2. Global technopolitics: the drama with technological innovations
2.2 European dominance, path-dependencies and global flows
This section reconstructs the technological dramas that evolve around the puzzle of a large-scale power shift, the ascent of European empires. It thereby sheds light on three main characteristics of global techno-politics: complex path-dependencies, dynamic, non-linear flows and feedback cycles, and the real yet contingent power effects of different technologies for the expansion and competition among European empires. To begin with,
128). But, as will be argued throughout this thesis, to retain enough analytical sensibility is absolutely paramount in this regard.
21 This commonality also points to another chasm which is discussed in Chapter 5: the fundamental distinction that springs from dualist understandings of ontology and monist forms of ontology (see Wight 2006, Jackson 2011).
many historians, sociologists, and economists came to understand that technology figured a central factor within global power shifts and divergent socio-economic trajectories across societies.22 Most of them, however, have not agreed upon explanations of how and to which extent novel technologies have shaped historical events, and the rise of Europe in particular. For instance, Jared Diamond’s, Germs, Guns, Steel attempts to explain power differences. He pictures various technologies as significant for diverging societal developments: military and maritime technology, centralized political organization, written information and archived knowledge are, to him, “proximate factors, which also enabled modern Europeans to conquer people and other continents” (Diamond 1999, pp.
80-81). Ultimately, however, technical differentials and technological gaps, according to Diamond’s analysis, are due to geographical and environmental conditions.
Many scholars do not agree with this understanding. Europe’s superior technological trajectory, in their view, is not just ephemeral, ultimately stemming from favorable geographical factors akin to a geopolitical notion of longue durée.23 Against structuralist explanations, they trace the principal causes of Europe’s comparative advantages to ingenious individuals and pluralistic societies that were mastering natural science, empirical research and progressive inventions. The central point advanced by these authors is that the achievement of technological leadership ultimately explains Europe’s later ascent to a dominant position (Ferguson 2011, Mokyr 2002, Goldstone 2009, Allan 2009, Landes 1969, Parker 1988). This view, of course, is not new. It mirrors the prevailing discourse of the nineteenth century when Europeans referred to India, China and Africa as backward regions (Adas 1990, pp. 153-210). Technological innovations and scientific artifacts figured as the most powerful indicator of this asymmetry.
“European observers came to view science and especially technology as the most objective and unassailable measures of their own civilization’s past achievement and present worth.
In science and technology their superiority was readily demonstrable, and their advantages over other people grew at an ever increasing pace. This was particularly true after Europe
22 See e.g. Sombart 1911, Schumpeter 1934/2008, Landes 1969, Cipolla 1967, and Innis 2007, Headrick 2009, Hugill 1999. Roland (1993) discusses the recent renaissance of historical appraisals of the crucial role played by technological changes for historical developments.
23 See Kinser (1981, p. 67). Braudel’s framework will be discussed in more detail in 3.1.
and its North American progeny entered a new phase of industrial development based on steel, electrification, and chemical production in the last decades of the nineteenth century.
Prominent social theorists and policymakers drew varying, often conflicting, conclusions from the undeniable fact of Europe’s material mastery and its concomitant global hegemony, but few disputed that machines were the most reliable measure of humankind.”
(Adas 1990, p. 134)
So, can we explain the expansion of European empires merely by their superior technologies? It is safe to say that the “prime movers” of at least 200 years of global economic integration (and domination) have been invented and commercialized in Europe and the United States (Smil 2010), although, as will be discussed in a minute, European innovators indeed have greatly benefited from imported knowledge. Among the most impressive inventions that have been employed in modern Europe are shipbuilding, mechanical clocks, steam and gas engines, global communication networks, aircrafts and electric power systems (Headrick 1991, Rosenberg, Landau and Mowery 1992, Nickles 2003). Long before the scientific and industrial revolutions, Europeans had already seized the technical edge in shipbuilding and artillery. Carlo Cipolla pictures in his magisterial work Guns, Sails and Empires the Caravels and Galleons with their powerful canons as the crucial instruments that enabled rapidly expanding colonial empires via sea. At the same time, European land armies were repeatedly defeated, for instance, by Indians or the Ottoman Empire, showing Europe’s still only partial advantage (Cipolla 1967).
