Primer: Technology

Most people today identify technology with cutting-edge innovations that transform human capabilities and thus bring historical progress. Recently this positive narrative has been undermined by concerns about technology’s role in triggering the accelerating environmental degradation of the Anthropocene (McNeill, The Great Acceleration). More broadly defined, however, technology denotes the whole spectrum of tools and skills with which human societies construct their worlds, and the artifacts that result from these processes – cell-phones or bread, grindstones, temple irrigation systems or assembly lines. The impact of technology is symbolic and social as well as material: artifacts have meaning; ways of making and doing embody beliefs and values, identities and relationships. As a nexus of material, cultural and political elements, technologies offer excellent opportunities for the multi-dimensional investigations of movements, exchanges and entanglements that interest world historians.

In considering how technologies evolved over time, shaped and were shaped by societies and encounters between them, and moved (or failed to move) around the world, it can be helpful to think in terms of two mutually constitutive concepts. The first is technological landscapes – the repertoires of skilled material practices and artifacts that societies or social groups build to produce food, shelter and clothing; to communicate; to control; to distinguish rank and gender, native and foreign, civilized and uncouth; to worship, fight or trade. The second concept is technological cultures – which technologies are judged significant and why, which are considered of minor importance or simply not noticed; ideas about the forces mobilized by technological activities of various kinds and about what constitutes efficacy; and views about how, whether and to what ends technologies should or should not be used, the nature of their effects, and their political, moral or metaphysical significance. As heuristics, these twin concepts can help us integrate technology productively into world history without projecting modern values and preconceptions onto the past (Bray, “Flows and Matrices, Landscapes and Cultures”; El Hariry, “On Our Own Terms”).

For many years the most influential narratives about technology in world history were structured around the rise of the West. Defining technological significance as transformative innovations that increased factor productivity, economic historians like Landes and Mokyr explained the nineteenth-century rise to global supremacy of the Western industrial powers in terms of a unique and superior culture of innovation, rooted in scientific curiosity, economic rationality and liberal values and institutions (Landes, The Unbound Prometheus; Mokyr, The Lever of Riches). This technological culture allowed the initially resource-poor Europeans to overtake and subjugate civilizations like China or the Islamic empires, which had formerly led the world in technological sophistication and commercial importance. Acknowledging that these non-Western societies had developed once-impressive technological landscapes, historians of this school asked what factors had impeded the cultural creativity and dynamism necessary for them to follow the Western path to sustained technological innovation and accelerated economic growth (Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past; Jones, The European Miracle). There are disagreements about the dates of the ‘Great Divergence’, and about whether other civilizations were inherently ‘blocked systems’ or rather knocked off track by Western competition and intrusions – but such critiques likewise typically treat technology as a proxy for economy (for instance Pomeranz, The Great Divergence).

Meanwhile, in less celebratory mode, political historians like Michael Adas and Daniel Headrick emphasized the oppressive power of Western technology as a tool of imperialist domination. Westerners took ‘machines as the measure of men’ to rank races and regions, and to justify colonialism as a civilizing mission. The technologies they imported –from weaponry to railways and factories –functioned as both material and cultural infrastructure, remodeling local societies, disciplining subject populations and forming subaltern identities (Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men; Headrick, Power over Peoples). Technological imperialism did not end with the independence of former colonies after WWII, but continued through development aid and programs for technology transfer, which helped perpetuate the underdevelopment of non-Western nations (Adas, Dominance by Design).

