contemporary sciences broadly understood. Below you can find many of my publications on these issues, including extra-academic ones. I've also participated in public talks and TV documentaries and have a Youtube channel (mostly, but not only, in Spanish): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWgPC2-Ti6F0a3YMThA1bZA
I received graduate education in Sevilla and Cornell Universities and obtained a PhD in History in University of California, Los Angeles (2011). I have been a Research Fellow at the UAB in the ERC project “The Earth Under Surveillance” (2012-2014), a Research Scholar in Department II of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2014-2017), and a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Research Group “Epistemes of Modern Acoustics”.
I joined the U Sevilla in 2018 as a Ramón y Cajal Researcher and in 2023 I became an Assistant Professor (Titular). There, besides conducting research, I teach history of science and philosophy of science. I have also taught at U Chicago (Spring 2016), UA Barcelona (Master, 2017-18) and U Salamanca (Master, 2021).
My first book, Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime (MIT Press, 2014), explores the significance of the history of science and technology for producing more accurate understandings of political economies. My second book, Los ingenieros de Franco: Ciencia, catolicismo y Guerra Fría (Crítica, 2017; winner of the Turriano-ICOTECH 2018 Prize), extends that view onto the role of scientists in shaping international relations during the Cold War. I have also published on phosphates and the Western Sahara, postcolonial nature conservation, energy dependency, the history of the idea of the global environment, and the making of the underwater ear and have edited a number of special issues and volumes.
A History of Science and Strategy, 1860-2020) and co-PI of the Spanish-funded project IBEROT@C (Cultura marítima ibérica y prácticas oceanográficas
en el Mediterráneo y el Atlántico: conocimiento tácito, estandarización, conocimiento práctico y geopolítica).
My interests are in the transnational history of Spanish engineering, science, and political economy in the Francoist period, the history of the earth and environmental sciences during the Cold War, the modern Mediterranean, and the philosophy of contemporary sciences broadly understood. Below you can find many of my publications on these issues, including extra-academic ones. I've also participated in public talks and TV documentaries and have a Youtube channel (mostly, but not only, in Spanish): https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCWgPC2-Ti6F0a3YMThA1bZA
I received graduate education in Sevilla and Cornell Universities and obtained a PhD in History in University of California, Los Angeles (2011). I have been a Research Fellow at the UAB in the ERC project “The Earth Under Surveillance” (2012-2014), a Research Scholar in Department II of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (2014-2017), and a visiting researcher at the Max Planck Research Group “Epistemes of Modern Acoustics”.
I joined the U Sevilla in 2018 as a Ramón y Cajal Researcher and in 2023 I became an Assistant Professor (Titular). There, besides conducting research, I teach history of science and philosophy of science. I have also taught at U Chicago (Spring 2016), UA Barcelona (Master, 2017-18) and U Salamanca (Master, 2021).
My first book, Engineers and the Making of the Francoist Regime (MIT Press, 2014), explores the significance of the history of science and technology for producing more accurate understandings of political economies. My second book, Los ingenieros de Franco: Ciencia, catolicismo y Guerra Fría (Crítica, 2017; winner of the Turriano-ICOTECH 2018 Prize), extends that view onto the role of scientists in shaping international relations during the Cold War. I have also published on phosphates and the Western Sahara, postcolonial nature conservation, energy dependency, the history of the idea of the global environment, and the making of the underwater ear and have edited a number of special issues and volumes.
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Projects by Lino Camprubí
Few geographical spaces have been more relevant to human life and more intensively theorized than the Mediterranean Sea. Today, this sea poses some of the most pressing challenges and opportunities for European economic, security, and environmental policies. Answers to how to manage the region depend on ideas and perceptions of integration and division of the basin and its peoples. But the Mediterranean as a spatial concept has radically changed in the last 160 years as humans have gained access to its depths, unveiling an underwater world to discover, exploit, and navigate.
