Page 170 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol III

information societies 989

Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned
to you by your children.We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors,
we borrow it from our Children. • Native American proverb

Muchofeconomichistorycanbeviewedastheslowevo- teenth century. The use of printed books to disseminate
lutionofinformationtowardincreasingspecializationand technical information coupled with rising literacy rates
afinerdivisionofknowledge.Engineers,chemists,mechan- and the wider use of paper facilitated these bridges be-
ics,andphysicianscontrolledspecializedknowledge,and tween people who knew things and those active in actual
as the body of knowledge expanded—at an exponential production.Thus, for instance, the celebrated book pub-
rateduringandaftertheIndustrialRevolution—finerand lished by Georgius Agricola, De Re Metallica (1556),
finer specialization was necessary.This implied that indi- which summarized what was known at the time in min-
vidualsneededtohavebetteraccesstoknowledgethatwas ing engineering, and Jacques Besson’s Theatrum Instru-
already known to someone in their society.The access to mentarum et Machinarum, published in Latin and French
thisknowledgedependedhistoricallyonthetechnologyof in 1569, went through three translations and seven edi-
knowledge reproduction as well as on cultural factors. tions in the following thirty-five years.While these prece-
The great discontinuity here was the printing press, dents were important, the true information revolution
which created a bridge between “town and gown,” but came in the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment,
the effectiveness of the printing press as a means of dis- which eventually changed the entire process of technolog-
seminating information depended on the degree of liter- ical progress and culminated in the Industrial Revolution.
acy as well as on the nature of the books printed.As long
as most books were concerned with religious issues or
were romance novels, their impact on economic devel- The Industrial
opment was of course marginal. But in the sixteenth cen- Enlightenment
tury a technical literature concerned with placing existing The informational aspects of the Enlightenment are a
information at the disposal of those who needed it at a central element of the economic and social changes trig-
minimum cost started to evolve. gered by technological progress. In the eighteenth cen-
In other forms, too, the Enlightenment in the West was tury, a movement we can term the Industrial Enlighten-
an information revolution that changed many of the ment, led to a three-pronged change that had far-reaching
parameters of information flow. Specialization had its economic results. First, the sheer number of serious schol-
costs: From classical times on, philosophers and scien- ars engaging in scientific research in the West increased
tists had moved in different spheres than people like steadily after the triumphs of Galileo and Newton, whose
farmers and artisans who produced useful things. As a insights vastly augmented the social prestige of natural
result, economically productive people were rarely aware philosophers. Second, the research agenda of these sci-
of best-practice science, and scientists were rarely inter- entists increasingly included topics that might benefit the
ested in the day-to-day problems of production and did “useful arts” such as chemistry, botany, optics, hydraulics,
not apply their intellects to the resolution of these prob- and mineralogy. In many of these fields, to be sure, sci-
lems. For China, so rich in scientific knowledge, this was ence was too little advanced to be of much immediate
especially true, but it also held for classical antiquity benefit, but many of the promissory notes issued in the
where brilliant scientists and mathematicians such as eighteenth century by scientists committed to the Bacon-
Archimedes and Hipparchus did not bother with issues ian program of controlling nature through understand-
dealing with agriculture or manufacturing.This started to ing it were honored in a later age.
change in the medieval Occident, when monks often Third, a central goal of the Industrial Enlightenment
became leading scientists and technological innovators. was to diffuse knowledge. It did so by publishing acces-
The gap between the two narrowed further after the sible and user-friendly compilations of knowledge, from
European voyages, and historians date the closer com- books of a general nature like encyclopedias and tech-
munications between the two to the middle of the six- nical dictionaries to specialized technical manuals and