Both models have been criticized as Eurocentric, firstly for suggesting that all significant innovation occurred in the West and flowed outwards from there, and secondly, from a more explicitly post-colonial perspective, for downplaying the agency of non-Western subjects, and neglecting the role of local technological cultures and landscapes in shaping the outcomes of such encounters. Some post-colonial historians take cases such as railroads or engineering education to ask how local technological landscapes and cultures co-produce, transmute or subvert colonial or cosmopolitan knowledge and practice (Mentzel, Transportation Technology; Martykánová, “Global Engineers”). Some anatomize the forms of technological imperialism practiced by non-Western powers (Moore, Constructing East Asia). Others trace the emergence of modern technological cultures that differentiate themselves from hegemonic norms (Medina, Marques, and Holmes, Beyond Imported Magic). Another fruitful alternative shifts the focus from large technological systems controlled by the state or corporations to ‘everyday technologies’ such as bicycles or sewing-machines, imported innovations that local populations adapted and naturalized into their technological landscape, changing their lives and expectations in the process (Arnold, Everyday Technology; Fretwell, “The Tools of Tailoring”). Looking at ‘technologies in use’ also draws attention to the often indispensable role of older technologies in making new systems work, while illuminating hybridizations or creolizations of knowledge and practice at local and world level (Edgerton, The Shock of the Old). Meanwhile studies at the global scale of technologies like nuclear power, automobile production or food provisioning illuminate how geographies of difference, including racialized hierarchies, are reproduced through the articulations of global supply chains and divisions of labor (Hecht, Being Nuclear; Grandin, Fordlandia; Freidberg, Fresh).

Undermining the idea of modern technology and its values as a Western export, these critical approaches reveal instead a rich historical tapestry interweaving threads from around the globe. Yet revising the narrative of the origins of industrial culture can only contribute so far to expanding our technological imaginations. Studies that elude or reject this teleology can be most stimulating here, seeking to recover modes of world-building that seldom figured in conventional histories of technology: stones, arrows, hammocks, yams or stairs anchor technological cultures in which temporalities, flows, forces, and the efficacy of material action were conceived in ways deeply alien to modern technological rationality, and yet deeply resonant across human experience (Gómez, “Caribbean Stones and the Creation of Early-Modern Worlds”; Mavhunga, Transient Workspaces; Norton, “Subaltern Technologies”; Coupaye, Growing Artefacts, Displaying Relationships; Bray, “Technics and Civilization in Late Imperial China”). Debates about more prosaic technological systems such as military revolutions and gunpowder empires have moved on, from ‘antiquated notions’ of diffusion from West to East and the innovative limitations of Eastern societies, to informed analyses of South-South flows and East-East early modern arms races, whose contributions to European developments are now freely acknowledged (Levi, “Asia in the Gunpowder Revolution”; Andrade, “Culture and Context”). Together with longue durée studies of global commodities such as porcelain or cotton, or comparative histories of useful knowledge, these approaches destabilize the Eurocentric geographies, chronologies and categories that still dominate both history of technology and world history (Gerritsen, The City of Blue and White; Riello and Parthasarathi, The Spinning World; Schäfer and Valeriani, “Technology Is Global”).

The challenge of epistemic justice also frames three helpful introductory surveys of technology in world history. All emphasize the importance of understanding how technological landscapes and cultures relate; W. Bernard Carlson presents case studies of societies grouped by era and treated by and large as self-contained. Headrick and Arnold Pacey emphasize interactions and flows. Pacey’s cases of ‘technological dialogue’ give unusual prominence to ‘South-South’ interactions and to ‘South-North’ flows of technological ideas and practices. None can fully evade the teleology of the Rise of the West, but all do their best to qualify its dynamics and, despite the straitjacket of linear chronology, to offer non-specialists accessible narratives that challenge received opinion (Carlson, Technology in World History; Headrick, Technology; Pacey and Bray, Technology in World Civilization).

The framework of world history offers valuable correctives to the Eurocentric instincts that still dominate history of technology, while technology offers a rewarding heuristic prism for enriching world history. One obvious contribution is to people the global map with technological actors and ideas beyond the narrow sphere of Europe. Another is to highlight south-south relations. Most important, explorations of technological landscapes and cultures beyond the telos of industrial modernity can expand our technological imaginations, better equipping us to meet the technogenic challenges that face the world today.

