The Impact of Long Terms: Resource Planning and Social Engineering (c.1850-1950)

This panel addresses the impact of long terms when engineers, architects, government officials, and entrepreneurs planned revenue and resources during an era of industrial expansion, war, and social engineering. While the paper tools of their trade showed single units, complete time series, smooth lines and calendrical grids for action, they dealt with fractured time. The life-spans of employees and investors were ill-aligned with those of companies, and the deep time of resource deposits was out of sync with increasingly global market cycles and technological progress. In these uneasy arrays of conflicting temporalities, scales and units functioned as 'hinge' technologies and were therefore the focus of polemics and struggles for power. This means for historians that scales and units that populate the working tools of professionals can offer entry points into past battles between standardised time and countertempos, hegemonic scales and their alternatives. This panel presents cases where ideas and technologies of duration, sustainability, efficiency, continuity, compression and expansion caused debate in social sciences, philosophy, and engineering. We focus on mental and material protheses that allowed professionals to shrink long time-spans to push their particular agenda in politically fraught situations, and show how temporally remote events were made to have an impact on the present, though not always as planned.