• 1 Krige (ed.), 2019, p. 17. See also Jasanoff, Kim (eds.), 2015; Pretel, Camprubí (eds.), 2018.
• 2 Schatzberg, 2006, 2018; Coupaye, 2021. See also Marx, 2010 [1997].

1At a time when the global history of technology is developing in line with the globalization of the history of technology, historians are questioning their conceptual and linguistic tools. John Krige raised a critical question in his introduction to How Knowledge Moves, published in 2019. Since the book was the result of essays initially presented at an international workshop, he considered it essential to reflect on the official language of the meeting: “Was it a coincidence that the majority in our workshop had travelled extensively, had lived on several continents, had changed passports and nationality, or spoke several languages other than English? We realised that the increasing hegemony of the English language could elide the specificity of the local—but it did facilitate transnational conversations.”1 Few English-speaking scholars have proposed to thoroughly analyse the history of the English word “technology,” including its ideological presuppositions, with notable exceptions such as Eric Schatzberg (for North American intellectual history) and Ludovic Coupaye.2 Considering the question raised by Krige, we wish to draw attention to the language that historians of technology use.

• 3 Krige (ed.), 2019, p. 10-11.

2Over the last few decades, this issue has become unavoidable as it is clear that the word “technology” conveys the meaning of the applied science, or at best technoscientific hybrids, having sustained Western economic growth from the eighteenth century onwards.3 Historians are trying to find alternatives to the concept of technology in relation to new research subjects that emerge from regions and periods in which social life is differently structured. In this sense, holding our pre-session to the WEHC at the musée du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac was highly meaningful. Locating our workshop in this ethnographic museum manifested our intention to look at technical activities from a non-Western centric point of view that accounts for why we do not feel comfortable using the term “technology.”

• 4 Carnino, Hilaire-Pérez, Lamy, 2024.

3After an analysis of the implications and limitations of the word “technology,” we will consider the diverse worlds of la technique and techniques. French and francophone perspectives and contributions have tended to be relatively ignored in the history of technology. Since the beginning of the 20^th century, however, French-speaking scholars have defined techniques as the result of psychologically, socially, and environmentally meaningful activities. As we shall see, they succeeded in giving a new meaning to this word before it began to be widely recognised in lexicography. They invented la technique, a faculty or activity aimed at transforming the environment, and encouraged scholars to look at all dimensions of human actions and gestures (psychological intentions, social values, group behaviors, local traditions, environmental conditions) through and beyond objects and methods. Since global history aims to interpret the specific rationality inscribed in actions, gestures, and locally-made inventions, we propose to call our field the “global history of techniques” instead of the “global history of technology.”4 As we will try to demonstrate, techniques precisely express the direction taken by global history, which has shifted its focus from universal norms and geographies to local values and environments.

• 5 Camolezi, 2021.

4This paper is divided in four sections. In the first one, after offering a brief overview of the attempts made over the previous generation to find alternatives to “technology,” such as the concept of “useful knowledge,” we highlight the emergence of a common ground in the history of technology: hybrids, “trading zones,” and collective intelligence have been brought to the forefront because historians are increasingly aware of the importance of local knowledge in practice and in theory making. That brings us to the second and third sections. As historians acknowledge the importance of locality, they open the possibility to think in terms of the global history of techniques. In the third section, we thus challenge the terminology used in global history: should we still use the word “technology” for the history of actions and gestures that do not belong to the Western industrial context, or should we restrict its use to refer to specific geographical zones and periods? What are the available alternatives? In the fourth section, we argue in favour of using the word “technique.” We trace its emergence, explain its different meanings in English and French, as well as the rise of the concept of technique (la technique) at the beginning of the 20^th century in France.5 The attention paid to local scales exemplified by global history of technology, we argue, may be leading to the rediscovery of the history of techniques with all the effervescence and interdisciplinarity that go with births – or perhaps, in this case, rebirths.

• 6 Antonelli et al. (eds.), 2006.
• 7 Mokyr, 2002, p. 2 sqq.