Adas, Michael. Dominance by Design: Technological Imperatives and America’s Civilizing Mission. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2009.
———. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.
Andrade, Tonio. “Culture and Context: Reflections on the Gunpowder Age.” Journal of Chinese History 2, no. 2 (2018): 439–41.
Arnold, David. Everyday Technology: Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Bray, Francesca. “Flows and Matrices, Landscapes and Cultures.” ICON: Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology 22 (2017): 8–19.
———. “Technics and Civilization in Late Imperial China: An Essay in the Cultural History of Technology.” Osiris, 2nd Series, 13 (January 1, 1998): 11–33.
Carlson, W. Bernard, ed. Technology in World History. 7 vols. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Coupaye, Ludovic. Growing Artefacts, Displaying Relationships: Yams, Art and Technology amongst the Nyamikum Abelam of Papua New Guinea. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2013.
Edgerton, David. The Shock of the Old : Technology and Global History since 1900. London: Profile, 2008.
El Hariry, Shorouk. “On Our Own Terms: Towards a History of Arab Technological Landscapes and Cultures.” Technology and Culture 62, no. 1 (2021): 241–52.
Elvin, Mark. The Pattern of the Chinese Past: A Social and Economic Interpretation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973.
Freidberg, Susanne. Fresh: A Perishable History. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Fretwell, Elizabeth Ann. “The Tools of Tailoring as Technologies-in-Use in Twentieth Century Benin, West Africa.” History and Technology (2021): 1–25. DOI: 10.1080/07341512.2021.1928452
Gerritsen, Anne. The City of Blue and White: Chinese Porcelain and the Early Modern World. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020.
Gómez, Pablo F. “Caribbean Stones and the Creation of Early-Modern Worlds.” History and Technology 34, no. 1 (January 2, 2018): 11–20.
Grandin, Greg. Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City. Metropolitan, 2009.
Headrick, Daniel R. Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010.
———. Technology: A World History. New Oxford World History. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Hecht, Gabrielle. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. MIT Press, 2014.
Jones, E. L. The European Miracle: Environments, Economies, and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981.
Landes, David S. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. London: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Levi, Scott C. “Asia in the Gunpowder Revolution.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, 2018. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.186.
Martykánová, Darina. “Global Engineers: Professional Trajectories of the Graduates of the École Centrale Des Arts et Manufactures (1830s–1920s).” In Technology and Globalisation: Networks of Experts in World History, edited by David Pretel and Lino Camprubí, 75–104. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2018.
Mavhunga, Clapperton Chakanetsa. Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2014.
McNeill, J. R. The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945. The Great Acceleration. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.
Medina, Eden, Ivan da Costa Marques, and Christina Holmes, eds. Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America. MIT Press, 2014.
Mentzel, Peter. Transportation Technology and Imperialism in the Ottoman Empire, 1800-1923. SHOT Historical Perspectives on Technology. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.
Mokyr, Joel. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress. Oxford University Press, USA, 1992.
Moore, Aaron Stephen. Constructing East Asia: Technology, Ideology, and Empire in Japan’s Wartime Era, 1931-1945. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013.
Norton, Marcy. “Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World.” Colonial Latin American Review 26, no. 1 (2017): 18–38.
Pacey, Arnold, and Francesca Bray. Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History. 2nd, revised ed. Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2021.
Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000.
Riello, Giorgio, and Prasannan Parthasarathi, eds. The Spinning World: A Global History of Cotton Textiles, 1200-1850. Pasold Studies in Textile History 16. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Schäfer, Dagmar, and Simona Valeriani. “Technology Is Global: The Useful & Reliable Knowledge Debate.” Technology and Culture 62, no. 2 (2021): 327–47.

Trained in Chinese studies, Francesca Bray is a historian and anthropologist of technology, science and medicine. She is particularly interested in how politics are expressed and enacted through everyday technologies, and in the politics underpinning different narratives about technology in national, comparative and global history. Publications include The Rice Economies: Technology and Development in Asian Societies (1986), Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China (1997) and Moving Crops and the Scales of History (2022); she is co-editor of the 3-volume Cambridge History of Technology (in progress).