The U.S. Military and the Rise of “Big Tech Cities”: An Incorporated Comparison of Austin and Seattle

Keywords: regional development, state-business relations, militarization, Seattle, Austin
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Conventional theories of regional development place private-sector innovation or the preferences of skilled workers as the rationale for the rise of ‘big tech cities’ in the United States. An often-forgotten dimension is the role of the national security state in underwriting high-tech industrial development through the Cold War period. Using Philip McMichael’s method of “incorporated comparison,” we examine how the U.S. military has been embedded in two exemplars of high-tech-oriented regional dynamism, the Seattle region and Austin, Texas. The analysis explores how these city-regions were positioned within the geography of the post-war national security state, tracing how shifts in geopolitical strategies and military procurement during the Cold War provoked distinct trajectories of regional industrial restructuring. These transformations were not mechanical, but depended on the agency of locally-embedded state elites and on contingent inter-industry linkages forged between military contractors and non-contracting private sector firms. While the United States’ big tech cities are often interpreted as symbols of economic inequality and corporate power, they also express the legacies and consequences of its global imperial reach.