5Economic historians and historians of science and technology have become attentive to the use of “technology” and recognised that the meanings of that English word are historically linked to innovation and economic growth. Over the last decades, they have attempted to define “technology” more precisely by making explicit the part played by scientific knowledge in economic growth—through what is termed “knowledge economy” by Paul A. David.6 We can consider this attempt as a condition for linguistic and terminological reflexivity. However, in taking this approach, historians have mainly dealt with technoscience, engineering, patents, and modern industry, leaving aside some of the main aspects of technical activity. Another step towards linguistic and terminological reflexivity is indubitably Joel Mokyr’s concept of “useful knowledge,”7 devised for studying an earlier period, the first Industrial Revolution (1700-1850), certainly constituted another step towards linguistic and terminological reflexivity. As stressed in a special issue devoted to his book The Gifts of Athena underlines,

• 9 Schatzberg, 2018, p. 118 sqq.
• 10 Although Mokyr did not focus on gender bias in his description of technoscientific milieux, new stu (...)
• 11 Mokyr, 2002, p. 11, p. 16-17.
• 12 Ibid., p. 29.

6Today, we could add that Mokyr’s hypothesis was confirmed by Schatzberg, who identified that the contemporary use of the word “technology” began with Thorstein Veblen around the 1900s.9 Veblen chose to translate the German noun Technik as “technology,” instead of using the English cognates available (“technics” or “technique”). Thanks to such “appropriation,” he established a peculiar use of the term by associating “technology” to the second prevalent meaning of Technik (industrial arts) in Germany at the end of the 19^th century. “Technology” became synonymous with industrial arts. After World War II, “technology” was progressively associated with applied science and still bears associations of industrial and scientific supremacy. While Schatzberg was developing his inquiry into “technology,” Mokyr was opening up the way for alternative terminology through the concept of “useful knowledge.” He focused on empirical and experimental knowledge shared by engineers, industrialists, and scientists in technoscientific milieux. He distinguished between “propositional” and “prescriptive” knowledge, making room for techne in the sense of skills and tacit knowledge.10 Science was not as central to his argument, but he still saw techniques (“feasible techniques”)11 as the application of knowledge produced by a highly skilled milieu outside of workshops. According to Mokyr, “[T]he timing of the Industrial Revolution has to be sought in the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment movement.”12

• 13 Klein, 2017, 2012.
• 14 Hilaire-Pérez, 2000.
• 15 Bret, 1990.
• 16 Hilaire-Pérez, 2007, p. 154.
• 17 Nègre, 2016, p. 10 (translated by us).
• 18 Orain, Laubé, 2017.

7In the meantime, there was increasing interest in techniques among historians of knowledge, who started to emphasise “hybrid” figures, such as the artisanal-scientific experts described by Ursula Klein.13 This approach echoed several studies focusing on artisanal knowledge already published in France. In L’invention technique au siècle des Lumières, Liliane Hilaire-Pérez highlighted the mixed sociability fostered by the complex process of expertise in France, which gave rise to a configuration very different to that of the English system.14 Following Patrice Bret,15 she was to show that artisans “formed an ‘intermediary and heterogeneous category’” and should be considered as “hybrids”: “This hybridization contributed […] to the emergence of new types of status, such as the mécanicien.”16 More recently, in L’art et la matière, Valérie Nègre paid “attention to how artisans and architects-constructors write, draw, model and communicate their technique,”17 identifying a kind of knowledge that cannot be reduced to science. Similarly, Arnaud Orain’s and Sylvain Laubé’s “Scholars versus Practitioners?” examined the emergence of “a mixed naval culture” in anchor-proof testing in eighteenth-century France.18

• 19 Smith, 2004.
• 20 Valleriani (ed.), 2017.

8Working from a slightly different perspective, several historians have highlighted the practical roots of knowledge. Pamela H. Smith developed the concept of “artisanal epistemology,”19 and Matteo Valleriani wrote about the “epistemology of practical knowledge,” claiming that “practical activities have been recognised as also being characterised by a structure of knowledge that connects materiality and action on which such activities were based.”20 Valleriani even argued that

• 22 Ibid., p. 2, p. 16-17.
• 23 Hilaire-Pérez, 2013, 2021.
• 24 Hilaire-Pérez, Lanoë, 2011.

9In this sense, the management of labour and the regulation of markets were crucial to the codification of practices and to the emergence of “new knowledge systems” or “new knowledge structures.”22 This was a long-lasting feature of early modern Europe. In La pièce et le geste, Liliane Hilaire-Pérez showed how artisans in the assembling trades of 18^th-century London developed an operative culture through the simple effectuation of daily management tasks (as shown by their account books) in the context of extended networks of subcontracting.23 “Technology” as a reduction of tasks into operations relied as much on theorists as on practitioners.24

• 25 Hilaire-Pérez, 2000.
• 26 Fischer, 2023. This trend has also recently been studied in the case of military topography, where (...)
• 27 Meyer, 2021.
• 28 See Montègre’s (2024) recent work on the inspector of manufactures François de Paule Latapie (1739- (...)

