A Global History of Technology, 1850-2000

Project Information

GLOBAL-HOT

Grant agreement ID: 742631

DOI

10.3030/742631

Project closed

EC signature date 26 June 2017

Start date 1 October 2017

End date 30 September 2022

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 499 789,00

EU contribution

€ 2 499 789,00

Coordinated by

TECHNISCHE UNIVERSITAT DARMSTADT
Germany

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - GLOBAL-HOT (A Global History of Technology, 1850-2000)

Reporting period: 2022-04-01 to 2022-09-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Since the colonial era, Europeans have considered Western technologies to be more rational and efficient, more useful and comfortable than technologies produced elsewhere. The research project “A Global History of Technology, 1850-2000” (GLOBAL-HOT; ERC Advanced Grant No. 742631) challenges this perspective. Among others, we exemplify the global circulation of technology by analyzing the exchange of tools, skills, and knowledge at missionary stations in the Dutch East Indies. By investigating vernacular forms of adobe brick construction in Central Asia and self-made menstruation cloth pads in South Korea, we highlight local ingenuity and question the strength of global standardization processes. The analysis of Peruvian and Argentine cookbooks indicates that the modernization of Latin American households followed quite different logics than in Europe and North America. Indigenous techniques resisted the global trend toward mechanization, and local traditions withstood the wholesale adoption of US or European food cultures.

Our results indicate the following:
• When approaching other material cultures on foreign continents, Europeans found themselves in a situation where they had to adopt local techniques and products.
• During encounters with representatives of the West, inhabitants on other continents appropriated and modified incoming technologies in a selective manner to fit their own needs.
• The outcome of colonialism and globalization is not necessary an increasing degree of uniformity and homogeneity across the world.

These conclusions feed into a wider discourse that critically scrutinizes the field of ‘development cooperation’ and its central tenets. Our work has the potential to challenge conventional truisms about the role of Western technologies in the world—also at present. European technologies have certainly been and still remain powerful and attractive, but they have never been nor do they remain hegemonic.

Our findings support these general hypotheses:
• The development and use of technologies took on a variety of forms—not a single, “globalized” form—in various parts of the world.
• The local appropriation of globally circulating artifacts and technical solutions was primarily a highly specific and often contested process.
• Technologies circulated between the Global North and the Global South. Artifacts and material systems did not flow in one direction only.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The first year of the project included four main actions:
• An intensive literature seminar to give all team members―the PI, one postdoc, and five PhDs―a firm basis in the history of technology, global history, and science and technology studies (STS)
• Orientation in and documentation of the relevant literature on the history of technology in various world regions
• Location of possibly relevant archives and libraries in chosen regions; including exploratory research trips to the respective continents
• The setting up of a project homepage and an online blog
During this phase the team members started working on essay reviews discussing the literature on the history of technology in various world regions.

After the first year, all members of the research team undertook research visits of different length to the relevant sites, where they gathered primary sources and locally available literature. Whenever possible, this material was scanned and later prepared back at the home institution at the Technical University of Darmstadt. In some cases, the researchers conducted interviews with consumers, users, craftspersons, and experts. Research outside Europe was complemented by archival trips in Germany and to France and the UK. Outcomes include, among others, eleven research papers submitted to peer-reviewed journals and book chapters to planned anthologies; five essay reviews submitted to leading journals in the field; one PhD and one MA thesis prepared for an established academic publishers; one PhD dissertation published online at our university library site.

In 2018, the PhDs and the postdoc presented their work at a summer school and conference organized by the International Committee for the History of Technology. We received much praise for our “interactive discussion session” on how to write global history of technology. A milestone was a 2019 workshop in Darmstadt, an event which gathered forty-odd scholars from around the world. A further highlight was our very active presence during the Annual Meeting of the Society for History of Technology in Milan, October 2019.

In addition to our homepage and online blog, we have laid the foundations for an interactive, crowd-sourced map on archives of relevance for the history of technology in the Global South. All initiatives have attracted considerable attention, both from publishers, colleagues, and commentators outside the academy.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

GLOBAL-HOTendeavors to show that many of the established interpretative frameworks in the history of technology fall short of delivering a nuanced and balanced picture of material culture in the Global South. Going beyond industrial technologies and large technological systems and unraveling the continuous use of local knowledge and techniques, we give craftspersons and ordinary users their rightful place in the history of technology. The involvement with topics and colleagues in Asia, Africa, and Latin America might in fact lead to a redefinition of the discipline: ideally, “history of technology” would need to be renamed “history of material culture.”

GLOBAL-HOT will in the end be able to deliver a forceful critique of theses of uniform globalization and homogenous modernization. It will not only allow us to better understand the varieties of technological forms; it will also contribute to the long overdue modification of persistent truisms and established concepts in the history of technology. For instance: our analysis of the electrification of East Africa makes it abundantly clear that so-called large technological systems in that part of the world followed very different logics than in Europe or North America; and, our interpretation of the manufacture and use of sugar in India shows that the concept of “appropriate technology” would profit from a radical redefinition.

Overcoming the Western bias of the discipline requires rigorous and sustainable efforts to incorporate researchers from the Global South into mainstream Western academic discourses—without breaking the ties to their institutional affiliations at home. At the same time, it is imperative to remove academic, financial, and visa barriers for scholars engaging with case studies on the Global South.

These insights motivate us to undertake a number of further activities―in addition to the production of articles, theses, and books―during the second half of the project:
• Collaborating with scholars from the Global South in order to improve their academic standing in their home countries.
• Attracting further associate members to the core team of the project.
• Crowd-sourcing information to create a comprehensive, interactive map of archives, museums, and research institutes on a global scale.
• Organizing a global online conference in the last project year.

GLOBAL-HOT Research Team