Microhistories of Technology: Making the World by Mikael Hård (review)

Reviewed by:

• Microhistories of Technology: Making the World by Mikael Hård
• Corinna R. Unger (bio)

Microhistories of Technology: Making the World
By Mikael Hård. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023. Pp. xx + 290.

In the preface to his new book, Mikael Hård describes how his approach to the history of technology has evolved over the decades. He started out with a conviction that nineteenth- and twentieth-century history could be captured by terms like industrialization and mechanization. Later, though, he came to argue that those concepts were too abstract to do justice to the complexity of history. He then became interested in the notion of globalization but questioned its macroperspective, which tended to hide particularities from historical view. His new book documents in impressive ways how the history of technology has evolved as a field, and it shows the exciting avenues open to historians of technology today.

In his book on microhistories of technology, Hård demonstrates the richness of technologies that individuals and communities across the world have used and, in part, continue to use in their everyday lives. His understanding of technology is notably broad and informed by methods borrowed from microhistory, social history, cultural history, and gender history. The volume, which covers the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, contains chapters on carpentry and construction work, communication via drums, sugar production, electricity networks, housing, cooking, beer brewing, and menstruation pads. In terms of geographic range, the chapters cover today’s Indonesia, Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Ghana, northern India, Tanzania, Argentina, Kenya, Uzbekistan, and South Korea. Referring to nation-states is somewhat misleading, though, as Hård is less interested in national structures than in local and regional phenomena. By drawing on historical cases, he highlights the variety of technological knowledge related to all aspects of life.

For example, by using European travel accounts and ethnographic studies from the nineteenth century and complementing them with contemporary literature, Hård emphasizes how well adapted the so-called Indigenous building techniques in Indonesia and sugar production techniques in India were to local climatic and economic conditions. Furthermore, he underlines that [End Page 994] Europeans acknowledged and admired local practices and incorporated them into their own work, just as representatives of local communities were eager to learn about practices Europeans brought with them. Hård thereby shows how an in-depth analysis of a specific technology in situ can allow historians to speak to broader questions about the nature of colonial relations.

Hård does not question the fact that colonial relations were unequal and exploitative, or that they were anchored in racist and sexist assumptions. Nor does he romanticize Indigenous practices, poverty, or violence. But he demonstrates that the idea that European, or Western, individuals dismissed Indigenous knowledge out of hand, eradicated existing approaches, and replaced them with their own is oversimplistic. For example, the assumption that South Korean society became “Americanized” after World War II is challenged by his finding that American companies trying to market menstruations pads and tampons faced numerous obstacles. South Korean women had long used self-made menstruation pads, and their clothing habits did not align with the products marketed by companies like Kotex. Hence, a South Korean menstruation supply industry evolved that marketed products adapted to Korean women’s practices even as their lifestyles and behaviors were changing over time. This suggests that concepts like “modernization” need to be used with great care, and that assumptions about the universalizing power of Western technology should be refined.

Each of the chapters presented in the book is so interesting that it would easily justify an entire book on the topic, and Hård makes an active effort to provide as much information on each phenomenon as possible. In some cases, this results in rather descriptive accounts that contain more detail on specific aspects than is strictly necessary. Not all chapters contain a conclusion, and their sometimes rather abrupt endings leave the reader wondering what to make of a particular phenomenon. Against this background, the concluding chapter Hård provides is very valuable in tying the different threads together, emphasizing his key findings, and linking them to ongoing historiographical discussions. For example, he presents a clear argument...