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  • Material World
  • Steven W. Usselman (bio)
David Edgerton. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xviii + 270 pp. Illustrations, notes, selected bibliography, and index. $26.00.

David Edgerton believes historians of technology and other students of technology and society have dwelled too long on invention and early adoption of new technologies. He wishes to redirect our attention toward the ways in which technology insinuates itself into ordinary workaday routines. His focus is upon what he calls "technology-in-use." From this vantage he sees not novelty, but persistence, and in that he envisions far-reaching implications. The new way of thinking "will help wean us off the idea that invention, 'technological change' and the 'shaping of technology' need to be the central questions for the history of technology," he suggests ambitiously in conclusion. "Instead the history of technology can be much more; it can help us rethink history" (p. 211).

The use-centered technological history Edgerton advocates must be a global history. One of his chief complaints about invention stories, especially those focusing upon developments in "high technology," is that they neglect most places and most people. He considers it far better to speak of "things" rather than of "technology." The latter term is too abstract. "Things belong to particular people," he observes, "in ways that technology does not" (p. xviii). Only by studying the use of things, he rightly insists, do we begin to comprehend the persistent importance of material objects and processes in places such as Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the unpretentious inventiveness that occurs there. In place of technological diffusion, he asks us to think about adaptive reuse of Western technologies in colonial settings, a process he characterizes evocatively as the creation of "creole technologies." Such activity gives the lie to any notion that so-called developing regions are simply delayed and will march through development in the same fashion as earlier movers such as the United States. Global history is not American history writ large.

If the book is not primarily about the United States, it is most definitely aimed at an American audience. Edgerton wants Americans to think differently about the place of technology, and themselves, in the modern world. "This [End Page 580] book is . . . a plea for a novel way of looking at the technological world," he writes, "one which will change our minds about what the world has been like. And implicit in it is a plea for novel ways of thinking about the technological present" (p. 209).

Edgerton seeks above all to quell any talk of technology irresistibly driving the contemporary world toward a New Economy. He disdains enthusiasts who rue that society will not recognize and accept where new technology is taking it. Our collective enthrallment with the new, he believes, is misleading and ultimately debilitating. It prevents us from facing the facts of our existence. The persistence of things and of the processes required to make and to transport them, in his assessment, belies the myth that we are "entering a weightless, dematerialized information world" (p. 212). A trip to the local Wal-Mart, brimming with goods manufactured in distant locales, should disabuse us of any such notions. So, too, should a visit to the poultry and beef processing plants of the American South and West. "Mass production," he shrewdly observes, "is now so common it is invisible" (p. 71).

Like most debunkers, Edgerton frequently exaggerates what he supposes to be the prevailing myth. His style of argument pivots repeatedly upon the creation of straw men. Most chapters begin with a quick sketch of what Edgerton takes to be the "conventional story" about a topic. Many are so overdrawn as to leave one wondering just who subscribes to them. His portrayal of the history of technology borders on caricature. Edgerton can claim to discover an "invisible world of technologies" only by painting a distorted portrait of this thriving, diverse field, whose practitioners long ago broadened their research agenda beyond the invention stories Edgerton derides. In reality, Edgerton could not have written his book without the rich body of work these historians have generated during the past twenty...

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