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  • Technology Is GlobalThe Useful & Reliable Knowledge Debate
  • Dagmar Schäfer (bio) and Simona Valeriani (bio)

A key phrase in global history over the past two decades has been Useful and Reliable Knowledge (hereafter URK). In Gifts of Athena, economic historian Joel Mokyr coined the phrase, recognizing that changes in knowledge, its perception, and organization are main concerns for both economic historians and historians of science.1 At first, historians of technology paid little heed to Mokyr's economic history discourses, which somewhat sidestepped applied science and technology. Yet Mokyr's approach—highlighting technological change as an engine of economic growth—has featured widely in global comparative history. Over the years, this type of scholarship has generated much research—mostly focusing on the transfer of European URK regimes and their impact on local knowledge cultures, economic growth, and cultural prosperity. These historians also observe—often in passing—that Western URK rarely started with a blank slate and that it had to respond to local methods of mobilizing technical knowledge and generating wealth.

This special issue turns the tables. We ask how local definitions and practices of usefulness and reliability generated wealth and technological change. We present research on the Ottoman Empire, China, Japan, France, Britain, and colonial India, covering a period from the fourteenth to the twentieth century. Collectively, these studies also shed light on a central issue of the history of technology: how artisanal and learned-literate-scientific knowledge communities interacted in regional and culturally diverse settings.

Taking such a reverse position, we address how a view from Europe has impinged on the role of the global in defining "usefulness" and "reliability." [End Page 327] We add a view on how varying regional methods and historiographies have contributed to the economic and epistemic "divergences" noted in comparative research. Historians of China, for instance, have identified conceptual equivalents for "Western" and "modern" usefulness and reliability, tracing the concept back to premodern history and identifying the notion of usefulness with technology's history and reliability with China's "sciences," while no such sources exist for the Indian subcontinent. At the same time, we note that different historical disciplines such as technology, science, economy, and global history developed independently from each other. While collating these case studies in this special issue, we realized that to understand the individual merits of each region and era, it is necessary to examine this unevenness and how it came about.

Contrasting such research in world regions in one special issue offers the methodological bonus of seeing how knowledge and wealth concerned many social groups and required them to cooperate. The diverse sources for each region the authors use for their case studies range from manuscripts and administrative records to finished products, raw materials, and instruments. As a rule of thumb, though, we can see that most craftsmen, practitioners, scholars, merchants, and trade managers produced, tested, and validated what was useful and reliable rather than writing about it. Parallels in cultural attitudes toward usefulness are important to us. That actors, for instance, wrote down both familiar and novel practices and ideas while often practicing yet another technology not only indicates that old and new technologies continued to exist and were mobilized, as David Edgerton has rightly pointed out; it also suggests that writing and codification were primarily political and social instruments and not—perhaps unsurprising, but still noteworthy—part of daily practice. Equally importantly, across regions, different sources give a voice to the historically silenced diversity of approaches to usefulness and reliability and how they affected technological developments in the twentieth century—much later than the eighteenth century, which scholars in the divergence debates, such as Pomeranz, have identified as the crucial moment of technological change.2 Such observations also call for a fresh and globally diversified look at the historical dynamics of codification, its relation to knowledge classification, and its effect on scientific, technological, and economic change. The authors in this issue critically reengage with the way historical actors approached and qualified knowledge when organizing a state, an artisan's workshop, a field of interest, or their personal life. They look at how state power, religion, kinship, and politics, as well as liberated capital and market...

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