DITNO - Data is the new oil - a political history of the European computing industry

ID Call: HORIZON-MSCA-2023-PF-01 MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships

Sapienza's role in the project: Host Institution

Supervisor: Giovanni Paoloni

Fellow: Marta Musso

Department​​​​​​​: History, Anthropology, Religion, Arts and Performing Arts 

Project start date: September 1, 2025

Project end date: August 31, 2027

Abstract:

The “Data is the new oil – a political history of the European computing industry” project investigates the history of the European computing industry from the aftermath of the second world war until the present. The research will be based primarily on companies’ archives, State Archives, and the historical archives of the EU, and will place the evolution of the European computing industry in relation with the development of a European oil industry, the most successful example of developing a strong, strategic, and globally competitive Europe-made industry against America’s first-comer advantage. By analysing the reasons of the failure to also establish strong European actors in the IT industry, the project will allow to better understand the reasons for the decline in European productivity, as well as what the role of the European Union (EU) can be in promoting the development of national or infra-national strong IT companies, able to compete with the current dominance of US companies alone. Furthermore, the project will consider the problem of the data economy in a historical perspective, analysing access to data as a commodity, in parallel to the problem of access to oil which dominated the geopolitical economy of the 20th century, testing the literature on the history of commodities on access to data. This will allow to cover a gap in the current literature on the history of the European computing industry, which focussed almost exclusively on hardware and software, and rooted in History of Technology. This project will update the literature from International History with a reflection rooted in history on the role of data in the economic and geopolitical development of the Twentieth Century.