Technology in World Civilization

Book Reviews Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History. By Arnold Pacey. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. Pp. xi + 238; illustra­ tions, notes, bibliography, index. $19.95 (cloth); $10.95 (paper). It has been said that an author choosing to write about a large topic must produce a very short or very large book in order to be successful. Arnold Pacey has chosen a large topic—a thousand years of world technology—and he has neatly fitted it into a 200-page volume. He accomplished this by selecting a few strong themes and developing them with care and insight. Anyone studying the worldwide development of technology is impressed by the number of times technological artifacts, processes, and ideas are carried from one culture to another by trade, war, or some other form of contact. This activity, called technology transfer, is assumed to be a unidirectional flow of information and/or objects from the discoverers to the recipient culture. Historians who investi­ gate technology transfers have tended to praise technological innova­ tors and denigrate those who do nothing more than borrow from their more creative neighbors. This viewpoint is exemplified in the work of modern scholars who stress the superiority of Western technology and its dissemination to the “less developed” nations of the world. To counter this sort of thinking, Pacey introduces the idea of technological dialogue. Dialogue, as opposed to transfer, implies a complex interaction between cultures in which the equipment or information that moves across the cultural boundaries becomes modified in the process. The modifications may be technical—actual changes in the design of the equipment—or they may be wholly social—the equipment design remains unaltered but the artifact is placed in an entirely new social context. It is Pacey’s contention that dialogue is a more accurate metaphor than transfer to describe what has occurred in the world history of technology. Pacey supports his idea of dialogue by surveying technology in large regions of the world since roughly a.d. 700. Initially, the broad movement of technological novelty was from China and west Asia toward Europe: hydraulic engineering, textile manufacturing, and the making of gunpowder and paper. Despite their Eastern origins, these innovations were changed to meet the conditions and values of European societies. In many instances the European-altered technol­ ogies found their way back to their place of origin where they underwent further changes. Permission to reprint a review printed in this section may be obtained only from the reviewer. 347 348 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE With the expansion of European dominance through commerce and conquest in the Renaissance, the tide of technological innovation began to flow in the opposite direction. The 18th century witnessed the birth of European industrialism and the subsequent spread of factories and steam power around the world. Pacey, however, is careful to point out that Eastern technologies continued to have a role in the West (Indian textile production and shipbuilding techniques in England are examples), and that imported European machines were regularly changed to meet local geographical features and climates or social and cultural needs. Again and again he makes a strong case for Indian, African, Chinese, and Japanese technologists who energeti­ cally and ingeniously adapted machines and processes sent from Europe. All of this is presented in a low-key, sensible manner. Instead of becoming bogged down searching for the “true” inventors of some device or process, or in accounting for cultural creativity or stagna­ tion, Pacey lays emphasis on dialogue, interaction, and borrowers in the East and West who were creative modifiers. George Basalla Dr. Basalla teaches the history of technology at the University of Delaware. He is the author of The Evolution of Technology (1988), and he is now writing a book on patterns of growth in technology. Capturing the Horizon: The Historical Geography of Transportation since the Sixteenth Century. By James E. Vance, Jr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Pp. xv + 660; illustrations, notes, index. $26.95 (paper). This is a “Softshell” edition of a book published in hardcover form in 1986. It will thus make more widely available a valuable handbook on transport history, although the decision to bind over 600 pages

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