In This Issue

In "Small Boats and Large Ships: Social Continuity and Technical Change in the Icelandic Fisheries, 1800­1960," Árni Sverrisson joins what he calls the "growing number of writers [who] have begun to ask whether the evolution of small-scale production can actually be seen as a key feature of industrialization, long-term technological change, and economic development." Sverrisson, like those other writers he refers to, seeks to counter views of industrialization that "cast small-scale industries in an auxiliary role at best, and even see them as relics." He argues that the "evolutionary technological dynamism of small-scale fisheries . . . constituted the core of the industrial dynamism that powered Iceland's transition from poverty to prosperity." The argument has a number of implications for theories of industrial development and technical change. Of particular practical interest is its potential significance for the large majority of the world's population who "participate only peripherally in the global industrial system." Developing countries import not only techniques and tools but also ideas about technological development. "Today," Sverrisson observes, "mainstream ideas about technological change obscure rather than illuminate the role of small-scale production in industrialization. . . . Setting the record straight is therefore of more than historical interest."

John Pannabecker's "School for Industry: L'Ecole d'Arts et Métiers of Châlons-sur-Marne under Napoléon and the Restoration" is, as he puts it, "a story of the politics of production, artifacts, and marketing [that] challenges a traditional historical paradigm, namely, that the French focused on theory and the English on practice." The school was "one of the most important centers for negotiating the politics of industrial change and educational innovation" in early-nineteenth-century France. Pannabecker focuses on the school's involvement in uniform production of artillery caissons during the Napoléonic era and on later controversies over its curriculum. The outcome of that conflict, Pannabecker suggests, "has important implications for understanding not only the nature and transfer of technological knowledge . . . but also the particular social forms and tensions that characterized nineteenth-century France."

Dario Gaggio approaches the subject of uniformity from a different direction in "Negotiating the Gold Standard: The Geographical and Political Construction of Gold Fineness in Twentieth-Century Italy." The term "fineness" refers to the amount of pure gold contained in an article of jewelry, and is measured in carats or, in metric units, millesimals. Pure gold is 24 carats, 18 carats means a 75 percent alloy--it seems straightforward. Not so, as Gaggio demonstrates. He pays particular attention to the spatial, or geographical, dimension of standardization, a methodology that "emphasizes the conflictual character of standardization without necessarily privileging the perspective of a center" and draws attention to the "flexibility and ambiguity" of standards themselves. The construction of the fineness standard took place "at the nexus of three interacting geographies: the locality, the nation-state, and global markets. None of these geographical and political networks managed to exert unquestioned authority." In the end, the fineness standard reflected the fractures in the geography of its construction.

The theme of globalization that runs through Sverrisson's and Gaggio's articles is also picked up by Hugh Slotten in "Satellite Communications, Globalization, and the Cold War." Slotten notes that analysts tend to focus on "such issues as the growth of transnational companies, the expansion of international trade, and the increased tension between metropolitan and local practices and cultures" when they consider the processes of globalization. An indispensable factor in this transformation has been "the development and implementation of global communication technologies," particularly the communications satellite. Slotten focuses on the crucial decision taken by the United States during the cold war "to establish a satellite communications system open to all countries of the world," a decision that reverberates today.