It is important to notice that Cipolla’s narrative does not confirm an instrumentalist understanding of technology. Assuming merely the application of devices makes little sense if one considers the daunting challenges at that time. Portuguese sailors, for example, could not have solved the most daring navigational challenge, the passage down the south Atlantic passing Cape Bojador, by using the superior firepower of their Galleons. This innovation rather required a fascinating networking process that lumped together shipbuilding, sailing skills, navigational practices, the enactment of rivaling spatialities and “fluid technologies”, not to mention immense courage (Law 1987, 2002).
Against this networking process, linear-determinist accounts of Europe’s ascent, not surprisingly, are manufactured on shaky epistemological grounds.
The main reason is the elusiveness of why and how inventions occur and innovations cluster locally. Although they have undeniably lasting and powerful consequences, the majority of individual innovative developments made sense only in retrospect. Preexisting “demand” was only in very few cases the origin of innovative activities, whereas the opposite is the rule. Inventions that turned out to have groundbreaking implications, or to yield huge profits, such as for instance the steam engine, light bulbs, the combustion engine, long-distance communication, and so on, were initially often deemed economically adventurous. In addition, numerous inventions faced fierce political, religious or social opposition (Mokyr 2002, Usher 1954). In sum, technological progress has not occurred in a linear fashion and does not display recurrent patterns. Simple explanations for innovational dynamics are thus implausible (Mokyr 1990, Pomeranz 2000), while the non-linear features of technological innovation challenge linear narratives that link Europe’s ascent to technological mastery.
To put it differently, explanations for innovations are thus mostly restricted to the ex-post facto mode. The peculiar nature of novelty renders anticipative impact assessment of innovations impossible as a matter of principle (Witt 1996, p. 124). For the magnitudes and peculiarities of an invention’s political and social effects are often emerging unexpectedly. Innovations have often opened up a new world that only few have entertained in their wildest dreams and speculations. The history of petroleum—
often seen by scholars as seminal example of the global impact of technological change (Buchan 1972)—is a case in point. Its pioneers kept a “low profile”, as Daniel Yergin notes in the The Prize, for they preferred concealing that they were “involved in so speculative a venture.” Actually, nobody could have foreseen the cascade of scientific and commercial innovations, which led to a development that today predominates our societies, economies and politics (Mitchell 2011, Mayer and Schouten 2012). In the 1850s, very few people imagined large oil deposits beneath the surface; very few saw in
“rock-oil” the coming source for illuminating the world’s home and factories; very few understood that “drilling” rather than “digging” was the way to exploit crude oil; many were opposed to pipelines in the 1880s; nobody seriously considered petroleum as fuel for combustion engines in cars before 1900; in 1911, Churchill had to be convinced to shift the British fleet from coal to oil; at the start of World War II, few foresaw the
central role of petroleum; the US military did not even have records of its oil use supplies; by the end of the war, the US oil production was up from 40,000 barrels per day to 514,000 barrels per day of high quality 100-octane. By then, various technical innovations had helped to meet a “demand” that was simply inexistent prior to the first
“war of motion” (Yergin 1993, pp. 19-113; 153-156; 382-384). Later, however, US oil production was in decline for decades despite constantly rising demand.
The sequence of the discovery, the exploitation, and the usage of petroleum illustrate the restricted explanatory power of “demand models”. Most innovations, regardless whether incremental or radical, did not stem from preexisting needs. Yet, as Wiebe E. Bijker’s work on the decades-long formation of bicycles and light bulbs shows, these innovations require a group of social engineers to envision and pave the way for their actual use. During a process, they eventually have “created” their economic necessity as well as new social practices (Bijker 1997, Bijker and Law 1992).
