For those looking for a brief survey of technological
history
around the world, Technology in World
Civilization by Arnold Pacey
would be a good start. With just a little preface to introduce ideas about how
civilizations interact in relation to technology, Pacey dives into a historical
narrative of the development of major technologies. He starts in A.D.
700 and continues almost to the time the book was published in 1990.
Throughout the book, Pacey describes the interactions between
civilizations as a dialogue. Straightforward, direct transfer of technology
from one civilization to another is rare in his view. The success and
development of a technology that originated in a foreign culture depends a lot
on the customs, organization, government,
economy,
and technology of the receiving culture. Very often, the adoption of a foreign
technology spurs adaptions, improvements and even new inventions among the
adopters. Even the rumor of a foreign technology can spur people invent, or
independently reinvent, solutions to a problem. Pacey is keen to recognize this
stimulus effect in cross-cultural dialogue related to technology.
In addition to recognizing the inventiveness found in many cultures,
Pacey is careful not to overemphasize mechanical inventions, which might tend
to put the focus on the West. He points out that the development of more
efficient and productive crops and agricultural
practices in Asia
were also important technologies.
Another important technological improvement centered on organization
and abstraction. As technologies became larger and more complex, they exhausted
what could be experienced directly by craftsmen. Improvement depended on
developing new ways of thinking about materials and work. Scale drawing and
model-making became a way to deal with complex construction. New principles of
organization were applied to work, such as specialization and division of
labor, especially as people began to work with powered machinery. Some
technological improvements even required a new way of understanding materials,
spurring interest in the development of sciences,
especially chemistry.
Pacey follows this progression through guns and railroads and
into the 20th
century with computers,
nuclear
power, and flights to the moon. He doesn’t
stop there. Instead, he takes a look, seemingly “back,” to survival
technologies. Technologies related to agriculture, sanitation
and environmental
health in the 20th century have a huge impact on the way we live
today. In the decades since this book was published, the Internet has
revolutionized the way we think about computing and communications, but in many
ways our health, wellbeing and lifestyles depend on technologies that are
centuries old and we cannot neglect them. Perhaps in an ongoing cross-cultural
dialogue about technology, new and old, we can find solutions to current and
future problems (climate change, water shortages, clean energy, food security
and more) that are adaptable to the various needs, scales and organizations of
cultures around the world.
If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Pacey, Arnold. Technology in
World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History. Cambridge,
MA: The MIT
Press, 1990.
