History: Neglected Clue to Technological Change
Lewis Mumford · Technology and Culture · 1961
THIS PAPER IS MEANT mainly as an admonition and a challenge to the new historians of technology; and it has partly been prompted by the serious lapses and omissions in the five-volume History of Technology that was recently completed. Yet there is a sense in which this challenge is slightly premature, and even the editors and contributors to that history deserve our charity, if not our complete absolution, for concentrating upon the internal history of technology and largely neglecting the larger historical situation. For the fact is that the primary data of technological history have not been collected and assorted on a sufficient scale; and a vast amount of documentary work, which should have been done in the nineteenth century, if not earlier, still remains to be done before technological processes and events can be fully understood in the large context of social change. Where so much remains to be done within the field of technology itself, to catch up with its long neglect as a subject for scholarship, there is some excuse for this over-sharpening of the focus. For all that, it would be a serious error to believe that the internal development of any department of technics can be firmly pictured without reference to the culture it served and to the movement of that culture through time. History as a mere record of events, as the annals or brief abstract chronicles of an age, has only an occasional item to contribute to our understanding of technical change: the invention of the canning process during the Napoleonic wars, in response to the pressure of the British blockade, might be cited as such an instance. But history as the interpretation of the changes and transformations of a whole culture must necessarily take account