Multiple Modernities and Technology: The Spread and Social Impact of Printing

Robert D. Woodberry, Calvin University

Scholars often assume that printing spurred many aspects of “modernity” – mass education, cumulative science, nationalism, the public sphere, etc. However, most of the evidence used to demonstrate these theories come from Europe societies which scholars often implicitly contrast with “less modern” societies. When exposed to the European version of these technologies (plus many other things at the same time), non-European societies also begin mass education, etc. In this restricted perspective, technology seems to drive change and ‘modernity’ seems to be one thing. In this paper I reanalyze the ‘impact of printing’ over a broader timeframe and geography. I analyze the spread and ‘social impact’ of printing in three waves: the Mesopotamian Wave (~2,000 BCE to ~1,000 CE) using woodblocks to print texts on clay, the East Asian wave (8th – 19th centuries CE) using woodblocks and moveable font type to print on paper, and the European wave (~1450 – the present) using movable font to print on paper using a press (because European paper was inferior East and Central Asian paper). In each wave, some groups rapidly borrowed the technology and others did not. Moreover, the ‘social impact’ of each type of printing technology varied radically between contexts. Printing enabled particular outcomes, but it did not cause them directly. The patterns of both technological diffusion and social impact do not correlate well with economic development, size of the merchant class, having phonetic writing systems, valuing calligraphy, religious & ethnic diversity, European conquest, frequency of wars, etc. However, in each wave, the pattern of diffusion and ‘social impact’ follows clear religious patterns. This suggests that, like languages, religions and ‘civilizations’ have an internal cultural grammar that shapes what people values and how they use technology. Competition can shift this grammar, but it has its own internal logic.

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 Presented in Session 76. Reading the Modern: Computational Methods and the Historical Genealogy of Social Meaning