Article ID: CBB847774032

"A Light Bulb in Every House": The Istanbul General Electric Factory and American Technology Transfer to Turkey (July 2022)

unapi

In 1946, Turkish entrepreneur Vehbi Koç signed an agreement with the U.S. firm General Electric to build and operate its first light bulb factory in the Near/Middle East, in Istanbul. This private joint venture introduced new manufacturing techniques, business practices, and consumer habits to Turkey, opening channels of postwar technological exchange. Closer examination of the GE-Koç partnership reveals that during the early Cold War, the transfer and embedding of American technologies in Turkey was a politically complicated process of innovation that required constant adaptation. Fraught with unforeseeable obstacles, it also required cautious negotiation with multiple transnational actors. The story of the GE-Koç partnership thus adds a new dimension to historical understandings of the Turkish Cold War experience and the Americanization of the region. It illustrates how transferring a nonmilitary, soft-power, domestic technology—the light bulb—played a significant role in Turkish-American relations and therefore contributes to studies of U.S. Cold War diplomacy through transnational investment in innovation.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB847774032/

Similar Citations

Article Jan Zofka; (2018)
China as a role model? The ‘Economic Leap’ campaign in Bulgaria (1958-1960)

Book Ali Erken; (2018)
America and the Making of Modern Turkey: Science, Culture and Political Alliances

Book Siegfried S. Hecker; (2016)
Doomed to Cooperate: How American and Russian Scientists Joined Forces to Avert Some of the Greatest Post-Cold War Nuclear Dangers

Article Honghong Tinn; (October 2018)
Modeling Computers and Computer Models: Manufacturing Economic-Planning Projects in Cold War Taiwan, 1959–1968

Article O'Reagan, Douglas Michael; (2014)
Science, Technology, and Know-How: Exploitation of German Science and the Challenges of Technology Transfer in the Postwar World

Thesis O'Reagan, Douglas Michael; (2014)
Science, Technology, and Know-How: Exploitation of German Science and the Challenges of Technology Transfer in the Postwar World

Article Forsberg, Carl; (2019)
Iraq, the United States, and the long shadow of the Cold War

Article Pablo León-Aguinaga; Lorenzo Delgado Gómez-Escalonilla; (2021)
The deployment of US military assistance to Spain in the 1950s: Limited modernisation and strategic dependence

Article David Scott Foglesong; (2020)
When the Russians really were coming: Citizen diplomacy and the end of Cold War enmity in America

Article Herrala, Meri Elisabet; (2019)
Challenges for Soviet-American collaboration in the Cold War: The capitalisation of pianist Sviatoslav Richter for American musical markets

Article Claudia Kedar; (2018)
Economic neutrality during the Cold War: The World Bank, the United States, and Pinochet’s Chile, 1973–1977

Book Jeffrey P. Stone; (2019)
British and American News Maps in the Early Cold War Period, 1945–1955: Mapping the "Red Menace"

Article Doel, Ronald E.; Friedman, Robert Marc; Lajus, Julia; Sörline, Sverker; Wråkberg, Urban; (2014)
Strategic Arctic Science: National Interests in Building Natural Knowledge---Interwar Era through the Cold War

Article Melanie Brand; (2021)
Intelligence, warning, and policy: The Johnson administration and the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia

Book Jeroen van Dongen; (2016)
Cold War Science and the Transatlantic Circulation of Knowledge

Book Christopher Hollings; (2016)
Scientific Communication Across the Iron Curtain

Article Nicholas Amthony Autiello; (2021)
Taming the Wild Dragon: John F. Kennedy and the Republic of China, 1961–63

Book Heidi Tinsman; (2014)
Buying into the Regime: Grapes and Consumption in Cold War Chile and the United States

Book Junker, Detlef; Gassert, Philipp; Mausbach, Wilfried; Morris, David B.; (2004)
The United States and Germany in the era of the Cold War, 1945-1990: A handbook

Article Howkins, Adrian; (2008)
Political Meteorology: Weather, Climate and the Contest for Antarctic Sovereignty, 1939--1959

Authors & Contributors
O'Reagan, Douglas Michael
Doel, Ronald E.
Dongen, Jeroen van
Friedman, Robert Marc
Hollings, Christopher David
Howkins, Adrian John
Journals
Cold War History
History of Meteorology
Journal of Historical Geography
ProQuest Dissertations and Theses
Technology and Culture
Publishers
Springer
University of California, Berkeley
Cambridge University Press
Brill
Duke University Press
I. B. Tauris
Concepts
Cold War
International relations
Technology transfer
Cross-national interaction
Political science
Science and politics
People
Khruschchev, Nikita Sergeyevich
Mao, Zedong
Hussein, Saddam
John F. Kennedy
Pinochet, Augusto
Lyndon Baines Johnson
Time Periods
20th century
Places
United States
Soviet Union
Great Britain
France
Germany
Chile
Institutions
Rockefeller Foundation
Ford Foundation
World Bank
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment