This panel is situated at the intersection of knowledge, infrastructure, and imperialism. Focusing roughly on the period from the late-nineteenth century to the post-war era, it explores the production, application, and contestation of knowledge on different sites of U.S. sponsored infrastructure in Latin America and the Caribbean. Each paper zooms into the context of one infrastructure system related to formal and informal imperialism on the part of the United States: the Intercontinental Railway project, the Pan-American Highway, the Panama Canal Zone, and the airfields of Pan American Airways.

To make these systems work, U.S. planners had to acquire and apply comprehensive knowledge on a broad array of subjects. The Railway Commission, for instance, gathered information on topography, urbanization, and trade in countries through which the future railway was supposed to run. Medical authorities in the Panama Canal Zone, for their part, not only had to develop means to treat disabled canal workers but also had to understand their emotions.

Using case studies, the panel aims to demonstrate two insights: first, that knowledge flows relating to infrastructure were not unilateral but were produced in “contact zones,” and second, that different sets of knowledge often coexisted and competed in these instances. Together, the papers contribute to an ongoing shift in the study of imperial infrastructure. In recent years, scholars have moved beyond diffusionist narratives of imperial infrastructure systems as “tools of empire” (Daniel Headrick) or “imperial mechanics” (Ricardo D. Salvatore) and have instead highlighted actors within their local conditions to inquire into how they negotiated, contested, and appropriated technological interventions in different historical and geographical settings.

The panel adds a knowledge perspective to this critical reassessment of infrastructure. It situates knowledge flows in interaction. Closely following the activities of U.S. planners and engineers as much as Central and South American engineers, laborers, and local dwellers, the case studies explore how and by whom knowledge was produced and applied and whose knowledge was necessary to design and operate infrastructure and its accompanying facilities. Confronted with unfamiliar conditions on the ground, some North American planners embraced and adopted vernacular knowledge while others believed in the superiority of their own concepts. Against the background of formal and informal U.S. imperialism, the papers discuss the impact of unequal hierarchies, racist othering, and the belief in cultural and technological superiority on the production of knowledge.

Foregrounding interactions, the papers also pay close attention to the activities of hitherto hidden actors in these processes, who were both producers of knowledge and potential subjects of its application. Far from being passive, as the papers demonstrate, these (often local) actors held crucial positions in knowledge flows and were free to share information or use it to subvert underlying hierarchies. Juxtaposing these papers, the panel provides a fresh perspective on knowledge production in (informal) imperial settings by illuminating the involvement of different “co-authors” with contradictory experiences and visions in the planning, construction, and operation of infrastructure systems.