The Shock of the Old: Technology in Global History Since 1900

  • David Edgerton
Profile/Oxford University Press: 2007. 320 pp. £18.99/$26 0195322835 | ISBN: 0-195-32283-5

As an academic discipline, the history of technology has spent many decades refining models of technological change. There has been a move from a relatively deterministic 'engineering darwinism' to considering technologies, at least in part, as being elicited and selected in the light of social values, aspirations and prejudices.

A hands-on approach: mechanics in Cuba maintain old American cars indefinitely using basic tools. Credit: M. MATZEL/STILL PICTURES

The polemical thrust of David Edgerton's book The Shock of the Old, however, is that this analysis of the succession of technologies, techniques and machines has the wrong focus. It is hopelessly biased towards innovation and novelty, and implicitly creates a tidy 'timeline of progress'. Moreover, things are not always as they seem. For example, B-52 bombers, an important part of the US Air Force today, are almost 50 years old and might be flown by the grandsons of their first pilots. In the Second World War, more than half-a-million horses dragged the 'mechanized' German army into Russia, while Britain's wooden Mosquito aircraft outpaced metal Messerschmitts.

Counter-intuitive examples such as these are the firecrackers of Edgerton's original and timely book, which has been promoted and packaged on the basis of the title and these old–new teasers. However, the author does not fully complete this advertised mission, for his real agenda is to promote an analysis of technology that is rooted in use and in practice, rather than in innovation and invention.

“One particularly important feature of use-based history of technology,” Edgerton argues, “is that it can be genuinely global.” Rather than focusing on the dichotomy between the technology-rich developed world and what Edgerton calls the 'poor world', usually presumed to be deficient in technology or furnished only with second-hand or debased versions, user-based history engages “with all the world's population, which is mostly poor, non-white and half female”.

This reading of the dislocation between the present reality and our “reheated futurism” is typified by a section on urban development entitled 'Not Alphaville but bidonville', which notes that by the end of the twentieth century, “most of the largest cities in the world were poor places where once Paris, London and New York led in scale and opulence”. Whether built from the oil drums (bidons) of North Africa, or the crates used to import tractors to Durban, these urban centres are home to distinctive, and effective, local 'creole technologies' about which we understand far too little. The book is filled with powerful and thought-provoking examples derived from Edgerton's enormous experience of the mainstream history of technology, but also, unusually, of South America and other parts of the 'poor world'.

With his emphasis on use, the author takes us into areas that most accounts of technology overlook, such as slaughterhouses and execution chambers. In one of the most valuable essays he reminds us that many people (perhaps most?) engage with technology through repair and maintenance. According to this perspective, the technological story of Toyota or Mercedes is not exemplified by the production lines and industrial culture of Nagoya or Stuttgart, emblematic though these may be in technological history. Equally important are the communal repair sites of Ghana known as 'magazines', where tools are rudimentary — “hammers, spanners in incomplete sets, files and screwdrivers” — but where the vehicles are reworked to be indefinitely maintainable, within their local system, and where those who repair them get to know them much more intimately than do drivers or mechanics in any rich country.

The account is a compelling tour de force and a corrective. My own institution, the Science Museum in London, does not entirely escape; he scolds it for an 'innovation timeline' that orders the showcase gallery “grandly” entitled 'Making of the Modern World'. However, as curators, we believe it is most effective to engage with audiences, initially at least, through what they know about technology. We may regret that an older historiography of technology dominates public understanding, but this is the case nonetheless, so icons such as Stephenson's Rocket help us to engage a wide audience. Of course, we also aim to add a deeper and more nuanced understanding, and those who penetrate a little farther into the gallery find an exactly parallel (and very popular) timeline display on the technology of everyday life — familiar and once-familiar artefacts that have earned a presence through use at home, in the workplace and at play.

Icons of invention do exist in our imaginations, but Edgerton seems unprepared to accept that humans navigate their culture by identifying exceptional events and discontinuities. Nor is he concerned with exploring the intriguing mental and cultural processes that make certain inventions or episodes memorable and emblematic. But this is not to deny the great importance, and the interest, of what he has started here.

Ultimately, the pursuit of a more global or democratic history is not unproblematic. What would a use-based history of technology be like, and how would it be more than a natural history? It would not be a replacement for other accounts, perhaps, but one running in parallel.

Finally, there is more to understanding than argument alone, and the author is often most persuasive when he is, perhaps unknowingly, being impressionistic and descriptive. One passage in particular was especially evocative and, almost in itself, seemed to validate the whole historiographic attempt: “Travelling through the poor world it is hard to miss... tiny metal-working shops where the most complex bit of machinery may well be an oxyacetylene, or electric, torch for welding.” It is from such shops that “at dusk, bright intermittent light from welding illuminates streets all over the world.”