Hello all!
I’m reading Headrick’s Tools of Empire for the first time. I have found many of his points compelling and interesting, and it is easy to immediately see their influence on shaping later investigations. However, I find many of his claims troubling and frustrating in their scope, such as how he defines the relationship between ideology and technology, and when he says stuff like “In today’s Asia and Africa, European political and religious ideals barely survive as tenuous mementos of a defunct imperial age - modern equivalents of the Mosque of Córdoba or Hadrian’s Wall.” Does anyone have a moment to point me in the right direction of a historiography of critical responses to this important work? This is not in my wheelhouse so I want to make sure the reactions I’m having to his claims are not entirely baseless.
Thanks!
So, I'd start you off with Europe, Technology and Colonialism in the 20th century which is David Arnold's lit-review about technology and colonialism. That will bring the historiography of the subject up to 2006.
I'd also recommend Michael Adas' book Machines as Measure of Men, which is about ideologies of technological supremacy. That is, how technology and science were added to religion as ideological justifications Europeans used to proclaim themselves superior to Africa, India, and China. Of course, Adas' book is from 1989, only about 8 years more recent than Headrick's. This H-net review is broadly complimentary. But, it raises the issue of the diffusionist framework where "European technology" is disseminated to "non-Western peoples", and that more recent scholarship is more open to recognizing that knowledge production came dispersed and culturally heterogeneous peoples.
As to that specific quote....that is a crock. There is all sorts of literature that talks about the intellectual continuities of colonial and post-colonial Africa. Ruth Rempel contributed 2 chapters about colonial and post-colonial development policy in Palgrave handbook of African Colonial and Post-colonial History which talks a great deal about the continued use of economic planning, agricultural marketing boards, etc.
James Scott's book Seeing Like a State articulates the idea of "high modernism", that states in the 19th-21st centuries have undertaken policies centered on governing society on scientific (or "rational") principles and how that fails. As a corollary, Harry Verhoeven applied the idea of high modernism to Anglo-Egyptian and independent Sudanese hydrological, farming, and state-led development planning from 1800-1998.
So yea, Headrick's assertion that colonial era influence on political or religious ideas was withering away by 1981 is laughable.
Also, this isn’t super relevant, but the smugness of his tone throughout the book is just 😳