Shock Of The Old by David Edgerton

Author:David Edgerton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2008-02-20T16:00:00+00:00

those who invented neither powder nor the compass

those who have never been able to tame steam or electricity

those who have explored neither the seas nor the sky

Eia for those who have never invented anything

for those who have never explored anything

for those who have never subjugated anything.62

But many others, including the dependencia theorists, lamented, for example, that ‘La diosa tecnología no habla español ‘, which meant Spanish speakers were not notable in the world of research and invention.63 ‘Que inventen ellos,’ said the Spanish essayist and rector of the ancient University of Salamanca, Miguel de Unamuno, before 1911. The phrase has achieved notoriety among those who want to see invention flourish in Spain, and indeed no rector of the University of Salamanca would say it today. A document prepared by a ‘western intellectual’ around 1960 claimed that Russian and ‘Eastern Slavonic nations’ were ‘much less inventive and imaginative’ than the Anglo-Saxon nations. But the Soviet bloc was inventive in many ways and Homo sovieticus was not a slav.64

These comments reflect very substantial differences in participation in elite inventive activities. Only sixteen non-whites have won Nobel prizes in science and medicine, but not one has been of African descent, despite the fact that the USA, the clear leader in the Nobel prize league table, has a very large African-American population.65 Very few Spanish speakers have won science or medicine prizes, while Spanish-speaking writers and poets from many nations have been garlanded with the Literature prize. Latin America, Africa and some parts of Asia produce few patents, while most of the Northern Hemisphere, including Japan and Korea, turns them out in prodigious quantities. Uruguay and Brazil give two patents per million population to residents, while Finland gives 187. In the USA there are worthy listings of African-American inventors; the fact that such lists are manageable points to the small numbers involved.

Racial and cultural differentiation was far from confined to invention. In the great empires there was a profoundly racial economy of technology in use. Empire created rich enclaves for European colonisers in colonies and near-colonies, with motor cars, telephones, electricity, running water, cinemas and so on. These were places such as the international settlements in Shanghai, Carthage/Tunis, Casablanca, Ismailia (on the Suez Canal), New Delhi, Singapore, and others. On a smaller scale, enclaves for white engineers and workers from the rich world were dotted around the poor world. Thus American employees of the United Fruit Company lived in special compounds in the company’s banana plantations in South and Central America; while American and other engineers had special housing and facilities in the USSR in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

Within imperial territories race was central to social organisation. In all the places where white technology went, white technicians were in control. The pilots who steered ships through the Suez Canal were British and French, not Egyptian. On the vast Indian railway network, the great majority of its senior engineers were white British. In the interwar years whites born in India became more important,

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