Technology and the Third World

Abstract

The word ‘technology’ as first used in seventeenth-century England meant the study of the useful arts. Today, and particularly in the context of development, its use is frequently limited to cover the physical methods of doing or making things, the how of production. Technology, however, is fundamentally much more than a tool or a physical process. It includes the cultural context of tools and processes. It is for this reason that during the whole of human history the transference of technologies has involved more than relocation of machinery and plant; it has involved complex and irregular diffusion of ideas and values. The study of such diffusion is complicated by independent origination of ideas and methods in different areas.