A transnational approach to understanding and analyzing knowledge circulation.

Focusing on what happens to knowledge at national borders, rather than treating it as flowing like currents across them, or diffusing out from center to periphery, the contributors to this collection stress the human intervention that shapes and drives how knowledge is processed, mobilized, and repurposed in transnational transactions to serve differing and uneven interests, constraints, and environments. The chapters consider both what knowledge travels and how it travels across borders of varying permeability that impede or facilitate its movement. They look closely at a vast range of platforms and objects of knowledge, from tangible commodities—like hybrid wheat seeds, penicillin, Robusta coffee, naval weaponry, and high-performance computers—to the more conceptual apparatuses of telecommunications, statistics, and food sovereignty. Moreover, this volume decenters the Global North, tracking how knowledge moves along multiple paths across the borders of Mexico, India, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, the Soviet Union, China, Angola, and Palestine and the West Bank, as well as the United States and United Kingdom. The variety of the kinds of knowledge addressed in the chapters brings forth an extraordinary array of state and non-state actors and institutions committed to performing the work needed to move knowledge across national borders.

Table of Contents:
Introduction
   Writing the Transnational History of Knowledge Flows in a Global Age
   John Krige
Chapter 1
   Knowledge, State Power, and the Invention of International Science
   Jessica Wang

Part I: Regulating Transnational Knowledge Flows
Chapter 2
   Harnessing Invention: The British Admiralty and the Political Economy of Knowledge in the World War I Era
   Katherine C. Epstein
Chapter 3
   Culture Diplomacy: Penicillin and the Problem of Anglo-American Knowledge Sharing in World War II
   Michael A. Falcone
Chapter 4
   Dangerous Calculations: The Origins of the US High-Performance Computer Export Safeguards Regime, 1968–1974
   Mario Daniels
Chapter 5
   Regulating the Transnational Flow of Intangible Knowledge of Space Launchers between the United States and China in the Clinton Era
   John Krige

Part II: Facilitating Transnational Knowledge Flows
Chapter 6
   Beyond Borlaug’s Shadow: Mexican Seeds and the Narratives of the Green Revolution
   Gabriela Soto Laveaga
Chapter 7
   Moving Coffee from the Cloud Forests of Colonial Angola to the Breakfast Tables of Main Street America, 1940–1961
   Maria Gago
Chapter 8
   Statistics and Emancipation from New Deal America to Guerrilla Warfare in Guinea-Bissau
   Tiago Saraiva
Chapter 9
   Security versus Sovereignty in a Palestinian Seed Bank
   Courtney Fullilove
Chapter 10
   How Data Cross Borders: Globalizing Plant Knowledge through Transnational Data Management and Its Epistemic Economy
   Sabina Leonelli
Conclusion
   Decentering the Global North
   John Krige
Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index