Technology and Technical Knowledge in the Great Divergence

Conclusion

For future studies on the "great divergence", this shift of focus from highlighting "science" as a factor of cross-cultural comparisons to investigating instead various bodies of formalized knowledge in different parts of the world fits well into more recent developments in a global history of science. Studies that explore – even without directly contribute – to the issue of the "great divergence" tend to look at "science" from the perspective of the "natural sciences" according to European standards, to an encompassing variety of bodies of formalized knowledge²¹.

Such approaches converge well with recent trends in studies at the intersection of early modern history of science and history of technology in Europe that increasingly tend to overcome this binary opposition with the aim rather of writing an overarching history of expertise in that period²².

Due to their somewhat restricted focus on technological invention alone, the protagonists of the debate on the "great divergence" thus far have not taken much note of these transformations of early modern technical knowledge. A research project headed by Patrick O'Brien at the London School of Economics mainly introduced this perspective into reflections on the "great divergence" by studying the generation and application of "useful and reliable knowledge" in various world regions before the onset of industrialization. Karel Davids, in his recent contribution to the debate, has discussed the relation between religion and technology in pre-modern Europe and China, with extensive reference to such newer methodological approaches²³.

He thus demonstrated that an in-depth consideration of these media, institutions and practices is one of many possibilities to bring the discussion of technology in this controversy to a level transcending its study as a factor exclusively for the generation of economic growth.

The "cultural turn" that the history of technology as a historical sub-discipline has witnessed in recent years offers many such possibilities for the study of how societies in various world regions not only employed technologies as an economically relevant factor, but also as an inherent part of their material culture within which technology served a multitude of cultural and symbolic functions.

The study of technical knowledge, in this panorama, shifts the focus away from some sort of "applied science" toward studying the wealth of knowledge formations that characterized, in particular, the expertise with which artisans produced viable economic effects in all regions of the world. Historians of science and technology might profit from future insights into an extended study of these levels of the "great divergence" to the same extent as representatives of other scientific disciplines and the interested public.