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The common question from the western point of view is of the sort; why did China lose its early leadership of productive technologies to Europe during the early modern period? Answers to this seemingly clear enquiry vary from general cultural inwardness to the interferences of imperial governance. This collection surveys such theories but alters the issue by raising the notion that Chinese technologies did not so much fail as move along a path different from that of Europe.

In Portugal, although the process of assimilating the concept of progress and technical development can be discerned in different movements and areas, the training and practice of Portuguese engineers during the 18th and 19th centuries is undoubtly one of the main arenas for asserting modernity. For this article, we have selected three figures we believe to be of particular significance in this context. The first, from the 18th century, is Manuel de Azevedo Fortes, engineering considered the father of Portuguese a military engineer who brought to Portugal the new trends of European engineering, mainly concerning the definition of the training and the practice of engineers. The second, from the 19th century, is João Crisóstomo de Abreu e Sousa, the father of engineering in Portugal one of the most representative engineers of the second half of the 19th century Portuguese engineering, for whom public works were synonymous of progress; and the third, another 19th-century figure, is José Vitorino Damásio, who was active in public administration as well as in business and in technical education.