The Expansion of Technology 500-1500 [antikvár]

The Expansion of Technology 500-1500 The growth of technology is the least developed and most rapidly shifting part of economic history. Historians prefer to work with ample documents such as have been left to us by merchants, bankers and landowners—those who manipulate goods. Unfortunately the peasants, craftsmen and engineers who produce the goods have generally provided sparse words. The state of records and the tastes of historians have thus combined to distort past activities. Today our view is being somewhat rectified by a surge of interest in studying, with what evidence is available, improved methods of production and transportation, the emergence of new types of goods, and changing ways of living and thinking which altered the market for goods and the kinds of investment. This essay attempts to codify what we now know about the development of the more important branches of technology in Europe during the millennium before Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Magellan broke Ocean's barrier and opened the first global epoch in human history: the four hundred and fifty years of European imperialism. The millennial span of the Middle Ages has inherent fascination simply as a phenomenon, but to us who stand at the end of the European Age it has the additional interest of being the period during which Europe built up the self-confidence and the technical [5]