Machine conquest: Jules Verne’s technocratic worldmaking

Abstract This article reads Jules Verne’s Extraordinary Voyages series (1863–1905) through a worldmaking lens. It argues that, rather than simply reflecting 19th-century ideologies of progress, Verne was engaged in creative global ordering. The article argues that Verne constructed global order as technocratic, anti-political , and necessarily violent . This space was ambiguously but persistently appropriated by white, male engineers and scientists. This generates two important insights for International Relations (IR). First, Verne’s global order was not about states, sovereignty, or political community: it was about an elite vanguard of technocratic adventurers roaming the globe. At a time when colonial incursions frequently emerged out of interventions by explorers and engineers and other ‘people with projects’, this understanding resonated deeply. It is also worth recovering as a current of technocratic thought not centred on bureaucracy and strong government but on private enterprise. Second, Verne’s fiction constituted a powerful conception of global order, and contemporaries drew upon this as an inspiration for real-world interventions. At the French Société de Géographie, of which Verne was a long-time member, as well as among imperialists across Europe, the Voyages became a casual frame of reference in justification of colonial expansion. Better understanding this typically downplayed aspect of the modern international imagination not only promises to enrich IR’s understanding of the role of speculative fiction in global ordering but also puts the current revival of techno-colonial projects – from Seasteading to the colonisation of Mars – into needed perspective.