Moses Abramovitz argues that a longer life span encourages investment in human
capital and makes people readier to move to new places and occupations. How much
more when the extra years can be the best—"Manpower, Capital, and Technology,"
p. 55.
"The clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchro
nizing the actions of men. The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the
modern industrial age ... at the very beginning of modern technics appeared prophet
ically the accurate automatic machine. ... In its relationship to determinable quanti
ties of energy, to standardization, to automatic action, and finally to its own special
product, accurate timing, the clock has been the foremost machine in modern tech
nics; and at each period it has remained in the lead; it marks a perfection toward which
other machines aspire"—Mumford, Technics and Civilization, pp. 14-15.
Cited in Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, p. 233.
Sivin, "Science and Medicine," p. 165, says that printing with movable type did
not replace the older method until the twentieth century.
Cf. Hall, Powers and Liberties, p. 49.
Elvin, Pattern of the Chinese Past, p. 180.
Needham, "The Guns of Khaifeng-fu," p. 40.
Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, p. 102.
On this point, note the development, as early as the sixteenth century, of a formal
claim by victorious armies to all bells, or to the best bell, in and around a conquered
place: "the right to the bells." Cipolla, Guns, Sails, and Empires, p. 30, n. 1.
In 885, all professional copyists in Baghdad were required to swear an oath not
to copy books of philosophy. On the conflicts of Muslim science and Islamic doctrine,
see Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science, especially chs. 9 and 10.
Ibn Khaltiun, The Muqaddima: An Introduction to History (London: Routiedge
and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 373, cited in Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science, pp. 103-04.
We have an analogous example of arrant cynicism and zealotry in Christian annals:
when the French "crusader" army sent to repress the Cathar heresy broke into Béziers
and was permitted (ordered) to put its inhabitants to the sword, the commander was
asked how they might distinguish the good Christians from the heretics; to which he
replied: "God will know his own."
White, Medieval Religion and Technology, p. 227.
Elvin, Pattern of the Chinese Past, p. 184.
Ibid., p. 85. Elvin gives the figure as "between 35,000 to 40,000 tons and
125,000 tons," but says he prefers the higher estimate. He relies here on Yoshida
Mitsukuni, a Japanese specialist writing in 1967. Subsequent work by Robert Hartwell,
"Markets, Technology, and the Structure of Enterprise," p. 34, also advances the
higher figure. In Hall, Powers and Liberties, p. 46, this becomes "at least 125,000
tons." That's the way of historical numbers—they grow.
Elvin, Pattern of the Chinese Part, pp. 297-98.
Cf. Goldstone, "Gender, Work, and Culture."
Balazs, La bureaucratie céleste, pp. 22-23.
Cited in White, Medieval Religion and Technology, pp. 245^t6.
CHAPTER 5
Schama, "They All Laughed," p. 30, says that even in 1892, protestors objected
to the celebration and delayed it by a year.
Cf. "The Invasion of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria," New Tork Times,
2 June 1991; and the indignant rebuttal of Teresa de Balmaseda Milam, ibid., 4, July