Analytically, such a historical understanding also multiplies the assumed motivations of innovative behavior. Myriads of different motivations for innovation are possible, while pressing demand structures, profit incentives, or technical lacks can neither force nor constrain innovations to become real. Theoretically speaking, the often contra-factual and stubborn agency of innovators (and pioneer users) is a crucial aspect of techno-dramas.
It is contested as to which explanations for the origins of technological innovations follow from their contingent occurrence and sequence. If we reason to one extreme, we could claim that success of inventions is coincidental. Claude Lévi-Strauss (1956), for example, proposed that the breakthrough of technological developments and consequential societal transformations couldn’t be attributed to certain cultures (or races).
Regardless of their whereabouts they would have developed essentially along familiar lines: “We can therefore be sure that, if the industrial revolution had not begun in North-Western Europe, it would have come about at some other time in a different part of the world” (Lévi-Strauss 1956, p.152). On the contrary, others claim that the uniqueness of local conditions is absolutely pivotal for inventions to be put into practice and to gain momentum. As such, technological innovations require peculiar legal, economic, and cultural settings in order to materialize and, in turn, to become powerful enablers of social change up to the scale of industrial revolutions (Pomeranz 2000).
By implication, and going beyond a set of environmental conditions, we can also differentiate between, on the one hand, the path-dependency of specific types of technologies, which clearly exists as the accumulation of technological innovations cumulatively builds on earlier stages of the same or related technologies. Path-dependency, in this context, is understood as co-evolution of technological systems and artifacts.24 On the other hand, the existence of other, previous unrelated, technological systems, applications, and artifacts is also an important precondition (Mitchell 2009, Misa 1994, p. 122). For example, while the proliferation of automobiles often preceded the necessary traffic infrastructure, leading to high death tolls and traffic jams, the “car”
is only fully realized with the extension of highways, streets, cheap fuel and a comprehensive availability of gas stations and repair shops (Volti 2008).
The effects of path-dependency, however, are limited. The state of existing technologies is a necessary stage for new inventions, yet not a sufficient one (Ayres 1961, Lawson 2008). Against expectations of incrementalism, innovations and their complex interactions and entanglements are often evolving abruptly. Inventor and futurologist Ray Kurzweil (2006) sees their pace even accelerating and partly exponential in momentum.
Indeed, the entire process of creative destruction (which is elaborated in Chapter 9) hardly follows an undetermined and thus incalculable path. In fact, another crucial limitation of path-dependency is that a technological progress is not inevitable so as a technological superiority is neither irreversible.
In this line, the case of the China empire has provoked Joseph Needham’s famous question of why a society, given its highly advanced development stage during the Tang, Song, and Ming Dynasties, did not turn into a hotbed of industrialization and scientific revolution (Landes 2000, Perdue 2006). After all, it would have been much expected that global travelers such as Marco Polo or Ibn Battuta between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries could arguably strike the industrial revolution in Imperial China, which at then had a long record as a technological frontrunner and produced far more advanced weapons, transport techniques and astronomic and medical knowledge as well as strong engineering and science (Mokyr 1990, pp. 209ff.). But, despite China’s earlier
24 Many scholars point to commonalities between technological and biological evolution (Mokyr 1990, p.
283, Lem 1981, pp. 25ff).
technological edge, European empires, trading companies and later nation-states have managed to catch up and, employing their superior weapons for example during the Opium war, even achieved a dominant military position.
