The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 Carroll W. Pursell (bio) The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900. By David Edgerton . New York: Oxford University Press, 2007 Pp. xviii+270. $26. On 2 May 2007, CNN.com carried the headline "Train Carrying Shuttle Rockets Derails." Such a juxtaposition of Robert Stephenson and Robert Goddard would probably appeal to David Edgerton. In his important and convincing book The Shock of the Old, Edgerton attempts to undermine simplistic understandings of technology and the way it changes by looking at what technologies are actually being used (and by whom) at any one time. An obsession with "innovation" leads to a tidy timeline of progress, focusing on iconic machines, but an investigation of "technology in use" reveals that some "things" appear, disappear, and reappear—often resulting in hybrid forms which he calls "Creole" technologies. The CNN.com headline nicely illustrates this coming and going. Here we see the workings of the "space age" depending on a technology that had long ago "disappeared," at least from the standard accounts of the history of technology. Everyone knows, of course, that trains still operate and are in many ways as important as ever. That common knowledge, however, sits comfortably alongside the cultural knowledge that the "railroad era" belongs to the nineteenth century, and has long since been displaced by the "space age." By looking at what things people actually use, however, we can study technology in all its myriad forms and in all parts of the world. Edgerton's first chapter is titled "Significance," as in, "is the condom more significant than the aeroplane?" (p. 1). The next seven chapters take up "Time," then "Production," then "Maintenance," from which Edgerton turns to "Nations," followed by "War," then "Killing," and finally "Invention." "Time" deftly undermines the neat chronologies and expectations into which we too easily fall. The rickshaw spread from Japan to the rest of Asia only in the twentieth century and the German army used more horses in World War II than the British did in World War I. By looking at the entire [End Page 237] world rather than just the West, we discover that "old" technologies often "acquire a new lease of life" in what Edgerton prefers to call the "poor" (rather than third or developing) world: carrier pigeons were introduced into the police services in Orissa, India, in 1946. What he calls "retro" and "Creole" technologies present not a timeline, but a tangle of time. In "Production" Edgerton looks at automobiles, of course, but also at small farms, agriculture in general, and domestic production. In what he calls the "long boom"—that is, the decades after World War II—he finds that "inflexions of the same technological and industrial revolution" (p. 74) happened in succession rather than each being a distinct advance in its own right. In "War" Edgerton dismisses the easy notion that this activity has been utterly changed by the more powerful and exotic of new weapons, and he argues instead for the continued primacy of the foot soldier with a rifle (now automatic) combined with the reappearance of such old techniques as systematic, and research-based, torture (including by American forces). In "Killing" he looks at pesticides and herbicides, as well as whaling, slaughterhouses, and capital punishment by lethal injection. With his novel arguments and striking examples, Edgerton wants nothing less than that we should take up this "novel way of looking at the technological world" (p. 209) with a view to adopting more realistic and helpful attitudes and policies toward the subject of technological change. Most change, he asserts, "is taking place by the transfer of techniques from place to place" (p. 209), rather than through science-driven invention and innovation. To facilitate this new understanding, he calls for a redirection of much of the traditional effort in the field of the history of technology. Indeed, that very phrase, "the history of technology," is a part of the problem. Instead of a history of technology, which has tempted us to focus on invention and innovation, and has produced what he calls "the history of technology . . . for boys of all...