10Other recent studies in France have shown that 18^th-century scientists, especially academicians, relied heavily on technical knowledge in the context of the growing political demand for innovation.25 In many cases, scientific theories were useless for understanding technical processes or for implementing projects. The more scientists collected and mastered technical knowledge on the job, the more authority and legitimacy they gained. To advance the science of the arts and to improve manufacturing, 18^th-century scientists had to acquire local techniques, as Daniel Fischer demonstrates in his study on the technoscientific metallurgy expert Philippe Frédéric de Dietrich (1748-1793). Borrowing the concepts of “interactional expertise” (expertise interactionnelle) and “sideways knowledge” (savoirs de traverse) from sociology,26 Fischer reveals that experts’ inquiries in workshops were seen as dispossessing workers of their capital and control over production. This dispossession fostered conflicts and resistance, leading Dietrich to criticise the workers’ secrecy and refusal to cooperate. Similarly, the mathematician Alexandre-Théophile Vandermonde (1735-1796), who became the head of the first repository of machines in France, the Hôtel de Mortagne, was a “skillful technician” and a technologist.27 In line with the French economic policy of the time, Vandermonde not only devoted more and more time to examining artisanal practices and inventions, as his position as academician required, but he also developed an increasingly technological scientific method. His chemistry research veered to the comparative analysis of processes, gestures, and tools through investigations in workshops, foundries, and mills, especially after he was appointed inspector of gunnery workshops (inspecteur des ateliers de fabrication d’armes) during the French Revolution. In short, a whole body of research is now highlighting the importance of travel, visits, and field inquiries for the acquisition of technical knowledge by scientists and for the legitimation of administrative and scientific expertise.28

• 29 Berg, 2007, p. 130; see also Berg (ed.), 2013.
• 30 Van der Straeten, Weber, 2024; Hilaire-Pérez, Jarrige, 2020; Edgerton, 2007.
• 31 Berg, 2007, p. 131.

12As Maxine Berg noted, Mokyr’s concept of “useful knowledge” focused on the connections between engineers, scientists, and industrialists in 18^th-century Britain. It was limited to the Western world, to the exclusion of all other world regions. Berg broadened the concept’s scope to include how Europeans learned, borrowed, and pre-empted non-European techniques: “The challenge of innovation was in the object: learning through observing, handling, taking apart, analysing those things that had not yet been made in the West.”29 Beyond the question of Western appropriation of non-European techniques, she also drew attention to the terminological and conceptual problems raised by a comparative approach to European and non-European techniques. She saw that a critical problem stemming from the myth of progress is the persistent emphasis of innovation—a Western concept that resists application to non-Western worlds. Instead of following a linear logic of replacement in the market, traditional techniques and their longue durée in most parts of the world (including Europe) involve a wide range of activities with latent circulations, resurgences, reuses, and coexistence with new generations of techniques—such plurality of temporalities is the most usual regime for techniques.30 Berg concluded that the challenge was to “discover the questions, the categories, and concepts that lead to a more global history of useful knowledge.”31

• 32 O’Brien, 2009-2013.
• 33 Hård, 2017-2022, ID 742631.
• 34 Hård, 2017-2022, see also 2023.
• 35 Schäfer, Valeriani, 2021.

13Her challenge was echoed in Patrick K. O’Brien’s URKEW project (“Useful and Reliable Knowledge in East and West”)32 and, more recently, in Mikaël Hård’s ERC project “A Global History of Technology, 1850-2000.”33 The latter noted that historians tend to follow “the common understanding” that technology is “more akin to engineering than to material culture. For example, the hydropower plant, in its close association to the field of engineering, is more likely to be understood as an artefact of technology than, say, bows and arrows.”34 Faced with the limitations of the term “technology,” which created the myth of a “technological vacuum” in some regions and periods, historians come to consider “technology” as a Western concept, while “useful knowledge,” initially proposed as an alternative to “technology,” would equally fail to effectively render the multiplicity of meanings of human activity. The special issue of Technology and Culture edited by Dagmar Schäfer and Simona Valleriani in 2021 addressed this problem. The issue’s very title, “Technology as Global. The Useful & Reliable Knowledge Debate,” pointed to the persistent difficulty in seriously challenging the word “technology.” The coordinators noted “the unidirectional view from the West [which] has shaped debates by exemplifying a reverse direction: an expanded approach to sources and actors—including religious actors and merchants—can also shed new light on URK in Europe.” They then stated, “URK, as a category useful in global research, needs a new definition.”35 Schäfer and Valleriani’s assessment and call for debate illustrate a trend in the global history of techniques.

