This book itself is proof of the globalised world we live in. Transnational lives and international connectivity are, however, only globalisation’s most visible faces. Today’s world is more than a virtual multicultural cosmopolis or an immaterial information society. It is a planet wired by transoceanic fibre-optic cables, digital storage facilities and satellites. It is a world made of global commodity networks, continental infrastructures and transnational migrant workers. Yet it is not a borderless world of unconstrained and uninterrupted flows and free movements. The technology and materials that support globalisation have paradoxical consequences. The same knowledge and technologies that promote globalisation often create new barriers, gaps or borders. Moreover, the complex technological scaffolding that supports modern globalisation and de-globalisation are built, designed and installed in specific parts of the planet. And what of the social actors who put technologies in place? This book aims to locate them and bring them back into the history of the making of the global economy.

David Pretel is Research Fellow at the Centre for Historical Studies, Colmex, The College of Mexico, Mexico. He specialises in the global history of technology, international economic history and the intellectual history of capitalism, with an ever-increasing interest in Latin American history.

Lino Camprubí is Research Fellow at the Center for the History of Science, UAB Barcelona, Spain. He has been a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Germany, and a visiting lecturer at University of Chicago, USA.