The Introduction presents the perspective and main arguments of the book. It situates the book’s subject and approach in the historiography of the social sciences, delineates how it draws on historical epistemologies, and sketches how it contributes to histories of the politics of growth.

In the course of the 1960s, mathematical modeling gradually stabilized as the primary mode of academic economic research. The Epilogue sketches the fate of “the Solow model” as it consolidated as an epistemic standard for an intellectual practice that focused on refining mathematical artifacts and using them to estimate model-relationships in any given data sets. Building on the idea that it already developed a life of its own at Solow’s desk, the Epilogue inquires into the movements and transformations of the multifarious artifact. It was adapted, extended, and reduced in relation to specific local, institutional, and strategic arrangements in planning offices, universities, and research institutions. Sketching some of its trajectories in the field of growth accounting and macroeconomic management, I wonder how the model sedimented into knowledge infrastructures and how the model’s knowledge, as precarious as it might have been, was equipped with computability, prognostic potential, and policy effectiveness.

Chapter 3 traces the establishment and distribution of hydroelectricity in the early People’s Republic. Inheriting technical personnel from the defeated Nationalist regime, the Communist government worked to create its own infrastructure. This chapter argues that the cooperation between party leaders and “experts from the old society” functioned relatively smoothly until the rise of radical Maoism in 1958. The harnessing of rivers was matched and enabled by the taming of individuals with technical expertise.

In March 2022, a couple of months after Kais Saied’s coup, I met Samia Driss, a leader of Ennahda in France whose trajectory we have followed throughout the preceding pages. I met her at the Place de la République in the centre of Paris, where many demonstrations took place during Ben Ali’s regime and where a new protest to oppose Kais Saied’s ascent to power was about to happen after several that had taken place over the previous months. Indeed, on 25 July 2021, the highly symbolic date of the proclamation of the Tunisian Republic, President Saied announced a state of emergency in Tunisia, suspended the Assembly and dismissed the prime minister. He then placed all powers under his control, with some initial popular support. Exactly a year later, he organised a constitutional referendum to replace the January 2014 Constitution.

Chapter 7 addresses the environmental impacts of the hydropower nation. Rising water levels in the dam’s reservoir area brought about unforeseen ecological consequences. Alongside the tragic human displacement, various species of fish and waterfowl have experienced a variety of changes in the transformed river landscape. In recent decades, environmental hazards – such as riverbank collapse – have persisted in the reservoir area. On the other hand, the creation of a wetland preserve and the emergence of a thriving population of Whooper Swans in the area offer evidence of the development of a nuanced relationship between humanity and nature in the Chinese state’s pursuit of what it calls an ecological civilization. These developments complicate the overwhelmingly dominant narrative of environmental decline in the field of environmental history.

Tunisian leftists and Islamists were active in fighting Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime, but several of them were also at the forefront of organisations that were concerned with immigrant politics. These were as much related to the French Muslim field as they were to the working and living conditions of immigrants and the fight for social and political equality. Chapter 5 therefore explores the articulation between different types of engagement, as well as the continuity, complementarity and simultaneity of activism in the fields of immigrant and homeland politics. The chapter also looks at the tensions and dissonances that resulted from those two faces of activism. The comparison between Tunisian leftists and Islamists shows how various activists found themselves facing different rules in the field of immigrant politics and how they negotiated these rules in the face of the unequal accumulation of material and symbolic resources. The chapter shows how new perspectives should be considered in order to fully understand Tunisian politics in France, and how ideological and class dimensions sometimes superseded the pro- or anti-regime cleavages.

Chapter 3 explores how the host state (France) and the home state (Tunisia) influenced the possibilities, nature and forms of pro- and anti-regime activism. It shows how the trans-state space of mobilisation should be understood in the light of the diverse and dynamic opportunities and constraints it offered. It first examines the ways in which the Tunisian system of control – the politics of encadrement – worked from afar, and shows how this system was characterised by a dialectic of assistance and surveillance. Through social and cultural encadrement, as well as surveillance, propaganda and a pervasive sense of threat, the Tunisian party-state succeeded in constraining Tunisian anti-regime mobilisation while simultaneously facing difficulties in encouraging support and pro-regime action in France. The chapter also looks at the ways in which the French authorities managed the different groups, from a diplomatic approach towards Ben Ali’s party-state to a securitised approach towards Islamists and a tendency towards indifference to the leftist movements.

Major spent his career in a strategic borderland where knowledge was embroiled in long-running territorial disputes. Competing princes built collections, laboratories, and intelligence-gathering networks in attempts to strengthen the resources of the land and their hold upon it. Their rival attempts to found global colonies and establishing long-distance trading networks entangled tightly with their global collections. The Gottorf dukes intended the new university to be another fixture of a state-building apparatus that already included glassworks, a chymical laboratory, extensive gardens, a celebrated collection, a planetarium, and an impressive library. These nearby facilities offered the University of Kiel sophisticated resources. They also illustrated the dangers of intertwining knowledge tightly with use. The shifting political situation allowed and even required scholars to seek beyond a single patron for support. This setting can illuminate Major’s attempts to defend academic independence, to develop audiences across rival states and a broader public, and to develop "unprejudiced" approaches.

This chapter focuses on micro encounters engendered by the Yale Peruvian Expedition, exploring via textual and photographic evidence the racial scientific research that shaped encounters in Peru between expedition members and Indigenous and Mestizo peoples, some of whom served as the expedition’s workers and assistants. Reading these sources in relation to the broader context of rural unrest in the Cusco region, the emergence of an urban and university-based indigenista movement that promoted the study of Indigenous peoples, and the rise of American-led expedition science, Warren questions how different groups imagined and contested the moral and ethical dimensions of such work. He argues that when measured and photographed, Indigenous and Mestizo research subjects ultimately subverted the expedition’s efforts to document accurate visual depictions of racial types. Drawing on the concept of ethnographic refusal in Indigenous Studies while also identifying other forms of engagement, Warren criticizes the univocal conception of moral fields as the possession of imperial researchers but not of Indigenous and Mestizo people subjected to their gaze.

Cannon shot and military engineering broke the earth’s crust, churning up amber, sand, shells, and petrified animal remains. These fossils allowed early modern people to rewrite the history of the earth. Against many contemporary views, Major argued that plant, animal, and other bodies hardened into rock slowly over time through the contingent motions of salt in conditions of changing humidity. He conjectured about how stones that were widely collected as wonders of nature could be explained through geological processes in their sites of excavation. He collected locally on the beaches of Kiel and aimed to travel to a famous cave in the Harz mountains where so-called dragon’s bones, unicorn horns, and human-like rocky formations could be found. However, Major never completed his cave study nor a planned major work on lithology. Relatedly, he sought to establish a science of shells but never finished it to his satisfaction. As Major gained new knowledge, he continually rearranged his own collections into new formations that gave rise to new perspectives. His increasing recognition that some underground stones were ancient artifacts shifted his interest from petrifaction to archaeology.