Global Magic: Technologies of Appropriation from Ancient Rome to Wall Street - Paperback

by Alf Hornborg (Author)

Modern thought on economics and technology is no less magical than the world views of non-modern peoples. This book reveals how our ideas about growth and progress ignore how money and machines throughout history have been used to exploit less affluent parts of world society. The argument critically explores a middle ground between Marxist political ecology and Actor-Network Theory.

Back Jacket

This book explores the conventional modern understanding of technology and the idea that technological progress is illusory, deriving from a local, European perspective on what has historically been a global process of accumulation and asymmetric resource transfers. Globalized technologies are based on differences in wages and the prices of natural resources in different parts of the world. Their magic consists of enabling affluent people to exert power over others while hiding the extent to which this power is dependent on the public conceptions about technology. The reconceptualization of globalized technology proposed here will benefit current deliberations on sustainability, as it advocates fundamental transformations of the economy, rather than technological utopianism.

Author Biography

Alf Hornborg is an anthropologist and Professor of Human Ecology at Lund University, Sweden.