A Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium (review)

In this big and ambitious volume, an eminent historian of technology tries, once again, to summarize the entire history of Western technology from the early Middle Ages to modern times. The coverage is impressive: Friedel’s dazzling tour de force describes almost every aspect of technology; it is not easy to find any glaring omissions in the book, except perhaps the deliberate decision to leave out the history of medicine. That it concentrates exclusively, and explicitly, on Western technology is understandable in view of the enormity of the material that Friedel covers.

Given that such books already exist—some of them multiauthored, edited collections and a few by scholars bold enough to attack such topics singlehandedly, such as Donald Cardwell’s magnificent Fontana History of Technology (Hammond, Ind., 1974)—what does Friedel’s volume bring to the table? For starters, the writing style is unusually lively, witty, and often insightful. Friedel begins each chapter with a telling anecdote or quote, and nowhere does he allow the text to sink into the bewildering details that explain the working of complex devices. The organization of the book is done with imagination and flair, with chapters bearing interesting titles like “Earth, Fire, Water, and Air” and “Stuff, Reality and Dreams.” The book, moreover, is rich in wonderful original illustrations of contraptions otherwise difficult to describe, many of them brilliantly executed by Dimitry Karetnikov. Friedel proves to be a master in picking a telling example to illustrate a more general principle. For instance, his choice of cheesemaking to demonstrate the many local differences in agricultural practice, as well the use of empirical trial-and-error methods to make up for theoretical gaps in knowledge, is exceptionally suggestive and well done. For an undergraduate never exposed before to this material, this book promises to be a long and exciting voyage of discovery. Nobody will ever be able to complain that the history of technology is “dull.”

Yet, like all singlehanded works of Really Ambitious History, this book is highly personal and idiosyncratic. Essentially, Friedel seems to resist any kind of analysis and interpretation. At the outset, he rejects any kind of economic determinism, barely mentions social constructivism, and eschews alternative frameworks, such as the evolutionary approach to the history of technology. The organizing term (not a framework by any stretch and much less a theory) is “improvement.” People laboring in workshops or toiling in fields tried to improve what they were doing and at times succeeded. Most of them had only a limited idea of what they wanted to accomplish. Improvement, Friedel maintains, occurred because there was a “culture of improvement,” which was either ephemeral or sustained (4).

Friedel feels that the evolution of technology needs to be understood on the basis of what the people who were carrying out these improvements were trying to do. This “individually-contingent” approach sounds sensible, but it misses most of what is interesting in the history of technology—namely, that technological progress was often accidental, unrelated to what people were trying to do. Unintended consequences, surprising interactions with other techniques, unanticipated bite-back effects, and the feedback of new techniques on useful knowledge and science are what make the story interesting.

For Friedel, technology is the effort by people to control nature—in short, to gain power. He discusses with great panache and knowledge how technology conferred this power, and how it could be, and was, used both for good and bad ends. But he does not concern himself sufficiently with what technology really is, which is human knowledge. As a result, he does not do justice to the complex and deep interactions between different kinds of knowledge and how they produced new and better techniques—sometimes by pure serendipity, sometimes by trial and error, and sometimes by preparing the minds that Fortune favors. For him, knowledge may have explained why techniques worked in the first place, but rarely, if ever, was it the cause of new technology, at least...