The Mediterranean has become a volume. DEEPMED is the first historical account of the discovery of the deep Mediterranean environment. Its main
hypothesis is that science and strategy jointly made the Mediterranean depths into an object of analysis and a political space, which in turn shaped science and strategy in the region. DEEPMED pursues three specific
objectives: 1) identifying the actors and contexts that enabled perceptions and practices of depth in the Med; 2) describing how natural and human time-scales interact in this body of water, and 3) tracking key
conceptual landmarks defining the uniqueness and representativeness of the Mediterranean volume vis à vis the global ocean.
DEEPMED is the first basin-scale step in a novel approach to oceanic history that incorporates analyses of deep and bottom layers of the Sea to gauge the causes and effects of the historical emergence of depth. This
requires an innovative interdisciplinary, transnational and digital methodology. The project identifies overarching trajectories of human engagement with depths from the mid-19th century to the present,
including contrasting timelines and perspectives. The availability of digital tools for creating a database that facilitates geospatial and visual analyses make the project timely. The current security and environmental
Mediterranean crises make it essential.
Books by Lino Camprubí
— Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University
This is a fascinating sociological account of one of the main figures of analytical philosophy and one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Anyone interested in Bertrand Russel’s rich intellectual life must read this book, but it is also particularly interesting for its deft use of cultural sociology and positioning theory.
— Patrick Baert, Cambridge University
In this innovative new study, Pérez-Jara and Camprubí provide a powerful cultural sociological analysis of one of the 20th Century’s most iconic public intellectuals. The book focuses not so much on Russell as an academic philosopher, but more on his evolving eschatological concern with how science and technology promise to pave the way to both paradise and hell. Through careful reconstruction and theoretical nous, the authors reveal how Russell attempted to forge a public morality that would help avoid humanity’s drift toward apocalypse. This book is a significant contribution to Russell studies and is essential reading for historians of philosophy, as well as cultural sociologists and sociologists of ideas and intellectuals.
— Marcus Morgan, University of Bristol
Participan (además de los editores): Lorenzo Delgado, Joseba de la Torre, Michael Falcone, Clara Florensa, Giulia Rispoli, Francisco Rodríguez-Jiménez, Ana Romero de Pablos, María del Mar Rubio, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Simone Turchetti
This title brings together a range of approaches and topics across different regions, transcending nationally-bounded historical narratives. Each chapter deals with a particular topic that places expert networks at the centre of the history of globalisation. The contributors concentrate on central themes including intellectual property rights, technology transfer, tropical science, energy production, large technological projects, technical standards and colonial infrastructures. Many also consider methodological, theoretical and conceptual issues.
scientists’ and engineers’ active roles in producing those political mandates. Many scientists and engineers had been exiled, imprisoned, or executed by the regime. Camprubí argues that those who remained made concrete the mission of “redemption” that Franco had invented for himself. This gave them the opportunity to become key actors — and mid-level decision makers — within the regime.
Camprubí describes a series of projects across Spain undertaken by the civil engineers and agricultural scientists who placed themselves at the center of their country’s forced modernization. These include a coal silo, built in 1953, viewed as an embodiment of Spain’s industrialized landscape; links between laboratories, architects, and the national Catholic church (and between technology and authoritarian control); vertically organized rice production and research on genetics; river management and the contested meanings of self-sufficiency; and the circulation
of construction standards by mobile laboratories as an engine for European integration. Separately, each chapter offers a fascinating microhistory that illustrates the coevolution of Francoist science, technology, and politics. Taken together, they reveal networks of people, institutions, knowledge, artifacts, and technological systems woven together to form a new state.
Papers by Lino Camprubí
This paper analyzes the different actors involved in developing the infrastructural and institutional networks that enabled those imports. While it focuses on the Francoist regime (1939-1975) it is attentive to continuities and changes with respect to prior and, particularly, later periods. The article's thesis is that, rather than assuming a homogeneous state with a unique strategy, different actors within the administration and in private industry pursued competing strategies and favored different resources coal , hydropower, oil and nuclear and, later, natural gas and renewable energies.
These actors shared a rhetoric of autarky and self-sufficiency, which they then mobilized to build their systems of domestic infra-structures and international connections. Given an increasing dependency on imports, competition between powerful state and private organizations was constantly evolving in response to altering expectations and perceptions of energy vulnerability and scarcity. Transition to democracy in 1978 and access to the EEC in 1985 led to a gradual liberalization, acquisition of infrastructures by foreign companies, and internationalization of Spanish firms. Today's diversification of imports can be seen as the result not of a unified strategy but of competing alternative strategies.
phosphate mine was discovered at Bu-Craa in 1964, Western Sahara received renewed geopolitical attention. Several countries competing for the control of the world fertilizer market, including Morocco, Spain, France, and the United States, developed diverging strategies to gain control of the mineral. After intense negotiations revolving around the materiality of mining
technologies and involving reserve estimations, sabotage, and flexing of diplomatic muscles, Morocco took over the Spanish colony in 1975. While this secured Morocco’s place in the world market, it condemned the local population to exile and domination. This article explores three technological
stages of the exploitation of phosphate in Western Sahara that underpin the geopolitical history. This perspective yields new visions of cold war technology and postcolonial markets.
Las rutas migratorias de las aves de Doñana contribuyeron a la
dimensión internacional en la que se fraguó el acuerdo entre
el World Wildlife Fund (WWF) y el Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas (CSIC) que llevó a la inauguración de la Reserva Biológica de Doñana en 1965. La posterior creación del Parque abrió la puerta a nuevos desencuentros entre diversos modos de entender el conservacionismo y entre diferentes categorizaciones científicas del territorio de Doñana. La resolución de estos conflictos dependió de fuerzas y alianzas, lo que permite concluir afinando el argumento metodológico de partida.
Few geographical spaces have been more relevant to human life and more intensively theorized than the Mediterranean Sea. Today, this sea poses some of the most pressing challenges and opportunities for European economic, security, and environmental policies. Answers to how to manage the region depend on ideas and perceptions of integration and division of the basin and its peoples. But the Mediterranean as a spatial concept has radically changed in the last 160 years as humans have gained access to its depths, unveiling an underwater world to discover, exploit, and navigate.
The Mediterranean has become a volume. DEEPMED is the first historical account of the discovery of the deep Mediterranean environment. Its main
hypothesis is that science and strategy jointly made the Mediterranean depths into an object of analysis and a political space, which in turn shaped science and strategy in the region. DEEPMED pursues three specific
objectives: 1) identifying the actors and contexts that enabled perceptions and practices of depth in the Med; 2) describing how natural and human time-scales interact in this body of water, and 3) tracking key
conceptual landmarks defining the uniqueness and representativeness of the Mediterranean volume vis à vis the global ocean.
DEEPMED is the first basin-scale step in a novel approach to oceanic history that incorporates analyses of deep and bottom layers of the Sea to gauge the causes and effects of the historical emergence of depth. This
requires an innovative interdisciplinary, transnational and digital methodology. The project identifies overarching trajectories of human engagement with depths from the mid-19th century to the present,
including contrasting timelines and perspectives. The availability of digital tools for creating a database that facilitates geospatial and visual analyses make the project timely. The current security and environmental
Mediterranean crises make it essential.
— Jeffrey Alexander, Yale University
This is a fascinating sociological account of one of the main figures of analytical philosophy and one of the most prominent public intellectuals of the twentieth century. Anyone interested in Bertrand Russel’s rich intellectual life must read this book, but it is also particularly interesting for its deft use of cultural sociology and positioning theory.
