TECHNOLOGY

Kristine Bruland

The relationship between technology and social history raises two kinds of considerations. The initial section of this essay takes a conceptual approach, examining the nature of technology itself. Is technology a separate force, as is often assumed by historians of technology, or does it interact with society in more complex ways, such that social forces may help explain technological developments and vice versa? The second category of considerations involves the actual development of technology as part of European social history, which is taken up in the second section of this essay. In terms of chronology, the conventional division between technology before and after the industrial revolution forms the main organizing principle.

CONCEPTUAL ISSUES

What are the relationships between processes of technological change and the social context? Until very recently technological change has usually been viewed primarily in terms of hardware: impressive, ingenious and increasingly sophisticated engineering solutions to the problems posed by production tasks. For a long time these solutions tended to be seen as rather autonomous in character, so that they could be understood without much in the way of social context. For example, the five-volume History of Technology edited by Charles Singer and collaborators and published between 1954 and 1958 follows technology from the earliest stages of human evolution to the twentieth century. Its 4000 pages cover technical developments (in terms of hardware and specific operative practices) in metalworking, textiles, pottery, and other areas in considerable detail but contain only one brief article by Gordon Childe on technology in terms of social practice.

The role of social factors in the history of technological change gives rise to a range of explanatory problems at different levels. There is, for example, a quite abstract level at which the general propensity of an economic system for such change is explored; this is the level that David Landes (1998) has explored. Then there are questions about why particular sectors of the economy exhibit a propensity for technical change; here one would have to consider questions of how technological opportunity emerges as well as questions of industrial structure; the development of markets, patterns, and levels of demand; the structure and capacity of producer goods industries; state economic policy; and so on. Finally there are questions about why specific technologies develop and what factors shape their diffusion. All of these levels have been researched, in one way or another, from a social perspective. But it is probably this last which has formed the most important focus of recent research. Social factors have been to the forefront in the analysis of how technologies originate and diffuse. As a recent study covering aircraft, fluorescent lights, steel, atomic energy, and electricity production and distribution claimed:

Technologies do not, we suggest, evolve under the impetus of some necessary inner technological or scientific logic. They are not possessed of an inherent momentum. If they evolve or change, it is because they have been pressed into that shape....Technology does not spring, ab initio, from some distinterested fount of innovation. Rather it is born of the social, the economic, and the technical relations that are already in place. A product of the existing structure of opportunities and constraints, it extends, shapes or reproduces that structure in ways that are more or less unpredictable. (Bijker and Law, 1992, pp. 5, 11)

The more traditional and still to some extent dominant view is that technology is something that might have profound social effects but which has developed and spread on the basis of rather autonomous processes of artisan development or, in the modern era, scientific and engineering advance. This kind of determinism has in recent years been supplanted by approaches that seek to set technical or engineering processes against the background of the social environments in which they are generated and put to work. From this perspective, technology immediately begins to look more complicated, and we can begin to see ways in which the social environment shapes technological evolution, as much as it is shaped by it.

Modern perspectives begin by conceptualising technology in ways that move beyond the level of material technique. Of course technology does involve hardware (machines, tools, infrastructure) and technique (in the sense of routines of technical practice), but it also involves at least two other primary dimensions, namely knowledge and organisation, both of which are social phenomena. Technology involves, for example, the production and maintenance of knowledge, both in terms of formal scientific and technical disciplines and also as an equally important array of tacit knowledge. These human skills—sometimes codified, but equally often developed gradually by individuals and taking the form of acquired skills—are an integral part of all processes of production and work. Then there are the crucially important processes of organisation and management through which hardware and technique are set to work. On the one hand these organisation and managerial issues involve decisions about how production processes are to be subdivided, operated, integrated, and supervised; this element of technological practice has a complex history of its own. The publication in 1974 of Harry Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital was a key event in this area. Braverman argued that the history of modern capitalist production is characterised by a consistent attempt to separate conceptual aspects of production (in terms of human skill and control) from the actual process of work; technological change in the modern era thus involves a persistent "degradation of work," and modern management is essentially a method for organising this. There is now a wide literature on the history of work organisation and its links to technological change and society. However, there are also equally important managerial issues involved in integrating technological aspects of production with the wider processes of commercial calculation, marketing, financial organisation, and so on, which firms must undertake. Finally, these elements of knowledge, hardware, and organisation at the firm level occur within a much broader and extremely complex social framework of economic, political, and cultural relationships. This social environment both facilitates and constrains the development, use, and spread of technologies in many ways: for example, through cultural attitudes that affect levels and types of education or that place different valuations on technical or economic achievement.

