Review: Shock of the Old (Part I)

I finished David Edgerton's book Shock of the Old earlier this week, but I've been letting it sit and stew for a while. I'm going to do this review in two halves because I think it's important for me to separate my response to the book from my response to the ideas, because I simultaneously agree and disagree with the thesis of the book. In order to articulate my argument, I think I need two halves. This is part one, in which I mostly enjoyed the book and agree with Edgerton.

If a book's goal is to challenge what you think, the Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 is very successful. Edgerton's aim is to shake up the field of technology history, leading some reviewers to describe him (not unhappily) as revisionist. The book is full of Edgerton-coined terms such as 'creole technology' and a sense of indignation and righteousness.

The main thesis of the book is that the history of technology focuses far too much on the history of invention and innovation. In fact, more than that--Edgerton argues that the history of technology and our very understanding of technology itself almost is that of invention and innovation and that is is wrong. We should instead look at the use of a given technology. This would mean, for examine, that we examine the use of a tool like a metal blade as a killing tool not as an outdated bronze-age technology but as a technology that continues to be crucial and effective to this day, even with the proliferation of other killing technologies such as guns and bombs. Edgerton illustrates this particular example (which I have phrased somewhat differently from him) with the devastatingly brutal use of the machete in Rwanda, in which millions were efficiently murdered.

In the conclusion of this article published in the Journal of History of Science and Technology (which slightly more academically reinterates in a compressed fashion many of the points, and a lot of the language, made in the more popularist book, if you're looking for a quick fix), Edgerton writes,   

If [this paper] calls for anything it is for the history of technology to ask and answer historical questions, to engage in historical and other debates. It argues that to do this we need to attend very carefully to nature of the standard narratives that are at work in today's academic  histories, which, for example, privilege the ‘question of technology'; conflate invention/innovation/technology and equate technology with the rich world, or the internal study of technology with invention, and much more besides.

 I wish this paragraph had been in the book, because I think it articulates what Edgerton was trying to do more clearly than his book does. I am not familiar with the academic histories of world technology, but I am happy to accept that there may in fact be a problem in academia like that described above. In that light, I do agree with Edgerton: technology is clearly about use as well as its invention. Technologies do not necessarily displace their predecessors, nor does the poorer world precisely trail after the richer technologically or lack a distinct technological history. There is value to examining the roles of resurgence, maintenance and the sharing/transition/imitation of technologies both temporally and geographically. The examples Edgerton provides are interesting and illustrative. In short: I agree.

What else is there left to say? I hear you cry. What's not to love? Why aren't you, like prominent reviewers, glowingly ending this review on a positive note?
  
Well, there are two things I object to, the first of which I shall articulate here, the second in my second post. My first objection is that I found this book poorly written. If (lol) this had been submitted to me as a paper, I would have sent it back because I found it quite badly constructed and in some cases, poorly explained. The text was bookended by the thesis, but did not make a cohesive argument throughout. In fact, I frequently found myself wishing each individual chapter had been a standalone article and that within each article, there was rather more discussion and rather fewer examples. In places, the reader was presented with a pile of data and examples presented without explicit links to the argument.

I think this all comes down to the book being more of an argument about the problems in academic histories without ever referencing the academic histories--or indeed, historians--it is apparently attempting to counter. At the same time, it's being a popularist, technological storyteller that sells in bookshops-- more like the lovely book The Battery that I recently read. The result was frustratingly neither a cutting examination of a failed historical narrative nor an interesting and innovative delve into the history of 20th century technology.

And so that is my first objection. My second is much more of an objection of ideas, and it can be partly touched upon with the terribly facetious comment: Yes. And?

You will have to read Part II for more.