European Historiography of Technology

This is an anthology about technology''s role in the modernisation process. It is written by a European group of historians of technology. Technological modernisation is very much a question of transferring technology from an innovating culture to a culture aspiring to economic growth. But technology is not only a lever of riches. Sometimes it was not even that. Technology in this anthology is not defined as artefacts only, but as skills and culture, too. Technology transfer was, perhaps, the most important agent of modernisation. Consequently, modernisation must be understood as a complex internationalisation of technological competence. Technological artefacts will always be embedded in a cultural environment. During transfer the recipient culture is likely to be upset, because transfer of technology invariably means transfer of cultural values. Sometimes the recipient culture refuses the technology transfer, sometimes it manages to shape the technological artefact according to its own cultural values, but quite often the recipient cultures succumb. The modernisation process can be seen as technology transfer smoothing out divergencies between cultures of European nation states. Or a smelting pot of technological artefacts and skills. This volume is an attempt to study the relationship between technology as artefacts and skills and cultural environments, academies of science, education systems and ethical values in a comparative European perspective. The papers were given at a conference in Roskilde in 1992 attended by some 40 historians of technology from Germany, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and the United Kingdom.