6 Quotes by Peter A. Lorge

Technology has become the West’s main prop to its claims of inherent superiority over the non-West, and the reason why the non-West should adopt Western culture. If advanced technology is particular to Western culture, then it is only by Westernizing that the non-West can obtain it. This argument collapses if Western technology can be adopted in isolation from the broader culture, or if other cultures can generate significant technology independently.

... the very appearance of the word ‘‘oriental’’ as a serious geographic or cultural term triggers alarm bells for any American academic. The late Edward Said’s Orientalism argued that the word ‘‘oriental’’ is a fundamentally pejorative term for certain parts of the non-Western world, not only indicating that they are inferior but also justifying Western colonization or domination of them.

China failed to maintain its technological lead, and a similar failure throughout Asia to take advantage of the early exposure to that head start transformed precocity into a false dawn. Perversely, Asian improvements and adaptations of current (twentieth- to twenty-first-century) Western-developed technology are taken as further signs of lack of creativity.

Guns neither initiated nor enabled larger changes. Economic, political, and social development preceded and laid the foundation for the invention and use of the gun, not the other way around.

Technology is often portrayed as an objective measure of development, and its advancement as something that can be examined outside of politics. But the history of technology, particularly military technology, has been deeply inflected by nationalist sentiment.

Perhaps the strangest manifestation of the Eurocentric approach to the history of military technology is ... the attempt to discern fundamental cultural roots in the distant past that have resulted in the perceived current Western dominance of the world. This essentialism attempts to contrast ancient Greek logic and philosophy with the less rationally minded philosophies of the non-West. Modern science and technology, in this view, is a simple jump from ancient Greece to early modern Europe.