Technology in Mediterranean and European Lands, 600-1600

Histories of technology are sometimes framed as broader narratives of societal progress. Pamela Long’s synthetic book Technology in Mediterranean and European Lands rejects that approach, arguing that technological innovations are best seen through the lens of process rather than progress. The book contributes to a growing body of literature in the history of technology that replaces an older emphasis on linear and teleological stories with an understanding of technology as contingent on local customs, political and economic contexts, and assimilation and adaptation across cultures. The Mediterranean is a particularly good geographical framework for this approach, as it allows Long to build on understandings of Mediterranean connectivity and to emphasize flows of information and technology transfers. Long also eschews stories of individual innovators or genius inventors in favor of a collective approach to the way societies use technology, drawing on the concept of “distributed cognition” to highlight how technological projects are built through communication among multiple groups of people with different sets of expertise. The book argues against the popular idea of technological “revolutions,” a frame that, according to Long, can obscure the context and exaggerate the effect of new technologies. The book instead offers a social and cultural history of technology without revolution, emphasizing the gradual and evolutionary nature of technological change in the pre-modern Mediterranean.One of the central methodological struggles for scholars of the Mediterranean is that of comparison: how to juxtapose case studies from diverse societies without flattening local specificity and nuance. Long meets that challenge by using a combinative approach, examining technological projects carried out in different locations but for similar purposes, showing the diversity and richness of human solutions to the common problems of food production, shelter, transportation, communication, and craft production. The book is organized into six chapters that build from the technologies needed to provide humans’ most basic requirements—food and water—to more complex societal patterns: the construction and maintenance of cities and the production and trade of material goods. It concludes with a chapter on instruments and machines, including weapons. The progression of chapters effectively illustrates the book’s main argument that technology is inescapably intertwined with human society at all levels.Long’s commitment to situating the history of technology in its social context means that she draws on gender, military, environmental, and economic histories. Environmental and agricultural history is particularly prominent in the chapters on food production and hydraulic technology, where geographic differences in climate and soil conditions led to different agricultural techniques. The heavy plow, for instance, while useful in Northern Europe, was not easily adapted to the soil conditions of most of the Mediterranean. Long synthesizes a wide range of archeological scholarship to argue against Lynn White Jr’s famous explanation of medieval Europe’s agricultural revolution, dismantling each element by showing that three-field rotation was already in use in the early medieval centuries, farmers used multiple variations of hand tools and plows, and the use of horse over oxen as draft animals for wheeled plows was gradual and varied from one region to another. Similarly, in her discussion of crop irrigation, drainage, flood control, and machines powered by water, Long shows the complexity and variety of technologies people used to control and benefit from water.Water supply and sanitation are also key themes in the next chapter on urbanism and building construction. Long’s discussion of building construction privileges ordinary buildings for non-elite people over the monumental structures that have captured the attention of architectural historians. She looks at common building materials—brick, wood, and stone—as well as types of buildings: stone castles, religious buildings like mosques and cathedrals, and houses. She examines the waterways, aqueducts, and reservoirs of Constantinople, Cairo, Rome, Venice, Toledo, Lisbon, London, and Vienna to show how each place used different combinations of technologies and environmental management strategies to supply clean water to its residents.These cities were nodes in the transportation and communication networks that are the subject of the next chapter. Long examines shipbuilding techniques, from the round ships and galleys of the Mediterranean to the cogs and longships of Northern Europe, and discusses the arsenals, shipyards, and port facilities needed to support ship traffic. While transport by water was the most common way to travel in the premodern Mediterranean, Long also outlines the infrastructure of roads and bridges that facilitated overland travel, moving from questions of design to considerations of the labor needed to construct and maintain them. The chapter concludes with an overview of the technologies of communication, including the production of paper, practices of book-making in manuscript and codex form, and the art of manuscript illumination. When moveable type emerged in the fifteenth century, “printing amplified and transformed the world of manuscripts.” (120).The final pair of chapters looks at the hundreds of types of products and objects produced by artisans and industries, giving special consideration to instruments and machines in a separate chapter. Long first looks at the training of skilled artisans in Byzantine, Islamic, and European towns, pointing to the emergence of craft guilds in Western Europe as a factor in the dissemination of techniques and technologies across generations. She then looks at craft production categorized by material: mining and metallurgy, textiles, ceramics, glass, leatherwork, and decorative arts and crafts. This organization of the material serves to underscore the large number of laborers involved in the production of these objects, moving the focus of analysis from luxury objects and famous artists to the everyday tailors, potters, glassmakers, tanners, and mosaicists who created the quotidian world of medieval Mediterranean material culture. The final chapter looks at specialized machinery like windmills, automata, clocks, and navigational instruments. Long here identifies a cultural change, arguing that “Measurement, precision, and practical mathematics became increasingly significant in the sixteenth century in navigation but also in other disciplines such as architecture and military arts” (172). In this chapter more than any other, she focuses on individual objects such as astrolabes, trebuchets, and crossbows, but concludes that even specialized machines of violence need to be understood in their political, social, and cultural contexts, reinforcing the themes of the book as a whole.The book ends in 1600, and Long only briefly mentions the ways in which the book’s survey of medieval technologies contributes to broader debates on the “Scientific Revolution.” Long does offer a compelling narrative that demonstrates that the knowledge and practices of artisans “might be usefully separated from concerns about “revolutions” of any kind, including the ‘scientific’,” (186). The book reflects a change in the historiography of the history of science more broadly, where a history of great men and great ideas is being replaced by studies that emphasize the importance of artisanal knowledge and craftwork in a constant interplay with theoretical knowledge. Throughout the work, Long clearly explains complex historiographical debates on topics like the economic impact of guilds, feudalism and the scientific revolution in terms that the non-specialist can understand. The book would be particularly useful in undergraduate classes in Mediterranean history and art history as well as in engineering programs that have courses on the premodern history of technology and society. It would also be an excellent addition to courses on medieval environmental history. General readers and specialists in the field alike will benefit from Long’s meticulous scholarship, her gift for synthesizing complex debates, and the wealth of material on how people made and did things in the past.