Daniel R. Headrick

Teknoloji Tarihi

Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century

The Tools of Empire

"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

Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850

When Information Came of Age

This penetrating examination of a paradox of colonial rule shows how the massive transfers of technology--including equipment, techniques, and experts--from the European imperial powers to their colonies in Asia and Africa resulted not in industrialization but in underdevelopment. Examiningthe most important technologies--shipping and railways, telegraphs and wireless, urban water supply and sewage disposal, economic botany and plantation agriculture, irrigation, and mining and metallurgy--Headrick provides a new perspective on colonial economic history and reopens the debate on theroots of Asian and African underdevelopment.

Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940

The Tentacles of Progress

"This book is about the ongoing conflict between humanity and the natural environment. Over the past 200,000 years, humans have multiplied and populated the Earth. When they domesticated plants and animals and replaced foraging with agriculture and herding, they depleted natural resources, deforested the land, and caused mass extinctions. But nature has agency too, causing pandemics of plague, smallpox, measles, influenza, and other diseases and a climate change called the Little Ice Age. In recent centuries, industrialization has accelerated extinctions, deforestation, and resource depletion, even in the oceans. Twentieth-century developmentalism and mass consumerism have caused global warming and other climate changes. Environmental movements have argued for the need to mitigate the negative consequences of technological and economic change. The future of humanity and the Earth depends on choices between achieving a sustainable balance between humans and nature, carrying on as before, or learning to manage the biosphere. environment, mass extinction, domestication, agriculture, pandemic, industrialization, developmentalism, consumerism, global warming"--

A Global Environmental History

Humans Versus Nature

Professor of Social Sciences and History Daniel R Headrick

This text examines the political history of telecommunications between 1851, the year the first telegraph cable linked France and Britain, and the end of World War II. The author attempts to illustrate the political aspects of information technology, such as radio propaganda and cryptography.

Telecommunications and International Politics, 1851-1945

The Invisible Weapon

In this work, Daniel Headrick traces the evolution of Western technologies and sheds light on the environmental and social factors that have brought victory in some cases and unforeseen defeat in others.

Technology, Environments, and Western Imperialism, 1400 to the Present

Power Over Peoples

This penetrating examination of a paradox of colonial rule shows how the massive transfers of technology--including equipment, techniques, and experts--from the European imperial powers to their colonies in Asia and Africa resulted not in industrialization but in underdevelopment. Examining the most important technologies--shipping and railways, telegraphs and wireless, urban water supply and sewage disposal, economic botany and plantation agriculture, irrigation, and mining and metallurgy--Headrick provides a new perspective on colonial economic history and reopens the debate on the roots of Asian and African underdevelopment.

A vital instrument of power, telecommunications is and has always been a political technology. In this book, Headrick examines the political history of telecommunications from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of World War II. He argues that this technology gave society new options. In times of peace, the telegraph and radio were, as many predicted, instruments of peace; in times of tension, they became instruments of politics, tools for rival interests, and weapons of war. Writing in a lively, accessible style, Headrick illuminates the political aspects of information technology, showing how in both World Wars, the use of radio led to a shadowy war of disinformation, cryptography, and communications intelligence, with decisive consequences.

Daniel R. Headrick

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