Central to modern conceptual approaches, therefore, is the idea that the histories of technologies should be seen in their economic and social context and that the focus should extend wider than to embrace just technical artefacts. The point here is that the evolution of technologies involves complex social processes of conflict, negotiation, compromise, and adaptation, and technological change cannot be understood in isolation from these social dimensions. In these approaches, society is not seen as adapting to a deterministic process of technological change, but rather it is social values and decisions that shape the path of technological development. It is a short step from this to the idea that differences in technological performance between societies have at least some of their roots in social structure and social forms, although how these differences operate is as yet far from clear. Nonetheless, technological developments have important impacts on the social world, on the environment, the way we work, and on our general social interrelations. So understanding the evolution of technology in the long run is in part a process of understanding the history of the wider society in which technology is embedded. Socio-technical interplay has only recently emerged as a systematic theme in historical studies. While study of technical and social interaction has frequently been found in historical work, there has also often been a strain of technological determinism, which has raised considerable problems in understanding technological dynamics and their relation to the social context.

Society and technology in the very long run. The link between human society and technology goes back a long way. The evolution of human societies and even the dominance of homo sapiens as a species are intimately joined with the evolution of technology. Early hominid fossil records, for example, are usually found in close proximity to remains of stone implements, and the extension of human society over the earth's surface seems to be founded on mastery of a number of apparently simple (but arguably rather complex) technologies: stone weapons, the management of fire, and the construction of shelter, for example. These technologies emerged in the distant past and characterised the paleolithic and neolithic periods, in which humans evolved complex understandings of animal behaviour, pyrotechnology, weapons manufacture, medical practice, materials, and so on. It has been argued that even these distant technologies can be analysed in terms of evolutionary sequences; the archeological record of such tools exhibits considerable variation, which led George Basalla to argue that

The modern technological world in all its complexity is merely the latest manifestation of a continuum that extends back to the dawn of humankind, and to the first shaped artefacts. Stone implements may not offer a crucial test for the evolutionary thesis, but they provide the best illustration of continuity operating over an extended period of time. (Basalla, 1988, pp. 30–31)

From the neolithic period (from ca. 5000 b. c.) this very slow evolution developed into a number of very profound technological revolutions, of which probably five are especially significant, apart from those mentioned above: the domestication of animals, cultivation of food and "industrial" plants (such as plants used for vessels, construction materials, fibres, and so on), the development of pottery, the development of textiles, and the evolution of metallurgy.

The evidence for the emergence and use of these technologies is primarily archeological, but over this period we have the first sustained phase of what can reasonably be called "radical" change. H. S. Harrison remarks that

The centuries following the development of the initial features of Neolithic culture, during which the hunter and gatherer first became a farmer and stock breeder, were the most significant in the history of human progress. Steps were taken then that were essential to the building of civilizations upon which later cultural revolutions depended.... the evidence indicates that the ferment leading to the development of the new culture was in progress before 5000 b. c. Centuries, and not years only, were consumed in the processes which led to the cultivation of cereals and the domestication of hoofed animals. New opportunities and stimuli emerged that led into other fields of discovery and invention. (Harrison, 1958, p. 79)

Harrison points to three further key features of these technological revolutions, which are found persistently in the historical literature and are relevant also in understanding modern large-scale technological change. First, the time periods involved in these shifts are long—the development of radically new technologies is slow, and therefore for long periods new techniques (such as metal implements) co-exist with the old (such as implements of wood and stone). Second, technical advance has an evolutionary character with new developments opening up further opportunities and thus gradually speeding up the overall process of change. Third, there is a close relationship between large-scale technological change and the social context. The emergence of new technological regimes interacted in significant ways with technical divisions of labour, productivity, and patterns of exchange. In particular, historians have emphasized the fact that increasing productivity raises the question of the distribution of the gains from growth; this is central to questions of the emergence of hierarchy, order, and power in human society. In the very long run, shifts in technological regime cannot therefore be separated from the evolution of social forms as such.

