Introduction

Technology has been central to the discipline of International Relations (IR) throughout its history. The formal inception of the discipline emerged in the aftermath of the First World War, in which the horrific destructive potential of modern military weaponry had been amply illustrated. The industrialization of warfare and the utilization of the most advanced technological artefacts for the slaughter of a generation formed the background for the varied intellectual responses that the war engendered, ranging from institution building to reinforcement of the balance of power.1 Alfred Zimmern, Leonard Woolf and Norman Angell, central figures in the early development of the field, emphasized industrialization as driving the process of international integration. It was this integration that made war both terribly destructive and pointless, as interdependence altered the material benefits bestowed by conquest. Zimmern — holder of the world’s first chair in International Politics, created in Aberystwyth in 1919 — stressed the centrality of industrialization and modern communications technologies in the creation of the discipline of International Relations itself (Osiander 1998: 424). For Zimmern, international integration was a ‘result of technological innovation, more specifically the increasing speed and ease and hence volume of global communications’ (Osiander 1998: 417; Zimmern 1928: 154). Technological change formed a central conceptual and empirical referent point for interwar ‘idealists’.