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The new edition of a milestone work on the global history of technology. This milestone history of technology, first published in 1990 and now revised and expanded in light of recent research, broke new ground by taking a global view, avoiding the conventional Eurocentric perspective and placing the development of technology squarely in the context of a "world civilization." Case studies include "technological dialogues" between China and West Asia in the eleventh century, medieval African states and the Islamic world, and the United States and Japan post-1950. It examines railway empires through the examples of Russia and Japan and explores current synergies of innovation in energy supply and smartphone technology through African cases. The book uses the term "technological dialogue" to challenges the top-down concept of "technology transfer," showing instead that technologies are typically modified to fit local needs and conditions, often triggering further innovation. The authors trace these encounters and exchanges over a thousand years, examining changes in such technologies as agriculture, firearms, printing, electricity, and railroads. A new chapter brings the narrative into the twenty-first century, discussing technological developments including petrochemicals, aerospace, and digitalization from often unexpected global viewpoints and asking what new kind of industrial revolution is needed to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene.
From the invention of the wheel to the mapping of the genome, technology has always been deeply intertwined with the course of human history. Now, this fascinating set explores the role technology has played in eighteen separate cultures in world history, and reveals the many ways people use technology to control their environment, express religious values, deploy political power, confer social status, and afford themselves varying degrees of pleasure, comfort, and security. Whether focusing on Egyptian pyramids or medieval cathedrals, the Mayan astronomical calendar or the internet, Technology in World History illuminates the amazing array of technologies that humans have developed to shape and give meaning to their lives.
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Today technology has created a world of dazzling progress, growing disparities of wealth and poverty, and looming threats to the environment. Technology: A World History offers an illuminating backdrop to our present moment--a brilliant history of invention around the globe. Historian Daniel R. Headrick ranges from the Stone Age and the beginnings of agriculture to the Industrial Revolution and the electronic revolution of the recent past. In tracing the growing power of humans over nature through increasingly powerful innovations, he compares the evolution of technology in different parts of the world, providing a much broader account than is found in other histories of technology. We also discover how small changes sometimes have dramatic results--how, for instance, the stirrup revolutionized war and gave the Mongols a deadly advantage over the Chinese. And how the nailed horseshoe was a pivotal breakthrough for western farmers. Enlivened with many illustrations, Technology offers a fascinating look at the spread of inventions around the world, both as boons for humanity and as weapons of destruction.
Technologies of Empire reshapes post-colonial scholarship of the long eighteenth century by exploring the ways in which post-enlightenment authors employ writing and imagination to produce rather than simply represent empire. Challenging the assumption that the first imaginings of coordinated global empires occur in the later nineteenth century, this study argues that authors ranging from Adam Smith, Edmund Burke to William Wordsworth conceive of imagination and writing as technologies that can conceptualize and consolidate the new forms of empire they see emerging.
Take an enthralling journey from the Stone Age onward, and see how our ancestors became great builders and rulers. They grew food, discovered metals, made tools, and invented writing. You will see a mighty civilization in Egypt, wise Chinese philosophy, Maya culture in Central America, the colossal Roman Empire, and much more. Illustrated maps let you compare what is happening across the globe at various moments in time. While the Santorini volcano was wiping out the Minoan civilization, flushing toilets were being invented in the Indus Valley (Pakistan). The Greeks held the earliest Olympic Games while the Zapotec built pyramids in Mexico. Find out where it all started!
Annotation World History: Cultures, States, and Societies to 1500 offers a comprehensive introduction to the history of humankind from prehistory to 1500. Authored by six USG faculty members with advance degrees in History, this textbook offers up-to-date original scholarship. It covers such cultures, states, and societies as Ancient Mesopotamia, Ancient Israel, Dynastic Egypt, India's Classical Age, the Dynasties of China, Archaic Greece, the Roman Empire, Islam, Medieval Africa, the Americas, and the Khanates of Central Asia. It includes 350 high-quality images and maps, chronologies, and learning questions to help guide student learning. Its digital nature allows students to follow links to applicable sources and videos, expanding their educational experience beyond the textbook. It provides a new and free alternative to traditional textbooks, making World History an invaluable resource in our modern age of technology and advancement.
This book presents the legislation that formed the basis of Roman law - The Laws of the Twelve Tables. These laws, formally promulgated in 449 BC, consolidated earlier traditions and established enduring rights and duties of Roman citizens. The Tables were created in response to agitation by the plebeian class, who had previously been excluded from the higher benefits of the Republic. Despite previously being unwritten and exclusively interpreted by upper-class priests, the Tables became highly regarded and formed the basis of Roman law for a thousand years. This comprehensive sequence of definitions of private rights and procedures, although highly specific and diverse, provided a foundation for the enduring legal system of the Roman Empire.
Transcending ethnic, linguistic, and religious boundaries, early empires shaped thousands of years of world history. Yet despite the global prominence of empire, individual cases are often studied in isolation. This series seeks to change the terms of the debate by promoting cross-cultural, comparative, and transdisciplinary perspectives on imperial state formation prior to the European colonial expansion. Two thousand years ago, up to one-half of the human species was contained within two political systems, the Roman empire in western Eurasia (centered on the Mediterranean Sea) and the Han empire in eastern Eurasia (centered on the great North China Plain). Both empires were broadly comparable in terms of size and population, and even largely coextensive in chronological terms (221 BCE to 220 CE for the Qin/Han empire, c. 200 BCE to 395 CE for the unified Roman empire). At the most basic level of resolution, the circumstances of their creation are not very different. In the East, the Shang and Western Zhou periods created a shared cultural framework for the Warring States, with the gradual consolidation of numerous small polities into a handful of large kingdoms which were finally united by the westernmost marcher state of Qin. In the Mediterranean, we can observe comparable political fragmentation and gradual expansion of a unifying civilization, Greek in this case, followed by the gradual formation of a handful of major warring states (the Hellenistic kingdoms in the east, Rome-Italy, Syracuse and Carthage in the west), and likewise eventual unification by the westernmost marcher state, the Roman-led Italian confederation. Subsequent destabilization occurred again in strikingly similar ways: both empires came to be divided into two halves, one that contained the original core but was more exposed to the main barbarian periphery (the west in the Roman case, the north in China), and a traditionalist half in the east (Rome) and south (China). These processes of initial convergence and subsequent divergence in Eurasian state formation have never been the object of systematic comparative analysis. This volume, which brings together experts in the history of the ancient Mediterranean and early China, makes a first step in this direction, by presenting a series of comparative case studies on clearly defined aspects of state formation in early eastern and western Eurasia, focusing on the process of initial developmental convergence. It includes a general introduction that makes the case for a comparative approach; a broad sketch of the character of state formation in western and eastern Eurasia during the final millennium of antiquity; and six thematically connected case studies of particularly salient aspects of this process.
The Silk Road: A Very Short Introduction is a new look at an ancient subject: the silk road that linked China, India, Persia and the Mediterranean across the expanses of Central Asia. James A. Millward highlights unusual but important biological, technological and cultural exchanges over the silk roads that stimulated development across Eurasia and underpin civilization in our modern, globalized world.