In his new open-access book, «Microhistories of Technology: Making the World,» historian Mikael Hård challenges the Eurocentric assumption that modern innovation flowed in one direction — from Western industrial centers to the rest of the world.
Drawing on archival records, field observations and oral histories from Asia, Africa and Latin America, Hård shows how local communities actively selected, adapted or rejected Western technologies to maintain their autonomy and preserve distinct material cultures.
By examining technology through the broader lens of material culture, Hård places hand tools on an equal footing with complex industrial machinery. He argues that globalization did not eliminate artisanal production methods. Instead, traditional, homemade and hybrid techniques coexisted with imported technologies from the mid-19th century through the late 20th century.
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Challenging the narrative of Western dominance
The book challenges established historical frameworks, including technological determinism and the idea of straightforward technology transfer. Hård argues that large-scale technological systems often failed to gain a lasting foothold in non-Western settings.
Colonial and corporate projects, he notes, frequently created fragmented infrastructures that did not displace established local practices.
In West Africa, traditional communication networks based on talking drums and transportation using pack animals remained resilient alternatives to colonial telegraph and railway systems. In colonial Borneo, Dayak gold miners combined German hammers with Indigenous panning tools, continuing manual mining after European corporate ventures had collapsed and their sites been reclaimed by the jungle. Similarly, in 19th-century Sumatra, Indigenous carpenters built missionary stations using traditional arch-bladed adzes and palm thatching rather than imported saws.
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Adapting technologies to local realities
Across eight case studies, Hård highlights the agency of ordinary users, artisans and craftspeople in shaping how technologies were adopted and used.
In northern India, smallholder farmers resisted capitalist sugar plantation models and expensive British milling machinery. Instead, they continued producing muscovado and gur — traditional forms of unrefined sugar — using intermediate technologies developed by Indian innovators such as S.M. Hadi.
In Latin America, home cooks developed creole cuisines by combining pre-Columbian stone-grinding tools with modern gas and electric stoves. Their practices illustrate how traditional foodways could adapt to modern appliances without losing their cultural identity.
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Rethinking urban life and consumer choice
Hård also examines how users shaped technology in 20th-century cities.
In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, electricity networks operated in isolated, disconnected sections, prompting residents to improvise ways to access power. In Nairobi, Kenya, residents of low-income neighborhoods developed flexible settlements built around home-based industries, local brewing and cooperative water supplies rather than relying solely on state-provided housing.
In postwar South Korea, women continued making reusable cotton menstrual pads for decades despite aggressive corporate marketing of disposable alternatives. In Soviet Samarkand, now in Uzbekistan, residents resisted standardized concrete high-rises by building, expanding and repairing traditional mud-brick courtyard houses through hashar, a tradition of communal labor.
Taken together, the case studies suggest that global technological history cannot be understood solely through top-down narratives of industrialization. It must also account for the resourcefulness of ordinary people, whose choices and adaptations helped shape the material worlds in which they lived.