We need to be cautious for, to the extent that technological catch-ups are reversing earlier technological dominance, they are always embedded in global flows and feedback processes. In this vein, recent scholarships qualified the premises of Needham’s problem;
they rejected a simplistic narrative that reduces Europe’s technological trajectory to a linear matter, as Europe’s emerging scientific and technical hegemony was a messy process. Andre Gunder Frank stressed, in contradiction to euro-centric perspectives, that western exceptionality and superiority has not unfolded with a preordained trajectory (Frank 1998, see also Goldstone 1993, Watson and Bull 1984). To begin with, well into the eighteenth century, Europeans had a hard time integrating into a then Asian-dominated global trade system because of economic and technical gaps.25 While getting wealthy through the exploitation of abundant resources and cheap labor from the Americas, European merchants and the first joint stock companies experienced worrying trade deficits with their Asian counterparts up until the eighteenth century. The reason was that artists, mines and manufacturers had—aside from silver and mechanical clocks—few products at their disposal that were interesting to foreign consumers and sophisticated enough to prevail on Indian, Arab, Japanese, or Chinese consumer markets.26 As a consequence, the French, Spanish and British rulers erected trade barriers to slow down the imports of Asian textiles, silk and other manufactured goods (Adas 1990, pp. 26ff., Cipolla 2011, pp.100ff.).
On a larger perspective, the European continent remained a backwater until the late eighteenth century. European economies remained technologically and institutionally inferior compared to subregions in India, Imperial China or even Southeast Asia where vibrant centers of manufacturing, trade, and craftsmanship were thriving. For instance,
25 Inside Europe, already by the end of the fourteenth century, the innovative abilities had shifted from the Mediterranean area to middle European kingdoms and city-states, as observers warned the Byzantine emperor of a growing technological margin (Cipolla 2011, p. 24).
26 This does of course not mean that European craftsmanship was generally inferior. Instead, as Zilsel (2000) has pointed out, without sophisticated European craftsman, professionals and manual labor, no modern science could have come alive. Yet until the eighteenth century most European products remained excluded from “global markets” except in the Americas.
drilling technology had been used for over fifteen hundred years in China, but was largely unknown outside. It was only imported to Europe around 1830 (Yergin 1993, p.
25). The British Navy copied Indian missile technology in order to apply it for the attack on Copenhagen in 1807 (Fridlunt 2011). Even the rise of modern capitalism was not solely confined to Europe since both India and China had enormous capitalist enterprises, advanced manufacturing, and cutting edge technologies (Frank 1998, Das Gupta 1994, Pomeranz 1993). Neither did the retreat of Chinese fleets after Admiral Zhenghe’s voyages end Chinese maritime dominance in Asia.27 The European attempts to colonize the “East Indies” were at first uneasy enterprises. “Conquer”, as Fernand Braudel put it,
“is too strong a word. Very often, they were not even able to trade on equal terms.”
(Braudel 1992b, p. 221) In short, the exploration of how Europe’s technological preponderance has occurred demands a truly global approach.
This complicates linear accounts of the early expansion of European empires. If homegrown ingenuity and indigenous scientific progress plays a role, then the technological rise of Europe must be seen primarily as a consequence of transcontinental flows of expertise and techniques. Most indefatigable, Braudel pictures the constant ebb and flow of “world economies”, areas of intense exchange that, as it particularly was the case with the Mediterranean, "bestrode the political and cultural frontiers”. He contends that “the economy, all-invading, mingling together currencies and commodities, tended to promote unity of a kind in a world where everything else seemed to be conspiring to create clearly-distinguished blocs.” (Braudel 1992c, p. 22) In fact, a continuous process of mutual learning was the rule—including the diffusion of technologies between cultures and societies across the globe, which our current imagination perceives as separated, or at least not well connected (Cipolla 1965, Braudel 1992a, pp. 385ff).
