Abstract
Technological change is a key issue for the philosophy of history, because technology is itself a complex social process, involving the influence of many social factors (economic, scientific, political, organizational, educational). So arriving at a history of a particular technology—e.g., electric power, inertial navigation, or medieval ship construction—is itself a challenging and important task for historians.
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Notes
- 1.
The history of technology as a discipline has been particularly fruitful in the past 20 years. Historians in this field have moved substantially beyond the conception of technological change as a series of stages of technical design and implementation, to focus on the social constitution of the process of technological change. Thomas Hughes has played a central role in this revival, as has the journal Technology and Culture.
- 2.
There has been lively work on the issue of the nature and causes of economic development in the early modern European economy in the past 20 years. Especially central is the question of the causal origins of self-sustaining growth in the early modern period of European development. Early expressions of work in this area include Deane (1979), Feinstein (1981), Deane and Cole (1967), and Postan (1972). Important contributions to the more recent literature include Crafts (1985), Jones (1988), Floud and McCloskey, (1981), and O’Brien and Keyder (1978).
- 3.
Deane and Cole (1967) provide a representative narrative along these lines.
- 4.
Essays in Does Technology Drive History? Shed important new light on the topic of technological determinism (Smith and Marx, 1994).
- 5.
For a recent and powerful case for the contingency of a great event of the twentieth century, see Niall Ferguson’s analysis of the origins of World War I (Ferguson, 1999b).
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Little, D. (2010). History of Technology. In: New Contributions to the Philosophy of History. Methodos Series, vol 6. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9410-0_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9410-0_6
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