Book Note

David Edgerton. Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xviii + 270 pp. $26.

Reviewed by Jody Roberts

This refreshing new book offers a wonderfully sobering antidote to the neotechnophilia that often characterizes our society. In his romp through 20th-century technology, Edgerton marvels not at the progression of new technologies but at the persistence of old ones and the ways in which they have shaped, and continue to shape, the fabric of our lives. He challenges the innovation-centered stories that have come to dominate recent histories of technology and instead exposes the ways in which the old is sustained. Edgerton demonstrates the role of the old thematically by the varied tasks assigned to technologies (production, war, killing, and invention) and the social structures that keep them going (nation-states and maintenance). Of particular interest is Edgerton’s attention to the chemical industry. Stories of innovation and invention that hail high-energy physics and, more recently, biotechnology, omit the role that chemistry—in particular chemical engineering—has played and continues to play in both academic and industrial science and technology. Indeed, in the 19th century, long before industry–university relations became a research model, chemists were already providing a bridge between these two societal sectors.