352 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE securing technological advantage. Wealth of Contrasts is beautifully produced, with numerous black and white photographs and tables and a clear layout. A few typographical errors and some titles missing from the bibliography do not diminish the value of the book. It pro vides an insightful contribution to the history of the pharmaceutical industry. In particular, it contributes to a secondary literature that needs more accounts of this kind, describing small firms with strong national roots, if it is to explain satisfactorily the sector’s expansion since 1970. Viviane M. Quirke Ms. Quirke is currently writing a doctoral dissertation in modern history at Ox ford. Its subject is the interaction between academic science and the pharmaceutical industry, and it is titled “Experiments in Collaboration: Science, Medicine and the Pharmaceutical Industry in Britain and in France, 1935-1965.” She was a Wellcome Trust student for two years and was recently awarded the Clifford-Norton student ship in the History of Science, to be held at the Queen’s College, Oxford. Technology and European Overseas Enterprise: Diffusion, Adaption, and Adoption. Edited by Michael Adas. Aldershot, Hamps., and Brook field, Vt.: Variorum, 1996. Pp. xxvi+433; illustrations, index. $134.95 (cloth). This book, volume 7 in Variorum’s series An Expanding World: The European Impact on World History, 1450-1800, consists of a collection of scholarly articles published between 1948 and 1993, reproduced by photo-offset and enhanced by the editor’s introduc tion and a useful index. The articles discuss technologies used by Europeans at sea and overseas; traditional Asian, African, and Native American technologies; and the roles of these technologies in the interactions between civilizations. Michael Adas has grouped these articles under three broad head ings: institutions and technology of exploration, maritime domina tion, and conquest; technology transfer, intercivilizational ex change, and economic change; and melding and competition of European and indigenous technologies and modes of production. Another way ofclassifying the articles might be by technological cate gories—navigation, firearms, mining, metallurgy, textiles, and sugar production—along with articles on the slave trade, Chinese re sponses to Western technology, and “Atlantic civilization.” As would be expected of an anthology, these essays are of uneven quality. The best are classics in the literature of technology and inter civilizational encounters, or they deserve to be. The first is a twentypage excerpt from Pierre Chaunu’s L’expansion européenne du XIIT au XVe siècle (1969), which describes, in clear French with supporting Technology and culture Book Reviews 353 illustrations, the evolution of shipbuilding and navigation before and during the oceanic voyages of discovery. Equally important is H. A. Gemery and J. S. Hogendorn’s 1978 article, “Technological Change, Slavery, and the Slave Trade.” It asks how sugar production could have increased so much from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century despite a stagnant labor produc tivity on West Indian plantations. The authors find the answer in the increasing productivity of the slave trade. This analysis should make economists and historians reconsider the equation of “technologi cal advance” with “labor-saving devices.” The connection between intercivilizational contacts and the tech nologies of labor exploitation is the theme ofA. J. R. Russell-Wood’s “Technology and Society: The Impact of Gold Mining on the Institu tion of Slavery in Portuguese America” (1977) and D. A. Brading and Harry E. Cross’s “Colonial Silver Mining: Mexico and Peru” (1972). Read together, these two articles show how fluid were the relations between institutions and technology and how the success or failure of mining enterprises depended on the skills and tradi tions of the labor force as well as on entrepreneurs and government policies. Particularly interesting are the contribution ofWestAfrican slaves with mining and metallurgical skills to Brazilian gold mining and how the slaves often used these skills to their own advantage. Two other articles that deserve to be read together are Candice Goucher’s “Iron Is Iron ’Til It Is Rust: Trade and Ecology in the Decline of West African Iron-Smelting” (1981) and L. M. Pole’s “Decline or Survival? Iron Production in WestAfrica from the Seven teenth to the Twentieth Centuries” (1982). The conclusions these articles reach may surprise...