EWhat if power cuts or energy supply problems changed our view of technical systems? In a classic book, Technical Europe. Technical revolution and free industrial development in Europe from 1750 to the present day, published by Gallimard in France in 1975, David Landes measured the advances and delays of European countries in terms of technical progress and their contribution to the Industrial Revolution, celebrating a conquering image of Europe. This interpretation has been broadly nuanced and completed by taking into account transnational dynamics in mobility and technical transfers. It was either a question of restoring the practices of expertise by insisting on the local contexts (cities, workshops, regions), or of extracting from them a specific model of rationality, the “useful knowledge” (useful knowledge) linked to the world of inventors, defining a culture of economic growth.
These works were part of a history of capitalism and its epistemologies that Fernand Braudel had already encouraged in Capitalism and material civilization in 1978 (reissue Armand Colin, 2022). With the work of Pamela Smith, a professor at Columbia University, the consideration of “negotiation zones” (trading zones) has made it possible to highlight hybrid epistemologies between craftsmen and scholars, and to show technical intelligence at work. This research has given weight to intellectual creativity, technical migrations, operations and processes in the process of invention.
History of uses
In the midst of an environmental crisis, the figure of innovation associated with the idea of growth nevertheless tends today to be eclipsed in favor of attention paid to maintenance and recycling. British historian David Edgerton sensed its importance in his book What’s new ? (Seuil, translated in 2013), which argued for a history of uses rather than a history of innovations. The geopolitical consequences of this displacement are obvious, since it restores to the countries of the South a place and a dignity in the world of technology.
David Arnold, in his seminal book Everyday technology. Machines and the Making of India’s Modernity (University of Chicago Press, 2013, untranslated) on small everyday technologies in India in the XXe century, showed for example the vitality of the repairers of bicycles or sewing machines, counterpart of a fascination for the techniques developed in the British Indian Empire.
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