Beyond SHOT

Although the Societyfor the History of Technology has been successful in broadening its purview in many directions, its conference papers and journal articles still concentrate predominantly on modern Western technology, that is, developments in Europe and North America since the Industrial Revolution.

The postwar era also saw a proliferation of scholarly books on the history of technology, of which we can only name a few. Foremost among them were the encyclopedic works covering all of Western technology. The most prominent of these was A History of Technology, edited by Charles Singer, E. J. Holmyard, and A. R. Hall, a seven-volume work published in Oxford from 1954 to 1978. While encyclopedic, it is a very internalist work that concentrates on “how things are done and made” and “what things are done and made,” ignoring why things are done and made and what impact they have had on society.

A similar endeavor in French is Histoire generale des techniques, a five-volume work edited by Maurice Daumas and published in Paris from 1962 to 1979. The title of its English translation, History of Technology and Invention: Progress Through the Ages (1969-79), reveals the internalist and Whiggish perspective from which it was written.^[237] Broader in scope, but from a doctrinaire Marxist perspective, is the work of Anatolii Alekseevich Zvorykin, translated into German as Geschichte der Technik and published in Leipzig in 1967.^{[238] [239]} The American work Technology in Western Civilization, in two volumes edited by Melvin Kranzberg and Carroll Pursell (1967), is of the same generation as these other works, but with a much broader perspective, as befitted the editor of Technology and Culture.¹¹