delanceyplace.com 08/30/06 - technology in isolation

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In today's excerpt - technology development accelerates when societies can exchange ideas and stagnates when a society is isolated:

"We tend to assume that useful technologies, once acquired, inevitably persist until superseded by better ones. In reality, technologies must be not only acquired but also maintained. ... Any society goes through social movements or fads, in which economically useless things become valued or useful things devalued temporarily ... such fads can persist in isolated societies.

"A famous example involves Japan's abandonment of guns. Firearms reached Japan in AD 1543, when two Portuguese adventurers armed with harquebuses (primitive guns) arrived on a Chinese cargo ship. The Japanese were so impressed by the new weapon that they commenced indigenous gun production, greatly improved gun technology, and by AD 1600 owned more and better guns than any other country in the world.

"But there were also factors working against the acceptance of firearms in Japan. The country had a numerous warrior class, the samurai, for whom swords rated as class symbols and works of art (and as a means of subjugating the lower classes). ... In addition, guns were a foreign invention and grew to be despised, as did other things foreign in Japan after 1600. The samurai-controlled government began by restricting gun production ... until Japan was almost without functional guns again.

"Contemporary European rulers also included some who despised guns and tried to restrict their availability. But such measures never got far in Europe, where any country that temporarily swore off firearms would be promptly overrun by gun-toting neighboring countries. Only because Japan was a populous, isolated island could it get away with its rejection of the powerful new military technology. Its safety in isolation came to an end in 1853, when the visit of Commodore Perry's US fleet bristling with cannons convinced Japan of its need to resume gun manufacture."