Early social conflict and technological change: the case of the water mill. With respect to modern and premodern eras, it has long been recognised by historians that the diffusion of major technologies is often closely linked to social factors such as patterns of ownership, economic organisation, and income distribution. A classic analysis of such factors was developed by Marc Bloch in his study of the diffusion of water-powered mills in England. The grinding of corn in England, as in all medieval societies, was an activity of key economic significance; the technological alternatives were handmills, which operated on a very small scale with human muscle power, and water mills, which operated with considerably greater speed and efficiency. Yet water mills diffused very slowly as a technique for corn grinding in the period after the eleventh century. The reason for this lies not in the technique itself but in the way the technique was integrated with particular patterns of ownership and social control. After the Norman Conquest of England control of rivers and streams became part of an attempt to impose a new social system based on manorial rights through which landowners claimed income and services from other social classes:

Manorial rights were not an institution native to England. The Norman conquerors had imported them from the continent as one of the principal elements in the manorial system which after the almost total dispossession of the Saxon aristocracy they methodically established. (Bloch, 1985, p. 75)

The watermill was in effect monopolised by the seigneurial class and used as a method of revenue extraction. As part of this process, handmills were proscribed, with a wide variety of attempts to eliminate their existence and use, often by force. This attempt to facilitate use of the water technology by direct suppression of the competing technology failed in the long run, and the consequence was a very slow spread of the apparently superior technology. Bloch's key point in analyzing this process was the deep interconnection between social power, embedded interests, and the processes of use and diffusion of a technology. The fates of the competing technologies were therefore shaped by the fact that different social classes championed them for different economic ends, and the diffusion of the technologies depended on the outcome of sustained social struggle.

Comparative technological development across societies. Social factors have also been deployed around the major historical problem of differences in the rates and direction of technological change across societies. There can be no doubt that many societies are capable of sustained and ingenious invention. Joseph Needham's magisterial Science and Civilisation in China showed beyond any doubt that China pioneered a wide range of technical advances; similar points can be made with respect to the Arab world in such key areas as written texts, mathematics, and so on. Yet, as Joel Mokyr has remarked, "The greatest enigma in the history of technology is the failure of China to sustain its technological superiority." Mokyr surveys a plethora of explanations for this but ultimately supports the view that a constraining social order was the core of the problem:

The difference between China and Europe was that in Europe the power of any social group to sabotage an innovation it deemed detrimental to its interests was far smaller. First, in Europe technological change was essentially a matter of private initiative; the role of the rulers was secondary and passive. Few significant contributions to non-military technology were initiated by the state in Europe before (or during) the Industrial Revolution. There was a market for ideas, and the government entered these markets as just another customer or, more rarely, a supplier. Second, whenever a European government chose to take an actively hostile attitude towards innovation and the nonconformism that bred it, it had to face the consequences.... the possibilities of migration in Europe allowed creative and original thinkers to find a haven if their place of birth was insufficiently tolerant, so that in the long run, reactionary societies lost out in the competition for wealth and power. (Mokyr, 1990, p. 233)

Although serious histories of technology have been written around the centrality of social forces in technological evolution for many years now, it would be a mistake to think that technological determinism is dead. It is common for writers and analysts (with the notable exception of James R. Beniger) to speak as though the revolution in information and communications technologies is autonomous and is reshaping society, but it is hard to doubt that this area too will come to be seen in the kind of context outlined above.

MAJOR DEVELOPMENTS IN TECHNOLOGY

Medieval and Renaissance technology. Most approaches to the development of technology in European culture stress the inventiveness of medieval and renaissance Europe, combined with relatively slow or limited diffusion and use of new technologies. Historians such as Bloch, Lynn White, and Bertrand Gille have shown the medieval development or adoption of a wide range of technologies, such as new forms of plow and harness in agriculture, the open field system, moveable type, and powered machinery. In an recent overview, Frances and Joseph Gies showed the importance of complex infrastructural developments, such as bridges, cathedrals, and fortifications on the one hand and on the other hand, of commercial innovation such as milling, textiles, glass, double-entry bookkeeping, and general accounting techniques. But it really cannot be claimed that these technologies came into widespread use. Mokyr makes a similar point with respect to Renaissance technologies. Clearly we should be cautious about using catchall terms such as the "Renaissance" to describe such a wide and differentiated period, but however we label it the period 1500–1750 generated a wide range of new technical developments in agriculture, mining pumps, precision instruments, tools, and other technologies. But the period is at least as interesting in terms of what did not happen, namely the widespread application of these technologies in a context of technical and productivity advancement. This is primarily a matter of the social and institutional context. Europe was only in the early stages of evolving the social framework which would sharply stimulate not only the development of technologies but their widespread application.

