Technology and Culture

348 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE With the expansion of European dominance through commerce and conquest in the Renaissance, the tide of technological innovation began to flow in the opposite direction. The 18th century witnessed the birth of European industrialism and the subsequent spread of factories and steam power around the world. Pacey, however, is careful to point out that Eastern technologies continued to have a role in the West (Indian textile production and shipbuilding techniques in England are examples), and that imported European machines were regularly changed to meet local geographical features and climates or social and cultural needs. Again and again he makes a strong case for Indian, African, Chinese, and Japanese technologists who energeti­ cally and ingeniously adapted machines and processes sent from Europe. All of this is presented in a low-key, sensible manner. Instead of becoming bogged down searching for the “true” inventors of some device or process, or in accounting for cultural creativity or stagna­ tion, Pacey lays emphasis on dialogue, interaction, and borrowers in the East and West who were creative modifiers. George Basalla Dr. Basalla teaches the history of technology at the University of Delaware. He is the author of The Evolution of Technology (1988), and he is now writing a book on patterns of growth in technology. Capturing the Horizon: The Historical Geography of Transportation since the Sixteenth Century. By James E. Vance, Jr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Pp. xv + 660; illustrations, notes, index. $26.95 (paper). This is a “Softshell” edition of a book published in hardcover form in 1986. It will thus make more widely available a valuable handbook on transport history, although the decision to bind over 600 pages of double-column text inside a limp cover does not make for easy han­ dling or comfortable reading. Nor does the fancy title inspire confi­ dence: horizons may confine or challenge, and they can be pushed back or expanded indefinitely, but they can never be taken captive because, once encapsulated, horizons lose their defining quality. Nevertheless, James Vance’s meaning soon becomes clear: he is concerned with the progressive advances in transport technology that have enabled the citizens of Western societies to move around the world with ever-increasing facility in the last four centuries. Very reasonably, he adopts a chronological framework for the bulk of his narrative, although he modifies it in order to deal with dominant technologies in succession. Thus there is a series of chapters dealing with canals, railroads, urban transport, sea transport, and commercial TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 349 aviation. The only theme that fails to fit neatly into this system is the story of road transport, which continues through all the other epochs described, so this is accommodated in three “vignettes” on “The Road in Transition” sandwiched between the other sections. Vance manages to pack an enormous amount of information into this framework, drawing on a wide knowledge of sources in Ameri­ can, Canadian, British, French, and German history. He tackles robustly the “chauvinism” that he identifies as a distorting influence in so much history of technology, with scholarship reflecting individual national standpoints. This is certainly a problem, because most sorts of historical investigation (political, diplomatic, social, etc.) regard such standpoints as a matter of course, and research is inevitably conditioned by national experiences and preferences and, indeed, by linguistic competence, whereas the great themes of technological history are truly international. It is a difficulty that requires more attention from historians of technology, and we should be grateful to Vance for his determination to examine developing technologies in the national context that is most appropriate to them. While present­ ing a substantial amount of information, moreover, he contrives to do so with the occasional light touch and personal anecdote that makes the text very readable, despite its bulk. This is, then, a useful book, and all students of transport history should find it instructive. But there are some qualifications to this judgment. In the first place, while there are a number of very good maps in the text, the line drawings and photographs are not well reproduced. Second, written by a geographer and designed specifi­ cally as a “historical geography of...