History from Things

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 175 key determinant of the rate of learning. His argument, carefully crafted, is applied to firms in different national and historical contexts. William Parker’s contribution is a tour de force, surveying three centuries of science, technology, and the economy—as well as human­ istic values and happiness. It would be easy to spend the entire review on EdwardJ. Nell’s ambitious discussion of the stylized cases of craft and mass production and the transition from one to another. Alice H. Amsden and Takashi Hikino cover late industrializers and how the latter progress through borrowing technology and undertaking incremental upgrading; Amsden and Hikino conclude that no major technological breakthrough has been associated with 20th-century industrializers. The book lacks a spirited interchange. Each author sets out on his or her path; the essays complement one another; outsiders (i.e., noncon­ tributors) are sharply criticized; but no one debates the arguments of the other contributors. All the writers accept an evolutionary view of technological change (although they may define “evolutionary” in different manners), all accept that learning is a cumulative process, and all accept—explicitly or implicidy—that diffusion is not cost-free. The approaches otherwise are diverse. What emerges is the elusive nature of technological change—whether embodied in big jumps (however de­ fined) or minor incremental modifications (however defined). The book makes an important contribution to the diffusion literature—how technology of various sorts is learned. It makes less of a contribution on which technologies (except at the level of craft versus mass production) are chosen when and provides no general explanation of technological change. While arguing for a historical approach, the book often seems ahistorical: generalizations derived from the 19th-century evidence are somehow assumed to be legitimate in the 20th century. I came away from my reading of this volume very stimulated; I recommend it highly. Mira Wilkins Dr. Wilkins, professor of economics at Florida International University, is the author of The History of Foreign Investment in the United States to 1914 (1989) and the editor of The Growth ofMultinationals (1991); she has published widely on the history of multinational enterprise and in that context has been particularly interested in the role of business enterprise as a carrier of technology across borders. Historyfrom Things: Essays on Material Culture. Edited by Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993. Pp. xvii+ 300; illustrations, notes, bibliography. $49.00. We are taught early in life that knowledge is gained through mastery of the “three Rs.” Learning to read and being drilled in penmanship are among the most important of childhood rituals. Proficiency in reading and writing, we are taught, is the key to a successful, useful life. By the time we reach adulthood, whenever we want to really know about something, we find a book on the subject. Yet we all would admit that 176 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE much ofwhat each of us knows, that perhaps the most important things we know, have been learned in other ways: through our five senses, through various experience, and by “reading” things other than words. History from Things focuses on material culture and is based on the premise that artifacts can be read. It gathers together papers prepared for a 1989 Smithsonian Institution conference on the use of objects in understanding the past. Conference organizers Steven Lubar and W. David Kingery aimed to discover if scholars from disparate disciplines—archaeology, anthropology, art history, folklore, geography, history of technology, museum studies, and materials science—each with their own theoretical approaches and methods for studying arti­ facts could “pierce the boundaries separating them, communicate with one another, and discover common ground” (p. x). Although the conference, according to Lubar and Kingery, revealed that material culture was “a topic through which meaningful communication among different specialists could begin” (p. x), History from Things does not clearly elucidate this nor other successes of the meeting. The volume’s seventeen essays illustrate the expansive landscape of artifactual interpretation. Some focus on theory, like Jacques Maquet’s reading of artifacts as cultural symbols, images, indicators, and referents as well as instruments designed to do something. Others concentrate

Argument (complex analysis) · Craft · Economics · Happiness · Neoclassical economics · Political science · Positive economics · Sociology · Stylized fact · Technological change · Economic Growth and Productivity · History · Law

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