Still, the early modern period did see steady technological evolution in major branches of the European economy. It was in this period that western Europe gradually shifted from being a borrower of Asian technologies such as explosive powder, the compass, and printing, to being a technological leader. Gradual changes in mining and metallurgy boosted European technology by 1600. Adaptations in the printing press, with the use of movable type, propelled Europe to a clear advantage in printing even earlier. By 1700 new technologies in many branches of textiles made Europe a world leader in that area.

The decades from the late seventeenth century to the advent of James Watt's steam engine (1765) saw an accelerating pace of technological change spurred not only by Europe's lead in world trade, but also by growing artisanal freedom from guild restrictions in England and Scotland and by some spillover from the scientific revolution. Social and cultural causes, in other words, explain technological change along with world economic position, while the technological changes in turn fed further social shifts. For the first time since the Middle Ages agricultural technology received attention (at the same time that Europeans were introduced to New World crops like the potato). New methods of drainage expanded available land in places like Holland, while the seed drill and even wider use of the scythe instead of the sickle for harvesting led to modest increases in productivity. The other main sector in which there was significant technological advance was domestic manufacturing, where new techniques such as the flying shuttle for weaving (1733), while still relying on manual or foot power, partially automated processes and so increased productivity. These developments soon proved compatible with water or steam power, combining to generate the technological basis for the industrial revolution proper. In the interim, new technologies fed the rapid commercial and manufacturing expansion of rural and urban areas in western Europe and fostered other changes such as the growth of consumerism.

Industrialization and the new technological era. Many of the issues involved in the interaction between society and technology become critical in the modern period, characterized as it is by incessant technological change and continuous productivity growth. What is often referred to as the industrial revolution began in England in the late eighteenth century and is usually and rightly regarded as a technological watershed, yet its interpretation gives rise to major problems of technological determinism.

Influential explanatory accounts ascribe the industrial revolution to the effects of the deployment of new techniques as the primary agent of economic advance. The strongest version of this argument is written around the steam engine:

If we were to try to single out the crucial inventions which made the industrial revolution possible and ensured a continuous process of industrialization and technical change, and hence sustained economic growth, it seems that the choice would fall on the steam engine on one hand, and on the other Cort's puddling process which made a cheap and acceptable British malleable iron. (Deane, 1965, p. 130)

In effect, the rise of the Watt steam engine has long been treated in British historiography as a decisive event in industrialization. The heroic approach began with the first systematic work on the industrial revolution, Lectures on the Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, by Arnold Toynbee (1852–1883), which focused on the Watt steam engine and the "four great inventions" which revolutionized the cotton textile industry—the spinning jenny (1770), the waterframe (1769), Crompton's spinning mule (1779) and the automatic mule (1825) of Richard Roberts. Toynbee took an essentially determinist view of technology; for example, in seeking to explain the rise of urban industrialization and the decline of the outwork system, he suggested that the emergence of the factory was "the consequence of the mechanical discoveries of the time," and indeed that the steam engine was the basic permissive factor in economic liberalisation. Toynbee had a major impact on subsequent economic history. His technological emphases were repeated in Paul Mantoux's classic Industrial Revolution in the Eighteenth Century and in a wide range of later works up to and including Landes's Unbound Prometheus, which remains the major work on technological development in Western Europe. Mantoux focused the second part of his work, titled "Inventions and Factories," on exactly the same sequence of textile inventions to which Toynbee drew attention, plus Henry Cort's iron process (1783–1784) and the Watt engine. Landes did likewise, adding a discussion of power tools and chemicals. It is only in recent years that a counteremphasis has emerged in which small scale innovation has been placed in the forefront of analysis. Donald McCloskey, for example, emphasized that by 1860 only about 30 percent of British employment was in "activities that had been radically transformed in technique since 1780" and that innovations "came more like a gentle (though unprecedented) rain, gathering here and there in puddles. By 1860 the ground was wet, but by no means soaked, even at the wetter spots. Looms run by hand and factories run by water survived in the cotton textile industry in 1860." G. N. von Tunzelmann (1981) argued that "the usual stress on a handful of dramatic breakthroughs is seriously open to question," and that what mattered was the variety and pervasiveness of innovation.

