| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 94.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900. By David Edgerton. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. xviii, 270 pp. $26.00, ISBN 978-0-19-532283-5.)

The history of technology is often told as a history of key inventions: the electric light bulb, the motor car, nuclear weapons, and so on. The Shock of the Old is a lucid and completely convincing rebuttal of that received narrative. David Edgerton shifts the focus from inventions and their straightforward diffusion to the ways in which technologies are used in a global context. As a result, "a whole invisible world of technologies appears. It leads to a rethinking of our notion of technological time, mapped as it is on innovation-based timelines" (p. xi). That world, of corrugated iron, horses, rickshaws, condoms, and harpoons, is far richer and more textured than the one provided by invention-centric accounts of technological change.

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