Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>How did experts become central actors in international affairs? The Technocratic International tells the surprisingly neglected story of how nineteenth-century Europe’s technocrats and capitalists advanced major projects with the help of a new elite of technical experts. From the Suez Canal to the world telegraph network, they made the case for a technocratic international. This bundle of ideas and practices laid the foundations of modern international organisations—but it also enabled capitalist expansion, dispossession, and the infrastructures of empire. Based on original archival research, The Technocratic International introduces a new theory of domain differentiation: the articulation of a distinctive domain of political action, such as the international, in which particular actors, such as experts, hold authority. This book confronts an inconvenient history to rethink present-day debates about expertise, technocracy, and the international.</jats:p>