Global History of Technology???
In this podcast, I explore the underlying assumptions of Edgerton's significant technologies and the way he formulates global history. The Shock of the Old is based on the presumption that invention has its origin in the rich countries, an element of Edgerton's work that only underscores the types of inventions that have traveled the world by way of markets. I point out this dependence on an economic definition of significance that I feel limits the scope of Edgerton's true re-imagining of technology. What is significant about these "things" then is not related to the fact that they are technologies but that they have the ability to change and impact habits. This makes what Edgerton talks about more related to cultural dominance than technology.
The music is from "Wall-e" of the Wall-e original soundtrack.
Comments
The Poor Man's Burden
Thank you for articulating so clearly what it was that bothered me about Edgerton’s work. I too was struck by negative aspect of the assumptions underlying his argument. His use of the term “poor world” instead of those he sees as less pejorative, such as “developing” and “Third World” which professionals and academics use, because they tell a more useful story for his purposes set the tone for the entire book, in my opinion. I wonder how entrepreneurs, industrialists, and governments of the thriving nations of Chile, Brazil and others would think of being lumped together in the Poor world dichotomy he sets up.
It seems to me that so many “old” technologies he discusses persevere in use and have been adapted by “poor” countries for reasons other than those he sites. Many of the old technologies still work because they require fewer expensive fuels to run, or involve less complex behavior on the part of the user, or they represent a more adaptable method than the one used by the “more sophisticated” inhabitants of “rich” cultures. Although several of his points were interesting and made me sense in his work, I for one did not find his analysis completely compelling because of the attitude you point out.
Nice job on the whole.
Where does "technology" come from?
Hi Aubrey,
Your critique of Edgerton raises some intriguing questions about the dominative force potentially (or perhaps inevitably) exerted by even the most well-intentioned attempts to write a global history of technology. Like you (it seems), I was slightly disturbed by Edgerton’s exclusive focus on those “poor-world” technologies that he wants to call “creole.” “We need to ask not what technology the shanty town lacks, but what it has” (40), he writes, and then seems immediately to forget to do just that—at least, when it comes to native technologies. Instead, we read about the local reproduction or re-purposing of all kinds of “things” that find their “originating case[s]” (43) in Western or “rich world” countries. It is almost as though, for Edgerton, the very idea of “technology” is defined by the hegemonic status of a “thing’s” point of origin, as though anything first produced outside of the Western “rich world” nations doesn’t “count” as “technology.” So far as I can tell, Edgerton’s bias (not to mentioned his regrettable coinage, “creole technology”) does nothing more than re-inscribe precisely the kind of hierarchical, invention-oriented historiography that he claims his work displaces.
But there is, I think, something interesting about Edgerton’s bias. To extend your podcast very slightly, Edgerton’s book forces us to ask whether technology is itself a discursive creation, an idea, in the service of maintaining Western cultural hegemony. To ask, in other words, whether any country but a culturally dominant country can even have “technology,” or if, by merely attributing something like “technology” to an “other” culture, the idea of “technology” begins to fall apart. To put this another way: I wonder if Edgerton’s _Shock of the Old_ is just the impetus some scholar needs to write a Saidian, _Orientalism_-like, history of the history of technology. I’d probably enjoy reading such a study.
Anyway, nice work. A clearly articulated and well-paced podcast. I very much enjoyed it.
Best,
-j.