In the current issue

Essay
James W. Cortada, "How New Technologies Spread: Lessons from Computing Technologies"

Essay Reviews
Karen Reeds, "All the Tools Fit to Print: Mark Bland, A Guide to Early Printed Books and Manuscripts;
Susan Dackerman, ed., Prints and the Pursuit of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe"

Theresa Levitt, "Science and Technology beyond the Barricades:
Robert Fox, The Savant and The State; John Tresch, The Romantic Machine"

Veront M. Satchell, "At Work in the Fields of Their Lords: Jonathan Curry-Machado, Cuban Sugar Industry; Lyman L. Johnson, Workshop of Revolution"

Peter A. Coclanis, "Rethinking
the Economic History of Early Modern India: Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not"

Technology and Culture
April 2013

In the Current Issue

How New Technologies Spread:
Lessons from Computing Technologies

James W. Cortada
Digital computers only came into existence in the early 1940s, but by 2010 over a third of the world's population used them. In seven decades they developed from the frightfully complex multi-million-dollar systems to a bewildering variety of technologies, including the very small, such as digital calculators the size of a credit card, and the very "smart," such as mobile phones, which have more calculating power and are richer in functions than even large IBM computers of the early 1970s. The rapid adoption and integration of computing stands alongside other recent technologies notable for their rapid uptake in societies, including, for example, radio and television. [more]

All the Tools Fit to Print:
Mark Bland, A Guide to Early Printed Books
and Manuscripts
Susan Dackerman, ed., Prints and the Pursuit
of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe

Karen Reeds
How big was the rhinoceros? More precisely, how big was the animal Albrecht Dürer portrayed in his famous 1515 woodcut? How big did the print's viewers think the creature was? And how big was the print itself? [more]

Science and Technology beyond the Barricades:
Robert Fox, The Savant and The State
John Tresch, The Romantic Machine

Theresa Levitt
The history of nineteenth-century French science after Napoleon has long labored under a cloud of decline. For too long, the question "What went wrong?" has crowded out other inquiry, and the standard answer—an overcautious positivism that refused to speak of anything other than observable facts—has made the period look sterile and uninteresting. But France at the time was one of the most vibrant and high-stakes battlegrounds of the forces of modernity, and science was at the center of the fight. "The capital of the nineteenth century" was Walter Benjamin's phrase for Paris, and two recent books have recovered that sense of drama and importance to the science being done there. [more]

At Work in the Fields of Their Lords
Jonathan Curry-Machado, Cuban Sugar Industry
Lyman L. Johnson, Workshop of Revolution

Veront M. Satchell
Slave-plantation societies in the Americas are one area of history that has been well-researched and -documented. Most works, however, have focused primarily on the state of the slave economies, the slave-labor regime, the enslaved themselves, or the factors that explain the abolition of the transatlantic trade in Africans and the eventual coming of emancipation. [more]

Rethinking the Economic History of
Early Modern India:
Prasannan Parthasarathi,
Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not

Peter A. Coclanis
Global history has arguably been the hottest field in the discipline over the past fifteen years. Within this broad area of scholarly interest, comparative studies in the global economic history of the so-called early modern period, somewhat surprisingly, have attracted the most attention and engendered the fiercest debates. The most important of such debates revolves around the historical question succinctly put inthe title of Prasannan Parthasarathi's challenging new book, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600-1850. [more]