Fire history and the making of the modern world

Chapter 3 - Fire as a philosophical and alchemical archetype

We live in an era of major technological developments, post-pandemic social adjustment, and dramatic climate change arising from human activity. Considering these phenomena within the long span of human history, we might ask: which innovations brought about truly significant and long-lasting transformations? Drawing on both historical sources and archaeological discoveries, Robin Derricourt explores the origins and earliest development of five major achievements in our deep history, and their impacts on multiple aspects of human lives. The topics presented are the taming and control of fire, the domestication of the horse,and its later association with the wheeled vehicle, the invention of writing in early civilisations, the creation of the printing press and the printed book, and the revolution of wireless communication with the harnessing of radio waves. Written in an engaging and accessible style, Derricourt's survey of key innovations makes us consider what we mean by long-term change, and how the modern world fits into the human story.

Fire history and the making of the modern world

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 445 opment and adoption of sophisticated fire control systems proved beyond the managerial capacities of the naval bureaucracy. Despite his title, Sumida says little about innovations (e.g., in propulsion) outside of gunnery, although fire control was undoubt­ edly central to Fisher’s plans. He records in excessive detail, so it seems to me, contract negotiations between Pollen and the admiralty that were often difficult and protracted. The index is organized not alphabetically but by topic—which is adequate if one is sure where to search for an entry, but difficult otherwise. Last, the few diagrams add little to verbal descriptions of complex machinery and fail to dojustice to the author’s careful study of important devices. But these are quibbles. Sumida has written an admirable and finely detailed study of the men, machines, and institutions that played a part in an early arms race. Explorations such as this are essential for understanding the marriage of military power and technological change that marks the modern world. Larry Owens Dr. Owens teaches in the Department of History at the University of Massachusetts— Amherst. Strike from, the Sky: The History of Battlefield Air Attack 1911—1945. By Richard P. Hallion. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989. Pp. xx + 323; illustrations, glossary, notes, bibliogra­ phy, index. $24.95. Richard Hallion’s Strike from the Sky chronicles the history of battlefield air attack from 1911, when the airplane was first used in war, to the end of World War II. His work, based largely on secondary sources, is a very useful study of the role of aircraft in battlefield support operations in major and limited wars in the first half of the 20th century. The author’s discussion of the doctrine, command and control, operational circumstances, and aircraft technology of battle­ field air operations traces the development of this crucial but oftenneglected aspect of air power. The importance of these operations in the first and second world wars and in smaller conflicts of the interwar era including the Russo-Polish War, British colonial operations, the American intervention in Nicaragua, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and the Spanish Civil War becomes evident in Hallion’s fast-paced narrative. The book concentrates on the battlefield experience in World War II and concludes with a short epilogue that briefly discusses the role of aircraft in support operations since 1945. Hallion examines the use of various types of aircraft in battlefield support, emphasizing the role of the fighter bomber on the Western and Eastern European fronts during World War II. 446 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE The author sets the development of these air operations in the general context of the evolution of aircraft technology, but the book concentrates nearly exclusively on frontline operations, with relatively little attention given to the aviation technology and production involved in the development of aircraft suitable for the role of battlefield air support. In its discussion of World War I, the book suffers from errors that a more in-depth study of available primary and secondary sources would have avoided. Hallion distinguishes between Allied ground attack aircraft as largely products of the single-seat fighter experience and German craft as products of the two-seat battlefield cooperation aircraft and paints an unduly favorable picture of the British experi­ ence. His concentration on the British to the near exclusion of the French means that the generalization about the Allies is not valid for the French, whose fighter pilots left battlefield cooperation to two-seat bomber and observation craft, the Breguets and Salmsons, in 1917 and 1918. The French, in fact, regretted their failure to develop two-seat light attack fighters like the Germans. Hallion suggests that the Germans designed their light attack fighters, the CL class, based on experience with Allied fighters in 1917, when in fact they established the specification for the type in September 1916 based on the experience of the Somme. The Ger­ mans were the only combatants to develop ground attack planes and fighters during the war, as the only British ground attack fighter, the Sopwith Salamander, appeared too late for wartime service. In 1917 and 1918, the British consequently were forced to...

Rural fires were an even more persistent scourge in late imperial Russia than famine, as Cathy Frierson shows in this first comprehensive study. Destroying almost three billion rubles worth of property in European Russia between 1860 and 1904, accidental and arson fires acted as a brake on Russia's economic development while subjecting peasants to perennial shocks to their physical and emotional condition. The fire question captured the attention of educated, progressive Russians, who came to perceive the peasants, especially female peasants, as key obstacles to Russia's becoming a rational, modern society in the European model. Using sources ranging from literary representations and newspaper articles to statistical tables and court records from regional archives, Frierson demonstrates the many meanings fire held for both peasants and the educated elite. To peasants, it was an essential source of light and warmth as well as a destructive force that regularly ignited their cramped villages of wooden, thatch-roofed huts. Absent the rule of law, they often used arson to gain justice or revenge, or to exert social control over those who would violate village norms. Frierson shows that the vast majority of arson cases in European Russia were not peasant-against-gentry acts of protest but peasant-against-peasant acts of self-help law or plain spite. Both the state and individual progressives set out to resolve the fire question and to educate, cajole, or coerce the peasantry into the modern world. Mandatory fire insurance, building codes, scientific village layouts, and volunteer firefighting brigades reduced the average number of buildings consumed in each blaze, but none of these measures succeeded in curbing the number of fires each year.