Scientific and philosophical knowledge traveled directly from Arabic civilizations to the relatively backward kingdoms and Italian city-states, igniting early European research and humanistic philosophies and enabling the enlightenment movement. Arabic
27 The Dutch East Indian Company, for instance, lost its profitable colony Zeelandia on the island of Taiwan. Dutch troops had to retreat to Batavia because of a crushing defeat against Chinese forces under the command of pirate-turned-admiral Koxinga in 1667. On an equally weak footing lived the Portuguese settlement in Macao, which was absolutely dependent on the permission of and food supplies by Chinese Imperial authorities (Andrade 2011).
philosophers, mathematicians and technicians, who for centuries incorporated ancient Greek philosophy, sciences and know-how, were far more sophisticated in terms of navigation, math, astronomy, irrigation, or urban infrastructure for a long period (Freely 2009). The same can be said about Sino-European exchanges. On the one hand, several Jesuits had become leading figures at the Imperial court in Beijing in charge of the Chinese calendar; on the other hand, Chinese artwork, gardening techniques, textiles, and architecture had been eagerly imported by European elites. The latter appreciated the two-way communication with the Ming Empire for mutual benefits. For instance, German philosopher Gottfried W. Leibniz, publishing his Novissima Sinica in 1697, saw the middle kingdom as a highly developed civilization with thriving philosophy, technical expertise, and superior political organization (Lach 1945, Perkins 2004).
The transatlantic explorations of Portuguese and Spanish conquistadores, merchants, and missionaries were quite different from the relatively selective and short-lived Sino-European encounters. They brought yet another twist in terms of technological progress as both consequence and facilitator of colonial expansion. The collection, systematization, and dissemination of knowledge about non-European cultures, societies, and environments spurred multiple philosophical and scientific responses. Novel collaborative practices within empirical science, engineering, and governance emerged from challenges of infrastructural projects in the Americas, spreading to other research institutions (Bleichmar et al. 2009, Barrera-Osorio 2010). The application of academic systems of knowledge—sometimes in form of “cultural manuals”—were also hugely influential in colonial societies for they often underpinned the production of new ethnicities, classes and other social cleavages. Meanwhile, European publics and elites largely came to understand their distinctiveness and historical mission through the prisms of “Orientalism” (Said 1976)—of which different registers had, as mentioned above, technological differences at their core.
Obviously, it was not merely military superiority that had led to the dominance of European colonial powers and later Japan and the US (Howard 1984, Headrick 1979, Buzan and Lawson 2015). The modern sciences and engineering involving the construction of technological systems, the production of expertise, and the use of novel technical artifacts were at the heart of the colonial (and imperial) enterprises (Palladino
and Worboys 1993, MacLeod 2000, Mizuno 2009). Inevitably, “western scientific knowledge has been co-constituted with colonialism” in many ways (Seth 2009, p. 274).
It is often overlooked, though, that through these expanding networks, technologies and practices moved in both directions. Long before the European powers created international organizations to facilitate industrial processes and enable technological infrastructures (Murphy 1994), this two-directional traffic had begun not only fundamentally altering the lives of Amerindians and colonial elites, but also transforming, for example, the territorial practices and sovereignty discourses of
“international” relations on the European continent.28
To sum up, technological innovations are in multiple and complex ways related to the historical rise and demise of civilizations, to power shifts among empires, and to the current distribution of power and prosperity amongst core and periphery states. The global dominance of European powers rests upon a large technological infrastructure and technological superiority (Buzan and Lawson 2015, pp. 67ff). But historical evidence suggests that path-dependency can be qualified in two important ways: first, technological innovations have not, strictly speaking, determined the outcomes of power shifts; neither have they singled-handedly caused economic divergence. Second, technologies as such have never functioned as mere instruments but emerge from various global flows and lead to unexpected interactions. Typically vested in a mutative performance, they were anything but easily controllable tools at the hands of conquerors, statesmen, or entrepreneurs. Clearly, to make sense of these developments from an IR perspective we need to refine conceptual lenses through which we understand technological aspects of power shifts in international politics. But we have first to broaden our understanding of the relationship between technological innovations, authority and state regulation. After all, the question why the Europeans have not just managed to catch-up, but become champions of technological innovation needs further elaboration. This, then, involves the co-constitution of technological innovations and modern statehood.
28 For detailed discussions of the “peripheral” sources of European modernity see Jahn (2000), Branch (2012) and Anderson (1996).