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Special Issue: Entangling Technological Infrastructures, Material Flows and Enviromental ModernitiesICON, The Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology | VOL. 28 | No 1 | 2023Guest Editors
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Stathis Arapostathis and Frank Veraart, “Entangling Technological Infrastructures, Material Flows and Enviromental Modernities”
ICON: Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology 28, no 1 (2023): 9-23
Sotiris Alexakis and Stathis Arapostathis, “From Exploitation to Adaptation: Entanglements, Nature, and Agricultural Practices in Greece, 1920–2000”
ICON: Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology 28, no 1 (2023): 48-76
Abstract: In the article, we study the interconnections of different sociotechnical systems involved in the shaping of the agricultural regime in Greece during the 20th century. Our focus is on the importance of material anchoring between different systems in directing transformations of the regime and in configuring the practices of historical actors towards continuation and adaptation rather than radical changes, despite the global challenges and pressures. Specifically, we argue that in the interwar period, Greece’s extant chemical industry had control of both the production of fertilizers and of the necessary raw materials, and was thus empowered to promote and legitimize policies of fertilization. Moreover, we argue that, since then, an agricultural mode of production that promoted intensification and endless productivity was determined and enshrined as the default under the influence of four entangled sociotechnical systems: the chemical industry, the mining industry, seeds, and water infrastructures (for energy and irrigation).
Stathis Arapostathis, Kyriaki Klokiti, Graham Dutfield, “Plants, Catalogues and Credit: Agriculture Transitions in Proprietary Regimes in Greece 1920-2020”
Intellectual Property Quarterly, 4 (2020): 299-314
Abstract: The emergence and transformation of intellectual property in Greece has attracted little scholarly attention, and there is an understandable tendency in legal scholarship to focus exclusively on formal intellectual property rules. This article offers an original approach. First, it examines proprietary, attributional and other regulatory norms in plant breeding in Greece from the 1920s to the present day. Specifically, it traces how the management of knowledge, the distribution of credit, and the establishment of regimes dealing with ownership and productivity claims have evolved over that period. Until the early 1980s, there was no intellectual property ( IP) in the narrow (that is, purely doctrinal) sense, but this does not mean that IP sensu lato was entirely absent. State institutions managed credit through publications and catalogues, and in so doing, socially legitimised their role as the creators of new improved varieties, publicly made productivity claims for the new varieties, and at the same time regulated the practices of agronomists and farmers. This more expansive construction of ” IP” provides a secondary claim to this article’s originality. The 1981 accession to the European Economic Community, however, reoriented Greek agriculture towards market liberalisation, alongside the institutionalisation of legal plant breeders’ rights, albeit not domestically, and national seed catalogues. As this article shows, though, this much more proprietarian and exclusionary trend is being challenged in Greece, as it is elsewhere in the world, by an emerging grassroots innovation movement.