This book will provide a compact scholarly introduction to major issues in the cultural history of science and technology in Britain and the British Empire between 1760 and 1914. Key themes will include: exploration and empire, industry and empire, and communication and empire. By demonstrating, in historical context, the real, complex and changing reactions between science and technology during the imperial expansion of 1780-1914, Engineering an Empire will move beyond the sometimes insular discipline of history of technology to offer something altogether new.

Engineers are empire-builders. James Watt, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Robert Stephenson and a host of lesser known figures worked to build and expand personal and business empires of material technology founded on and sustained by durable networks of trust and expertise. In so doing these engineers and their heirs also became active agents of political and economic empire. Indeed, steamships, railways and electric telegraph systems increasingly complemented one another to form what one early twentieth-century telegraph engineer aptly termed "our most powerful weapon in the cause of Inter-Imperial Commerce." This book provides a fascinating exploration of the cultural construction of the large-scale technologies of empire.