At a profound level, we are our technology. Humans live and prosper because we take part in networks of physical and social technologies. Whether we are using stone tools or complex computers, we interact with the world in certain ways because of the devices we have. Yet it is not the artifacts that tell the whole story of technology; even more than the devices themselves, we are technological beings because we accumulate knowledge and share it with others. We organize ourselves to take on tasks that are beyond the scope of an individual, and share in the rewards that come from combining our skills and abilities. There are dangers associated with our technological life, such as pollution, the devastation of industrialized war, the destruction of existing social structures when new technologies are adopted, and the ever-present potential to exhaust the natural resources that support civilization.

It is easy to think of technology in terms of big buildings, wars and the mass production made possible by factories. It is certainly true that these things do represent important aspects of the grand sweep of history, but the effect of technology on a more individual and human scale is often a better measure of the changes that technology has made and how technology changes social relations.

Domestic life can encompass a wide range of work. It may include food preparation, care and education of children, making clothes and footwear, manufacturing household utensils, decorative arts, tending the sick and elderly, and the observation of various rituals. How and by whom these activities are carried out has been the subject of a great deal of study by historians, anthropologists and sociologists, looking at our ancestors and present-day social groups.

Around the Mediterranean basin a series of empires rose and fell. Part of the strength of the new empires was their ability to absorb technology from other societies and develop new technologies to overcome social and natural problems. The Greeks took over Egypt and expanded on the physical and mechanical understanding of the world, but it was the Romans who created a massive empire based on technological innovations. In particular, roads, a well-trained military and a centralized government allowed Rome to control a vast empire. The wealth of Rome was expressed in civil engineering projects such as aqueducts, temples and large buildings. They introduced the use of the arch and concrete for their building projects. After the fall of the western Roman Empire, Islamic empires grew up and became wealthy by controlling trade between Africa, Europe and Asia. Religion and social mobility spread new technologies east and west, leading to the Islamic Renaissance.

In the era of colonialism, access to global resources had taken Europeans out to the far reaches of the world to bring those resources back to Europe. By the twentieth century, the push for industrialization and changes in transportation created a global marketplace where industrial production and consumption spread from Europe and North America to the wider world. In many ways, the start of the twentieth century began with the end of the First World War. The war had been fought using twentieth-century weapons and nineteenth-century strategies. It demonstrated in the most graphic way possible the power of mass production and the application of modern scientific and engineering concepts to the task of mass destruction. It also demonstrated that industry and politics were global as people and materials were moved around the world to fight the war.

Two revolutions occurred in the late Middle Ages that changed the direction of European society and laid the groundwork for a new age of global empires. In each case, the revolution in fact depended on a literal “revolution.” The first case was the agrarian revolution that depended on the rotating of crops, and the second was the proto-industrial revolution that was based on the revolving of waterwheels that offered the first significant application of power that did not depend on muscle power. Although the waterwheel was not new to Europe, as a technology it was revived by the contact between Christian Europe and the Islamic world. Some European farmers alternated field and fallow, but the systematic rotation of crops and the types of crops was also imported. The Europeans built on the technology they copied, modified it, and eventually surpassed the agricultural and industrial capacity of their neighbors.

The second stanza of William Blake’s poem introduced the term “satanic mills” and it was widely believed that it was a reference to the factories that were springing up across Britain. The vision of the diabolical, dark and dangerous mills was further reinforced when Robert Bridges, England’s Poet Laureate, asked Charles Hubert Hastings Parry to set the poem to music as a hymn that would be used to promote patriotism during the First World War. When Blake was writing his epic poem, England was in the midst of one of its greatest periods of challenge, with industrialization at home changing the economy and social relationships, the recent loss of the American colonies, and Napoleon being crowned emperor of France. In 1803, Thomas.