Status Updates From The Tools of Empire: Techno...

So far, the specs of the ships and stuff cause me to skim and feel confused and overwhelmed in places, but numbers do that to me ^^;

But when it’s more just paragraph writing it’s very engaging so not bad.

* this IS required reading for school!

The way this man wrote a singular paragraph of an argument in the past 100 pages and is just flaunting his knowledge on mundane history for the rest of the book is making my blood boil.

Yesssss back to school energy

"The British community of Calcutta, which felt isolated from its homeland-a round trip took a year or more-saw in steam a means of accelerating communications. In 1825 it offered a prize to the first steamer to make the trip in seventy days or less. In response, a group of steam enthusiasts in London built the Enterprize, a large ship with a weak and fuel-hungry engine."

"The Opium War was the first event whose outcome was determined by specially built gunboats. Not by accident did gunboats appear in China at the right moment. They were the end product of a complex process of creation resulting from the confluence, in the mid-1830s, of two historical forces ..."

"The debate on the new imperialism is essentially the result of conflicts in the ordering of causes. To defend the importance of a new factor is therefore to run head-on into ,other interpretations."
Not sure if this can be entirely avoided. For e.g., in the next page when he lays out the three possible scenarios involving the culmination of motives and means, he ends up setting up a loose ordering of causes himself.

"The real triumph of European civilization has been that of vaccines and napalm, of ships and aircraft, of electricity and radio, of plastics and printing presses; in short, it has been a triumph of technology,
not ideology."
Is technology completely separable from ideology, though?

I have to read this for my World Civ II class. Good thing I am already seasoned in perusing dry material in a short amount of time and writing reviews on it because that is my assignment exactly.