This general account has not gone without challenge, however. For a start it runs into serious problems of chronology: in the words of G. N. von Tunzelman, "if the Industrial Revolution was to be dated from around 1760, as Toynbee believed, then the Watt engine can hardly have triggered off industrialization, since it was not being marketed commercially until the mid-1770s." Even where there is a clear temporal correlation between expanded output and technical change, as in cotton and in the period 1760–1800, the causal relations are not at all obvious. Others have pointed out that the large factory was uncharacteristic in the eighteenth century; that historians of industrialization have seriously neglected agriculture, "the dominant sphere of the economy at this time, and also the most intensively capitalist of any sector," as Keith Tribe has called it; that hand techniques persisted in sector after sector until well into the nineteenth century, and that it is therefore, according to Raphael Samuel, "not possible to equate the new mode of production with the factory system." All of these considerations suggest a need for a closer look at the social aspects of technological change during the industrial revolution.

Social determinants of innovation in the industrial revolution. Although economic historians have, on the whole, a much more complex understanding of the industrialization process than economists, they have nonetheless followed economists in focusing on aspects of the economic environment (entry conditions, for example, or the structure of factor prices), or the impact of technological change on, for example, productivity growth, rather than on the sources and character of technological change as such. The approach taken by much of the literature on the social dimensions of industrialization has been similar in that it focused on the impacts of technology but not on the dynamics of innovation itself. This was probably because of the long lasting influence of the first systematic examinations of industrialization, the Parliamentary Select Committee hearings that began in the early nineteenth century, and the substantial literature on industrialization to which they gave rise. Within this literature the emphasis was on working conditions, health effects, mortality, and other impacts on the new working class. This type of approach was followed through in the classic sociological study of industrialization, Neil J. Smelser's Social Change in the Industrial Revolution (1959), and then in modern social history.

The approaches of social and economic historians have said little about the technologies themselves. So although technological change is treated as a major factor in early industrialization, it is rarely itself explained in any systematic way. In some cases this occurs because of an explicit or implicit technological determinism, as noted above, which sees technology as an autonomous explanatory force. It is quite common in the literature to find arguments to the effect that the transition to the factory, the rise of new forms of enterprise, or the development of cost accounting, for example, are responses to technological change. It is rare, on the other hand, to find detailed or systematic treatments of the evolution of specific technologies.

Indeed, with the exception of the literature on steam power, we have no systematic histories of the core technologies of early industrialization. Instead what we have had until very recently is Hamlet without the Prince: an economic historiography written largely around the impact of new technologies, but with little analysis of the processes that produce specific areas of technological development, or that determine why some technologies succeed and some fail.

Where we have had attempts to explain the development of technological change in the industrial revolution, the explanations have emphasized the new social context of commercial calculation. Landes, for example, in Unbound Prometheus, writes of technical change in European industrialization as an effect of a conjunction of Western "rationality" (by which is meant means-end calculation) and a "Faustian spirit of mastery." Samuel Lilley, on the other hand, emphasised the causal effectivity of the control, decision-making capacity, and incentives to innovate that characterize the capitalist entrepreneur:

The capitalist entrepreneur is aware—to a degree that no previous exploiter is aware—of how much he stands to gain from this or that technical change. He probably also has enough technological knowledge to judge the practicability of an invention, perhaps even to invent for himself. And the cold steel of competition reinforces this awareness and eliminates those who do not possess it. Hence derives the extreme sensitivity of response to technological opportunity that eighteenth century entrepreneurs repeatedly exhibited. (Lilley, 1978, pp. 219–220)

It should be emphasized that these aspects of the new technological environment are essentially social: they rest on new powers of ownership and control in production. However, we can go beyond these general factors into accounts of the determinants of specific lines of technical change. Modern analysis suggests that the technological change process is not general but focused, and that this is one of the primary explanatory problems which technological advance presents. Against this background the history of technological change is in fact one of advance in quite specific directions, often concentrated not just on particular sectors of the economy but on particular processes within sectors subject to change. In a word, there appear to be priorities. The theoretical problem here has been most succinctly outlined by Nathan Rosenberg:

