Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History by Arnold Pacey and Francesca Bray (review)

Arnold Pacey collaborates with Francesca Bray in a new edition of his classic survey, Technology in World Civilization (TWC). What a delight it is! A wealth of examples appears: cooking stoves with ceramic linings (Kenya), gas-engine dynamos (England), astrolabes with beautifully etched tympans (Marrakesh), a machine for reeling silk (China)—and these examples come just from the illustrations—alongside concise and satisfying technical descriptions: how block printing was done and early guns cast and the significance of semiconducting materials. The first edition offered a strong interpretive framework, which is slightly different and more precisely drawn in the new one. Less apparent is the interest in technology transfer that previously motivated Pacey; more developed is the concept of technological dialogue and frameworks of environmental constraint and industrial movements and/or revolutions (as plural processes that happened more than once). TWC gives us a "thousand-year history as a continuous, global process of dialogue or exchange" (p. xv) among and beyond China, West Asia, Africa, South America, the Islamic Mediterranean, India, and Europe, broadly considered.

The book is a model of concrete discussion and historical specificity, with every technology tied to specific places, people, and times. We see important historical debates as scholars saw them: Karl Wittfogel and hydraulic civilizations; Christopher Freeman and waves of innovation; Tessa Morris-Suzuki and technology transfer as creative, not copying. Pacey and Bray move from the iron industry of Asia around the year 1000 to technological complexes of nomadic Mongol culture and different agricultural regions of China and the Middle East. Next come movement, trade and technologies of transport, and agroecology in the Americas. A three-way dialogue appears in mining in Zimbabwe under the Portuguese and in the crops the Portuguese had introduced: maize and peanuts from the Americas that endured long after the Changamire drove the Portuguese off Zimbabwe's southern plateaus. Gunpowder empires illustrate Japan's experience with firearms, unification, and international withdrawal. Printing and books brought "new methods for handling technical information and formulating technical (and managerial) ideas" (p. 112), expressed in machine drawings and in factories and plantations, as in the novel organization of plantation sugar production on Madeira and strict divisions of labor that came to characterize later manufacturing.

The new TWC is a book for our time, as we reassess our technological heritage in light of its effect on our planet's climate. About halfway through, TWC turns to the development of industry and patterns that endure. Language that in the previous edition suggested general approbation of industrial development has been excised: a "decisive advantage … [in] material production" gained by the West has become simply a "situation very different" (p. 128) from elsewhere. Pacey and Bray offer industrial movements rather than a singular industrial revolution: in Britain of "steam engines, iron, and coal" (p. 129) and changes in productive organization; in India of textiles and supporting chemical industries and in wooden ship building. Railway empires show the imperial ambitions of Europe and Japan. Scientific developments influenced and drew from technology: electricity and chemistry in France and Germany; nuclear research seemingly, and worryingly, all over the place. The inescapable dialogue of technology with health, food, and basic needs appears in discussions of public health and infant mortality, the green revolution in Asia, agroforestry in the Americas, and everyday cooking technologies in recent African history. The final chapter carries TWC into our current century, using the concept of waves of innovation—that is, innovations interacting and bunching together—to trace the continued significance of semiconductors and communications and the developing importance of photovoltaics and new batteries. TWC concludes with a discussion of environmental limits, climate change, and the need for a "radical switch to non-polluting energy sources" (p. 258) to power a twenty-first-century industrial revolution.

This final chapter marks the most significant change from Pacey's first edition, which concluded with a chapter on "Survival Technology in the Twentieth...