— Patrick Baert, Cambridge University
In this innovative new study, Pérez-Jara and Camprubí provide a powerful cultural sociological analysis of one of the 20th Century’s most iconic public intellectuals. The book focuses not so much on Russell as an academic philosopher, but more on his evolving eschatological concern with how science and technology promise to pave the way to both paradise and hell. Through careful reconstruction and theoretical nous, the authors reveal how Russell attempted to forge a public morality that would help avoid humanity’s drift toward apocalypse. This book is a significant contribution to Russell studies and is essential reading for historians of philosophy, as well as cultural sociologists and sociologists of ideas and intellectuals.
— Marcus Morgan, University of Bristol
Participan (además de los editores): Lorenzo Delgado, Joseba de la Torre, Michael Falcone, Clara Florensa, Giulia Rispoli, Francisco Rodríguez-Jiménez, Ana Romero de Pablos, María del Mar Rubio, Gabriela Soto Laveaga, Simone Turchetti
This title brings together a range of approaches and topics across different regions, transcending nationally-bounded historical narratives. Each chapter deals with a particular topic that places expert networks at the centre of the history of globalisation. The contributors concentrate on central themes including intellectual property rights, technology transfer, tropical science, energy production, large technological projects, technical standards and colonial infrastructures. Many also consider methodological, theoretical and conceptual issues.
scientists’ and engineers’ active roles in producing those political mandates. Many scientists and engineers had been exiled, imprisoned, or executed by the regime. Camprubí argues that those who remained made concrete the mission of “redemption” that Franco had invented for himself. This gave them the opportunity to become key actors — and mid-level decision makers — within the regime.
Camprubí describes a series of projects across Spain undertaken by the civil engineers and agricultural scientists who placed themselves at the center of their country’s forced modernization. These include a coal silo, built in 1953, viewed as an embodiment of Spain’s industrialized landscape; links between laboratories, architects, and the national Catholic church (and between technology and authoritarian control); vertically organized rice production and research on genetics; river management and the contested meanings of self-sufficiency; and the circulation
of construction standards by mobile laboratories as an engine for European integration. Separately, each chapter offers a fascinating microhistory that illustrates the coevolution of Francoist science, technology, and politics. Taken together, they reveal networks of people, institutions, knowledge, artifacts, and technological systems woven together to form a new state.
This paper analyzes the different actors involved in developing the infrastructural and institutional networks that enabled those imports. While it focuses on the Francoist regime (1939-1975) it is attentive to continuities and changes with respect to prior and, particularly, later periods. The article's thesis is that, rather than assuming a homogeneous state with a unique strategy, different actors within the administration and in private industry pursued competing strategies and favored different resources coal , hydropower, oil and nuclear and, later, natural gas and renewable energies.
These actors shared a rhetoric of autarky and self-sufficiency, which they then mobilized to build their systems of domestic infra-structures and international connections. Given an increasing dependency on imports, competition between powerful state and private organizations was constantly evolving in response to altering expectations and perceptions of energy vulnerability and scarcity. Transition to democracy in 1978 and access to the EEC in 1985 led to a gradual liberalization, acquisition of infrastructures by foreign companies, and internationalization of Spanish firms. Today's diversification of imports can be seen as the result not of a unified strategy but of competing alternative strategies.
phosphate mine was discovered at Bu-Craa in 1964, Western Sahara received renewed geopolitical attention. Several countries competing for the control of the world fertilizer market, including Morocco, Spain, France, and the United States, developed diverging strategies to gain control of the mineral. After intense negotiations revolving around the materiality of mining
technologies and involving reserve estimations, sabotage, and flexing of diplomatic muscles, Morocco took over the Spanish colony in 1975. While this secured Morocco’s place in the world market, it condemned the local population to exile and domination. This article explores three technological
stages of the exploitation of phosphate in Western Sahara that underpin the geopolitical history. This perspective yields new visions of cold war technology and postcolonial markets.
