GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

FURTHER READINGS • 4 4 5
and Civilization in China, by Joseph Needham (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press), of which 5 volumes in 16 parts have appeared since
1954, with a dozen more parts on the way. Ahmad al-Hassan and Donald
Hill, Islamic Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
and K. D. White, Greek and Roman Technology (London: Thames and
Hudson, 1984), summarize technology's history for those cultures.
Two conspicuous examples of somewhat isolated societies adopting and
then abandoning technologies potentially useful in competition with other
societies involve Japan's abandonment of firearms, after their adoption in
A.D. 1543, and China's abandonment of its large oceangoing fleets after
A.D. 1433. The former case is described by Noel Perrin, Giving Up the
Gun (Boston: Hall, 1979), and the latter by Louise Levathes, When China
Ruled the Seas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). An essay entitled
"The disappearance of useful arts," pp. 190-210 in W. H. B. Rivers, Psychology
and Ethnology (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926), gives similar
examples among Pacific islanders.
Articles on the history of technology will be found in the quarterly journal
Technology and Culture, published by the Society for the History of
Technology since 1959. John Staudenmaier, Technology's Storytellers
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), analyzes the papers in its first twenty
years.
Specific fields providing material for those interested in the history of
technology include electric power, textiles, and metallurgy. Thomas
Hughes, Networks of Power (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1983), discusses the social, economic, political, and technical factors in the
electrification of Western society from 1880 to 1930. Dava Sobel, Longitude
(New York: Walker, 1995), describes the development of John Harrison's
chronometers that solved the problem of determining longitude at
sea. E. J. W. Barber, Prehistoric Textiles (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1991), sets out the history of cloth in Eurasia from its beginnings
more than 9,000 years ago. Accounts of the history of metallurgy over
wide regions or even over the world include Robert Maddin, The Beginning
of the Use of Metals and Alloys (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1988), Theodore
Wertime and James Muhly, eds., The Coming of the Age of Iron
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), R. D. Penhallurick, Tin in
Antiquity (London: Institute of Metals, 1986), James Muhly, "Copper and
Tin," Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences
43:155-535 (1973), and Alan Franklin, Jacqueline Olin, and Theodore