HIST363: Global Perspectives on Industrialization

As has already been stressed, technology is perceived as a crucial factor by nearly all the authors in the debate on the "great divergence". They agree that it was by far the only aspect of relevance to the development of sustained economic growth. It was, however, an indispensable one, insofar as without advanced machinery and the abundant energy resources provided by fossil fuels, the rising output of goods, increase in productivity and drop in prices would not have been possible.

This focus on quantifiable factors has, however, led to a somewhat lopsided treatment of technologies in the debate. Today, the history of technology is no longer seen predominantly as a history of spectacular inventions and innovation processes. Historians of technology pay attention to a whole range of other factors such as the social and cultural settings in which diverse technologies are produced and used. The debate on the "great divergence" is still characterized by a much more schematic perspective on technology, however. One traditional strain compares the technologies of pre-modern Europe, China, India, and the Ottoman Empire only in terms of who first invented what, the performance of certain artifacts or simply regarding sheer size, as is the case of comparing the ship sizes of Zheng He's fleet with those of the European colonial powers.

It has to be stressed that this focus is as characteristic of proponents of European superiority as well as of proponents of the superiority of Asian civilizations in the pre-industrial era. Just as Jones and Landes, repeatedly highlighted the superiority and ingenuity of Western technology, John Hobson, a most fervent advocate of Asian technological superiority in the same period, used the same yardstick: innovation and large-scale technologies¹⁴. A second line of thought, as part of well-established approaches in economic history, stresses the role of technological artifacts in achieving productivity gains, for example as a response by entrepreneurs to the high wage rates during British industrialization¹⁵.

For example, one line of inquiry recently gaining momentum seeks to examine the role of macro- or micro-inventions in the productivity gains. To be sure, this is just one way of approaching the role of technology in a society. It is only one of a multitude of issues nowadays under debate among historians with expertise in the history of technology, in particular when it comes to reflections about how societies employ and evaluate technologies.

The question is thus whether such a quantitative approach to the factor "technology" suffices to understand the role technology had in societies in China, India, the Ottoman Empire and European's core regions between c. 1500 and c. 1800 and the relevance this factor thus might have had to the "great divergence". One might well argue that a merely quantitative perception of the issue of technology rather obstructs a more substantial discussion of the qualitative aspects of this factor. Along this line of thought, the discussion about technological issues in the controversy on the "great divergence" could in the future be brought to a different level.

One could, for example, explicitly turn away from comparing the mere performance of technical artifacts and from using yardsticks like efficiency and productivity gains, in order to develop non-Eurocentric categories instead which might better serve to compare technologies in different world regions. Such categories might comprise the ways technologies were adopted and adapted to local economic, social, and environmental conditions; how respective decisions were influenced by political or religious structures; and which symbolic functions such artifacts had as part of the material culture of a given place or region. So far, however, a discussion about the standards by which one might compare pre-industrial technologies in different regions of the world with such rather qualitative categories has hardly even begun¹⁶.

One thing quite clear is that utilization of the most intricate machinery is not an appropriate yardstick of our reflection on the ways technology is part and parcel of a change over time in any society. An often cited example of the problems connected to this frequently adopted approach is the employment of milling machinery in Europe and China. While the basic elements of this technology had been known in both cultures since about the time of Christ's birth, and various forms of mills were being employed for various purposes in China for centuries, China did not experience a similar application density of grain mills as did Europe, where mills were found in a range of places throughout the early modern period. One of the basic reasons is that, in China, the milling of rice was simply not necessary or adequate.

All the same, when it comes to agrarian output, Chinese rice farming produced more calories per area than European grain production. To use the number of mills employed as a yardstick for technological superiority is thus as misleading. Similarly misleading is the argument that the renunciation of carts in Arab regions since late Antiquity in favor of camels marks a technological regression in transportation. Research has shown that because the climatic and environmental circumstances in which they technical choice was made, camels were simply much more apt to fulfil transportation purposes than carts.

Another such doubtful comparison regards the employment of complex pumping technology for irrigation purposes as a symbol of technological progress. Hydraulic systems such as those in China or in the Islamic world and Persia, to a great extent without relying on such mechanical devices, fulfilled comparable functions and were sometimes executed on a considerably larger scale than their European counterparts.

To be sure, mechanical technology remains highly relevant to the study of Western industrialization. Yet the argument advanced here is that it would be productive to discuss pre-industrial technology on a global scale without necessarily presupposing Eurocentric categories. There is surely enough material to do so. In recent years a number of pioneering studies have been published that take a closer look at Ottoman artisans, cotton production in Asian regions, the employment of gunpowder weapons across Asia, or the employment of technical and scientific illustrations and technical treatises in China¹⁷.

However, these path-breaking studies seem to have not been taken comprehensively into account in scholarship on the "great divergence". An attempt to take a closer look at "technology", below the only skin-deep quantitative approaches, could also be directed at the study of technical knowledge, along the lines discussed in the following section.