Beyond the West

While varied and innovative, much of the history of technology that appears in the aforementioned books and journals deals with Europe and North America. Yet much fine scholarship takes place outside the field as currently defined, for scholars interested in the history of technology in earlier times and in other civilizations have audiences in their own fields to whom they can address their work in journals such as Modern Asian Studies, African Studies Review, Hispanic American Historical Review, the Journal of African Studies, and countless other journals in foreign languages as well as English.

As noted earlier, scholarly fields such as archaeology and anthropology that deal largely with material culture are heavily oriented toward the history of the technology of their time and place.

In recent years, historians have developed an interest in world history, including global histories of technology that would encompass all cultures and civilizations. Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History (1994) takes the same approach as Leslie White did a generation before, offering energy sources and uses as keys to understanding the evolution of civilization. A more balanced view, albeit in too brief a form, is presented by Arnold Pacey in Technology in World Civilization (1990) and by Daniel Headrick in Technology: A World History (2009).^{^[251]}

While the history of technology outside the West still lags behind, there is one remarkable exception to this rule: Joseph Needham's multi-volume Science and Civilisation in China.^{^[252]} Joseph Needham (1900-95) was trained as an embryologist and his Chemical Embryology (1931) became a classic in his field. While teaching at Cambridge University, he came under the influence of three Chinese scientists - Lu Guizhen, Wang Yinglai, and Chen Shizhang, who inspired him to learn Chinese and become interested in Chinese science and technology.

During the Second World War, as a liaison officer between the British and the Nationalist Chinese governments, he traveled around China acquiring old books and manuscripts on these subjects. Upon his return to Cambridge, he collaborated with historian Wang Ling to begin a multi-volume work based on their research, the first volume of which appeared in 1954. Needham wrote the first fifteen volumes with the help of several collaborators. Since his death, the work has continued and has currently reached twenty-four volumes. It is arguably the most important work on the history of technology produced in the twentieth century.

Although the word “technology” does not appear in the title of his magnum opus, many volumes are devoted to such technical subjects as mechanical engineering, shipbuilding and navigation, paper and printing, gunpowder and missiles, metallurgy, ceramics, and agriculture. In this enormous work, Needham and his collaborators demonstrated that China was well ahead of the rest of the world in most technological fields until the fifteenth century, and contributed several key inventions to the West, such as the compass, gunpowder, paper, and printing. In the process, he raised the so-called “Needham Question,” one that has intrigued scholars even beyond the narrow confines of sinology: Why did Chinese innovation cease just as Europe was becoming more innovative? This question has recently attracted public attention as China has risen to the forefront of economic development and cutting-edge technologies.

Overall, the history of technology in other civilizations has lagged behind that of the West and China. Nonetheless, there have been a few remarkable exceptions to this generalization - among them we might cite Richard Bullict's The Camel and the Wheel (1975), which explains why wheeled vehicles, which originated in ancient Mesopotamia and spread throughout the Middle East, Europe, and Asia, were eclipsed by camels during and after the Roman empire.^{^[253]}

Besides the history of technology in non-Western cultures, a few historians have found technology as a useful lens through which to understand the relations between civilizations.

Among them we might cite the work of Geoffrey Parker, whose Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500-1800 examines the changes in weapons, tactics, and strategy that transformed warfare not only among Europeans, but also between Europeans and non-Western states in the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas.^{^[254]} Another very important contribution to comparative military history is Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (2003) by Kenneth Chase, which seeks to explain why explosives and firearms, though invented in China, had a much greater impact in Europe and the Middle East, and were deliberately banned for centuries in Japan.^{^[255]}

In a similar vein, the Italian historian Carlo Cipolla looked at the technological dimension of the encounter between West and non-West in two remarkable books. In Guns, Sails and Empires (1965), he demonstrated the importance of technological innovations in explaining European imperialism in the early modern period, and in Clocks and Culture, he focused on clocks as a means of understanding the different attitudes toward time and timekeeping in Europe and in China.^{^[256]}

Following in the footsteps of Cipolla and Parker, Daniel Headrick has investigated the importance of technological factors in Western imperialism in three books: The Tools of Empire: Technology and Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (1981), The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940 (1988), and Power over Peoples: Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present (2010).^{^[257]}

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Source: Christian D. (ed.). The Cambridge World History. Volume 1. Introducing World History, to 10,000 BCE. Cambridge University Press,2015. — 516 p.. 2015

Beyond the West

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