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Microhistories of Technology

Making the World

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  • Open Access
  • © 2023

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Overview

Authors:
  1. Mikael Hård

    1. Institute of History, Technical University of Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

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  • This book is open access, which means that you have free and unlimited access
  • Discusses how people around the world challenged the production techniques and products brought by globalization
  • Invites readers to view the history of technology and material culture through the lens of diversity
  • Offers examples of colonized peoples resisting the tools of their subjugation

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Table of contents (10 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xx
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  2. Introduction: Honing Local Techniques in a Globalized World

    • Mikael Hård
    Pages 1-11Open Access
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  3. Conclusion: Challenging Globalizing Technologies

    • Mikael Hård
    Pages 249-257Open Access
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  7. Back Matter

    Pages 259-290
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Keywords

About this book

In this open access book, Mikael Hård tells a story of how people around the world challenged the production techniques and products brought by globalization. Retaining their autonomy and freedom, creative individuals selectively adopted or rejected modern gadgets, tools, and machines. In standard historical narratives, globalization is portrayed as an unstoppable force that flattens all obstacles in its path. Modern technology is also seen as inexorable: in the nineteenth century, steamships, telegraph lines, and Gatling guns are said to have paved the way for colonialism and other forms of dominating people and societies. Later, shipping containers and computer networks purportedly pulled the planet deeper into a maelstrom of capitalism. Hård discusses instances that push back against these narratives. For example, in Soviet times, inhabitants of Samarkand, Uzbekistan, preferred to remain in—and expand—their own mud-brick houses rather than move into prefabricated, concreteresidential buildings. Similarly, nineteenth-century Sumatran carpenters ignored the saws brought to them by missionaries—and chose to chop down trees with their arch-bladed adzes. And people in colonial India successfully competed with capitalist-run Caribbean sugar plantations, continuing to produce their own muscovado and sell it to local consumers. This book invites readers to view the history of technology and material culture through the lens of diversity. Based on research funded by the European Research Council and conducted in the Global South, Microhistories of Technology: Making the World shows that the spread of modern technologies did not erase artisanal production methods and traditional tools.

Reviews

“Ideal for teaching, Hård’s eight vivid and illuminating microhistories of “honing local techniques in a global world” will captivate readers, challenging them to think afresh about how globalization works on the ground. Bringing fresh insights into everyday technological choices through the lens of material culture, this fascinating book will tempt readers to further explorations in the history of technology.” (Professor Francesca Bray, University of Edinburgh)

“Among the efforts to understand globalisation and to write global histories in new and diverse perspectives, this work will stand out for its critical engagement with the question of technology and many presumed directionalities and inevitabilities thereof. It is bound to provoke varied responses and to inspire fresh researches on less explored localities and dimensions—perhaps with even less positing of Europe as the polestar.” (Professor John Bosco Lourdusamy, Indian Institute of Technology Madras)

“Granitic ideas of Western technology and experts conquering the world come here to a lethal end. Instead, a complex mosaic of micro and local universes of silent, unnamed, and creative contributors to technological landscapes emerges. The book is a feast of ordinary people in the “Global South,” making the world through ordinary actions and technologies. The impressive variety of unusual sources highlights historical cases rarely addressed by scholarship.” (Professor Stefania Gallini, Universidad Nacional de Colombia)

Authors and Affiliations

  • Institute of History, Technical University of Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany

    Mikael Hård

About the author

Mikael Hård is ​Professor of History of Technology at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany.

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