Historians of technology tend to preoccupy ourselves with a narrower slice of the human experience than we have to; most of our work focuses on the “industrial age”, post-1850, and on the North Atlantic-oriented world—Western Europe and North America, and their efforts to colonize and exploit the rest of the world. That is changing quickly, though. I work in the early modern world—roughly 1500—1850—and quite a few good scholars these days write good stuff about the ancient world, the medieval world, and peoples from other parts of the world. We’ve gone beyond written sources in archives, drawing heavily on anthropology, archaeology, and material culture. We’ve broadened our understanding of “technology” to encompass every aspect of the human manipulation of the world around us, from idea to implementation to adaptation.
Perspective
Perspective
Perspective
Historians of technology tend to preoccupy ourselves with a narrower slice of the human experience than we have to; most of our work focuses on the “industrial age”, post-1850, and on the North Atlantic-oriented world—Western Europe and North America, and their efforts to colonize and exploit the rest of the world. That is changing quickly, though. I work in the early modern world—roughly 1500—1850—and quite a few good scholars these days write good stuff about the ancient world, the medieval world, and peoples from other parts of the world. We’ve gone beyond written sources in archives, drawing heavily on anthropology, archaeology, and material culture. We’ve broadened our understanding of “technology” to encompass every aspect of the human manipulation of the world around us, from idea to implementation to adaptation.