The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900

An interesting thesis with lots of interesting examples, but I am not convinced that the thesis is strongly supported. The key idea is that if we look at the “use-based” history rather than “innovation-centric” history, we can see that the old technologies are pervasive across our society.

Introduction

Use-centered history is not simply a matter of moving technological time forward. As Bruno Latour has aptly noted, modern time, where this behaved as moderns believed, has never existed. Time was always jumbled up, in the pre-modern era, the post-modern era and the modern era.

A use-based history will do much more than disturb our tidy timelines of progress.

These questions become much easier to answer if we stop thinking about ‘technology’, but instead think of ‘things’.

Significance

Time

The story of the poor world (a term preferable to the euphemistic ‘developing world’, and the now irrelevant ‘Third World’) and technology is usually told as one of transfer, resistance, incompetence, lack of maintenance and enforced dependence on rich-world technology. Imperialism, colonialism and dependence were the key concepts, and the transfer of technology from rich to poor, the main process. The crucial measures in play were the stock of rich-world technology in the poor world and its innovative capacity. There is a second line of thought, in which the poor world betrayed its true nature by adopting, even partially, ‘western’ technology. Dating to at least the interwar years, this view held that modern technology destroyed these local, ancient, alternative and more authentic cultures. More recently ‘western’ technology has been thought of as spearheading a violent assault on poor societies. Both accounts fail to take into consideration the distinctiveness of the new poor world as it emerged in the twentieth century. In particular, they fail to see the poor world as a distinctive technological world, one that was particularly fast-growing, and dependent on local and what are usefully called ‘creole’ technologies, many of which we think of as ‘old’. That distinctive world can be voyeuristically consumed, as in the writings of the architect Rem Koolhaas and his associates, but it also needs to be understood not as the future, but as a distinctive world with its own technology of poverty.

Central to this new urbanisation was the growth of the slum, or shanty town, though we must be wary of these terms because they describe many different types of housing. For example, the favelas of Rio de Janeiro are connected to electricity and water, while the asenta-mientos (settlements) of Guatemala City are dark at night. At first sight, the term slum might refer, as it generally did in the rich world and in many parts of the poor world, to decayed old parts of cities where the poorest lived. But in the later twentieth century in particular a new kind of slum, a newly built – one might say purpose-built – one, arose. The optimistic term pueblos jóvenes, or young towns, used to describe the slums of Lima says something important about them even though many are decades old. We need to be particularly wary of definitions of slums in terms of the lack of facilities characteristic of rich cities, such as permanent structures, particular forms of sanitation or electricity. We need to ask not what technology the shanty town lacks, but what it has. For poor cities had particular and often novel systems of building, of sanitation, or supply of water, of food and all the other necessities of life, which were not traditional but new. They proved capable of sustaining a new kind of rapidly expanding urban existence on an enormous scale, even if usually a miserable one. One modern technology of the slum was the Kenyan ‘flying toilet’. A plastic bag, that ubiquitous product of the post-Second World War chemical industry, was used not only to defecate into, but to dispose of what was once quaintly called ‘night soil’: the bag was tied, taken outside, swung around, and hurled away as far as possible from one’s patch

Corrugated iron, asbestos-cement and cement were not invented in the poor world, they were first exported to it, and then locally produced. The growth of the poor world went along with a massive increase in use of these ‘old’ technologies from the rich world, and yet also, importantly, it was a story of the spread of distinctive technologies often adapted from ‘old’ technologies. One can usefully describe them as ‘creole’ technologies. ‘Creole’ is a complex term with a long history and many variant meanings. It most commonly means local derivatives of something originally from elsewhere (typically the white and black populations of the Americas). The term also carries the sense of earthy, local, genuine, vulgar, popular, in contrast to the sophistication of the metropolitan.

Production

Maintenance

Nations

An implicit techno-nationalism is found in an extreme and widespread form in the assumption that national economic and technological performance is determined by national rates of invention and innovation. It is there in the standard market failure argument, developed in the United States in the late 1950s, for state support of research. The argument was this: individuals in a society would not fund enough research because others could make use of the research just as much as the funder could. This is the famous ‘free-rider’ problem. The market failed, and thus government should step in to fund research, which would benefit everyone.

This implicit techno-nationalism is also found in another justification for national funding of research (and development). It is the idea that to overtake rich countries a nation needs to invent and innovate more, and that if it does not it will descend to the level of the poorest countries. Even casting doubt on the role of national R&D can lead the analyst to be accused of being indifferent to their nation becoming like Bulgaria or Paraguay. In such arguments it is often first claimed that invention and innovation is of huge importance to other nations, and then that Britain, India or, say, Thailand spends much less on R&D than the United States and Japan. Thus Spaniards complain that Spain’s share of invention has been lower than its share of population, and indeed production. But Spaniards compare themselves to the richest countries in the world, not the world as a whole.

They also argued that the British ‘decline’ (that is slow growth) must have been associated with low innovation, indeed this ‘decline’ was itself taken as evidence of poor innovation. For example, a recent book on innovation and economic performance, most of it arranged in typical fashion in chapters based on nations, expresses surprise that in the case of Japan recent economic performance has not been on a par with the country’s huge R&D spending, which is second only to that of the USA in scale.13 In the 1990s crude versions of endogenous growth theory, which claimed that inputs such as R&D led to growth, globally and nationally, flourished.

It was known in the 1960s that national rates of economic growth did not correlate positively with national investments in invention, research and development, or innovation. It has not been the case that countries that innovate a lot, grow a lot. Take, for example, Italy and the United Kingdom. Each was very different in 1900 but not so different in 2000. In the 1980s Italy overtook the United Kingdom in output per head, a shock the Italians named il sorpasso. That these countries, such opposites in the usual estimations of national character, had now reached the same level of income per head was unsettling on both sides. In the techno-nationalist world it was literally incredible that Italy had become richer than Great Britain, while spending much less on R&D than Britain did. Italian scientists and engineers and research policy experts had long complained that Italy was by no measure a great centre of innovation; it has very few Nobel prizes (one is for the polymerisation of the plastic polypropylene), and its expenditure on R&D has been low by the standards of rich countries. In Britain, so peculiar are the politics of technology that it has been claimed that Italy was spending more on R&D than Britain in order to square this particular circle. What one does not find is the acceptance that Italy has been brilliantly successful in that with little R&D, it has become as rich as Britain. … It is important to stress that this is not a unique case. Spain was one of the most successful European economies in terms of rates of growth in the 1980s and 1990s, and yet this is a country which spends less than 1 per cent of GDP on R&D.

War

Killing

Invention

Conclusion

We have long been told that we live with an ‘ever-increasing rate of change’, yet there is good evidence that it is not always increasing. Measuring change is extremely difficult, but let us start with economic growth in the rich countries as a crude measure. While there was rapid growth before the Great War, there was slower growth overall between 1913 and 1950. There was spectacular growth in the long boom, followed by less strong growth since. In other words, growth rates were lower in the interwar years than before 1914, and average rates of economic growth after 1973 were considerably lower than in the period 1950–1973. In the 1970s there was a ‘productivity slowdown’ and since then the rich world has continued to grow, but not at historically unprecedented rates.

This book has argued for the importance of the seemingly old. It is also a plea for a novel way of looking at the history of the technological world, one which will change our minds about what that world has been like. And implicit in it is a plea for novel ways of thinking about the technological present.