In the realm of pure theory, a decision maker bent on maximising profits under competitive conditions will pursue any possibility for reducing costs.... What forces, then, determine the directions in which a firm actually goes in exploring for new techniques? Since it cannot explore all directions, what are the factors which induce it to strike out in a particular direction? Better yet, are there any factors at work which compel it to look in some directions rather than others? (Rosenberg, 1977, pp. 110–111)

If the explanation of technological change should be understood in terms of explaining the direction of technological change, then we should seek to explain why technological advance has specific trajectories. This is in large part a matter looking at the social and technical problems which the innovator seeks to solve. Rosenberg has proposed three such "problem areas": technological complementarities, in which imbalances between technical processes induce correcting innovations; supply disruptions of various kinds, leading to innovations to provide substitute products and processes; and labour conflict, in which strikes or plant-level struggles generate "a search for labour-saving machines."

The latter issue was particularly important during the industrial revolution; it gave rise to Marx's famous remark that "it would be possible to write a whole history of the inventions made since 1830 for the sole purpose of providing capital with weapons against working class revolt." This claim has in fact been researched in terms of the sources of innovation during industrialization, and a number of confirming instances have been found. Kristine Bruland (1982) described three important technologies deriving from an attempt to "innovate around" labor conflicts, showing that a number of key innovations in textiles (including the first fully automatic machine in history) could be ascribed to the desire of entrepreneurs and engineers to automate their way around persistent conflicts with powerful shop-floor operatives. Conventional interpretations of industrial technology, in other words, do not deal adequately with the pace and extent of adoption of new technologies or the nature of social and cultural, rather than "great inventor," causation. More recent interpretations have revealed the role of social forces in the construction of "heroic inventors," as in Christine MacLeod's study of Watt and the steam engine.

By the mid-nineteenth century the pace and extent of new technologies unquestionably accelerated. Railroads and steamships transformed transportation from the 1820s onward, and the telegraph began to do the same for communication. Metallurgy was revolutionized by the substitution of coal for charcoal and the invention of the Bessemer process (1850s) for making steel. Printing was automated and larger printing presses were introduced. By the 1870s, use of electrical and gasoline motors anchored the set of new technologies sometimes referred to as the second industrial revolution.

The basis for invention increasingly shifted from individual tinkerers, usually of artisanal background, to organized, collective research in large companies, government agencies, and universities. German firms pioneered the formal research and development approach. The United States became a significant innovator where previously it had borrowed; its contributions included the introduction of interchangeable parts, which speeded the manufacture of weaponry and machinery, and the expansion of looms and other equipment later in the nineteenth century. The second industrial revolution also involved the application of new technology outside the factory, to agriculture (harvesters and other implements), crafts (loading equipment, mechanical saws, and the like), and office work (typewriters and cash registers). Even the home became the site of technological change with sewing machines and vacuum cleaners, among other conveniences.

The modern industrial era. The emphasis on social forms as a central explanatory element of technological change does not stop with the industrial revolution. Many researchers have pushed it into the modern technological epoch, a field of study which developed rapidly in the 1990s, especially focusing on analyses of technology which conceptualise technologies not as artefacts but as integrated systems, with supporting managerial or social arrangements. A particularly influential body of work has been that of Thomas P. Hughes, whose history of electrical power generation and distribution emphasizes that the development of this core technology of the "second industrial revolution" must be understood in terms of "systems, built by systems builders." His work encompasses the electrification of the United States, Britain, and Germany between the 1880s and 1930s. As Hughes shows, the evolution of electric power systems was different in each country, despite the common pool of knowledge to draw on. Reasons for these differences are found in the geographical, cultural, managerial, engineering, and entrepreneurial character of the regions involved. The "networks" which he studies refer not only to the technology but also to the institutions and actors involved. Such an approach, treating technologies as complex integrated systems of artefacts and social organization, has been carried out with regard to a wide range of technologies such as radio, jet engines, and railways.

Interest in the process of technological change crested again with the final decades of the twentieth century. New procedures of genetic engineering, computation, and robotics transformed the technological landscape in what some observers termed a third industrial—or postindustrial—technological revolution. Europe now participated in a literally international process of technological innovation, lagging in some areas (in computerization, behind the United States) but advancing rapidly in others, such as robotics. The full effects of this latest round of technological upheaval have yet to emerge, but the complex relationship between technological and social dynamics will surely remain a major topic for European social history in the future.

See also other articles in this section.

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