Daniel R. Headrick Book order

Focusing on historical studies, technological change, and economic history, the author explores often-overlooked questions with a unique analytical approach. This work promises to be a significant contribution to its fields, likely to be referenced extensively in academic discussions.

Today technology has created a world of dazzling progress, growing disparities of wealth and poverty, and looming threats to the environment. A World History offers an illuminating backdrop to our present moment--a brilliant history of invention around the globe. Historian Daniel R. Headrick ranges from the Stone Age and the beginnings of agriculture to the Industrial Revolution and the electronic revolution of the recent past. In tracing the growing power of humans over nature through increasingly powerful innovations, he compares the evolution of technology in different parts of the world, providing a much broader account than is found in other histories of technology. We also discover how small changes sometimes have dramatic results--how, for instance, the stirrup revolutionized war and gave the Mongols a deadly advantage over the Chinese. And how the nailed horseshoe was a pivotal breakthrough for western farmers. Enlivened with many illustrations, Technologyoffers a fascinating look at the spread of inventions around the world, both as boons for humanity and as weapons of destruction.

"One of the myths of the computer era is that it is our age that invented Information Technology. In a book that is as timely as it is scholarly, Dan Headrick shows how the age of enlightenment discovered 'information' as a systematic way of organizing the things we know. Information technologies preceded industrialization and clearly played a major role in the emergence of modern production techniques and the democratic institutions of free market. Headrick isone of the most imaginative and original minds working on historical questions today."--Joel Mokyr, Northwestern University