Small nation, big ships winter navigation and technological nationalism in a peripheral country, 1878-1978
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© 2017 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
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A1 Alkuperäisartikkeli tieteellisessä aikakauslehdessä
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Authors
Date
2017-06
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Language
en
Pages
29
Series
History and Technology, Volume 33, issue 2, pp. 220-248
Abstract
Finland is the only country in the world where all ports freeze over during a typical winter. Over the century 1878-1978, Finland developed a winter-seafaring system that broke the winter isolation and eliminated seasonal variation in shipping. By using diverse archival sources, we deconstruct the dominant narrative of Finnish winter seafaring through which national as well as technological development is often presented as natural, inevitable and straightforward. We reinterpret the Finnish winter navigation system as a tangible, historical experience and show that technological solutions in this domain cannot be understood outside the context of a decades-long process of nation-building. Finally, we argue that winter navigation became a central imaginary for Finland as a western, industrial and modern nation. As such, the Finnish winter-seafaring system presents a case of technological nationalism in which a small, peripheral country sought to integrate itself into a modern international order.Description
Keywords
Nationalism, Finland, winter seafaring, icebreakers, technology transfer, large technological systems
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Citation
Matala, S & Sahari, A 2017, ' Small nation, big ships winter navigation and technological nationalism in a peripheral country, 1878-1978 ', History and Technology, vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 220-248 . https://doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2017.1343909