Las rutas migratorias de las aves de Doñana contribuyeron a la
dimensión internacional en la que se fraguó el acuerdo entre
el World Wildlife Fund (WWF) y el Consejo Superior de Investigaciones
Científicas (CSIC) que llevó a la inauguración de la Reserva Biológica de Doñana en 1965. La posterior creación del Parque abrió la puerta a nuevos desencuentros entre diversos modos de entender el conservacionismo y entre diferentes categorizaciones científicas del territorio de Doñana. La resolución de estos conflictos dependió de fuerzas y alianzas, lo que permite concluir afinando el argumento metodológico de partida.
grandes modos. El más extendido es el empirista-positivista, según el cual las percepciones posibilitadas por los órganos sensoriales del sujeto humano son la base de todo el conocimiento (y la ciencia sería un tipo de conocimiento). Según esta perspectiva, la historia humana en general será una línea de progreso marcada por el avance de la ciencia. Por contra, el idealismo ordena estas tres ideas en sentido contrario: la historia del espíritu y la cultura (y la ciencia será un tipo de cultura) es la que da forma a nuestras percepciones y cosmovisiones, de modo que los datos sensoriales serán construcciones sociales independientes de determinaciones corpóreas. Una metodología materialista fi losófi ca ofrece en cambio un circularismo no vicioso que pasa por romper la unidad de cada una de estas tres ideas y referirlas unas a otras desde el momento de su constitución. Este artículo ensaya ese enfoque mediante el ejemplo de la historia de la acústica submarina y cotejando bibliografía
eciente en varios campos relevantes para los estudios literarios y culturales.
First, as elsewhere, Spanish politics posed both opportunities and constraints for the reception and development of most disciplines, even beyond public universities and state-funded research institutions.1 Second, Spanish scientists and engineers were relevant actors in the making of the modern Spanish state. They worked around problems and projects that were relevant for the broader political economy: industry, the military, administration, medicine, education and, more generally, ideology or worldview.
This chapter is organized around some of these “working worlds” of science. Its chief preoccupation will not be questions of backwardness with respect to the scientific core. Reception of scientific theories, practices, and instruments produced elsewhere will occupy a good deal of our attention. And we will insist on how those artifacts and ideas functioned in the changing Spanish political economy – for instance, from cultures of scarcity and craftsmanship to cultures of forced modernization and big science.
But our main interest lies in understanding the place of science within modern Spain. As such, we have structured the chapter along four rather large periods that mark political and economic breaks. However artificial and traversed by continuities, these periods had a lasting impact in scientific institutions and practices.
Link to German version: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-476-05421-0_33
Link to the Handbuch’s table of contents: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/bfm%3A978-3-476-05421-0%2F1.pdf
Antonio Miguel Bernal (Premio Nacional de Historia) y Juan Luis Pavón acompañan en la presentación al autor, Lino Camprubí.
Archivo de audio. A partir del minuto 20 mejora mucho.
research] ed. by Martina Heßler und Heike Weber.
icon of mechanical control of biological processes
in the atomic age, meet the ‘Algatron’.
Dreamt up as a system for producing food for
humans from human waste, it was soon reduced
to a less grandiose but no more prosaic incarnation:
the ‘fecal bag’, now used and loathed in
spaceships by astronauts. There are many other
examples of real and fictional trons. Luckily
for curious minds, David P. Munns has set up
a participative website (www.worldoftrons.com)
in which you can learn more about this era of
technological science or contribute your favorite
example.
Pero también hay que indagar en los factores internos y externos de la industrialización, la homologación de la economía española a la de los países capitalistas y, cómo ocultarlo, la extensión de muchos de esos atributos que relacionamos con el Estado del bienestar a grandes capas de la sociedad española. Gustavo Bueno lo llamó derecha socialista en su libro El mito de la Derecha, complementario de El mito de la izquierda y ambos de más de actualidad que nunca en el actual escenario pluripartidista. Los historiadores que estudian este proceso deben poder explicarlo. Si no, lo harán otros."
Estos ejemplos sugieren algunos comentarios finales sobre la explicación histórica.