• 36 Mavhunga, 2014, p. 17, p. 20.
• 37 Mavhunga (ed.), 2017, p. 1.

15In Transient Workspaces: Technologies of Everyday Innovation in Zimbabwe, published in 2014, Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga focuses on a word (nzira) used among the vaShona hunters. This word means “way (of doing things),” both a means of action and a displacement—creativity tending to be linked, according to the author, to mobility in African cultures. Mavhunga also considers how technology is constituted “under regimes of spirituality.”36 His What do Science, Technology, and Innovation Mean from Africa?, published in 2017, starts from the observation that meanings are often established through the exercise of power: “[O]ur definitions of science, technology, and innovation (STI) originate from countries and cultures that have acquired their dominance of others through global empires […] and are able to purvey to or even impose upon those without such power their definitions.”37 However, Mavhunga notes, “things do not (always) have the same meaning everywhere.”

• 38 Grace, 2021.
• 39 Ibid., p. 38.
• 40 Berg, 2007, p. 31.
• 41 Grace, 2021, p. 29.

16In “Ufundi and Tekinolojia in Independent Tanzania: Kiswahili Lexicons of Specialization in Adult Education Manuals, 1960s to 1980s,” Joshua Grace traces the history of the word ufundi. In Kiswahili manuals, ufundi refers to a range of gestures, from divination, carpentry, and tailoring to soccer playing.38 Grace showed there to be a correlation between the deployment of the vernacular term for “technology” (tekinolojia) and the established discourses of ufundi. According to him, “tekinolojia’s use in the 1970s and 1980s reflect both local and national uses of the term that do not readily map onto the more visible invocations of ‘technology’ in international discourses of development.”39 That is why he suggests “a conversation about tekinolojia’s reliance upon ufundi, as the broader, more powerful, and more flexible category through which tekinolojia found relevance in the 1970s and 1980s in Tanzania.” Grace’s research thus seems to take up the challenge posed by Maxine Berg’s reading of Mokyr’s Athena: “to discover the questions, categories, and concepts to lead to a more global history of ‘useful knowledge.’”40 Tekinolojia and ufundi, Grace argues, should be seen as “categories of useful knowledge.”41

• 42 Lamouroux, 2010.
• 43 The earliest official record on controlling gong is the kaogong ji (“Notes for examining the artisa (...)
• 44 Chen, 2021, 2023.

17Another critical reassessment of the meaning of techniques in non-Western cultures from a local perspective is given by a longue-durée approach to Chinese “technology.” Contributors to the Revue de Synthèse’s special issue “Travail et savoirs techniques dans la Chine pré-moderne” underlined the codification of techniques through treatises, memoirs, and notes, and the standardisation of work in a context of growing technocracy. For example, Christian Lamouroux focused on the impact of an “ideology of labour” in line with an “ideology of service” during the Song dynasty. These ideologies motivated literati officers to “organise technical skills within a centralised state” and collect information to improve technical decisions and work management in hydraulics and in state workshops.42 In the inventories of tasks in state workshops drawn up by officials, technical organisation was expressed in terms of interdependent tasks, “gong,” in the sense of both an accounting unit for the task and a quantity of work.43 Given such a strong legacy, one might well ask how did Confucian scholars reacted when they were exposed to the learning of Western arts (xiyi 西藝) with the establishment of the engineering universities. This is precisely the question Hailian Chen asked in “China’s Paths to Modern Technology: From Institutional Innovations to Confucian Scholarly Learning of Arts, 1860-1885.”44 She examined the changing views of Confucian scholars through their debates on “the art of techniques” (yixue 藝學 or jiyi 技藝) (shixue 實學) at the time they were learning Western techniques as taught within the “engineering university” (gongke daxue 工科大学). How did they perceive Western techniques, how did they redefine technical culture, and what was the impact of Western technology on the very meaning of arts, crafts, gestures, and labour in China?

• 45 Aristotle, 1984, vol. ii, vi, 4-8, 1140a sqq.
• 46 Kant, 2007, § 43, 303.
• 47 Bourdieu, 2014 [1994].
• 48 Wolff, 1963 [1728], § 71; Carnino, Hilaire-Pérez, Hoock (eds.), 2017.

20Let’s consider the phrase “practical knowledge.” It presents the advantage of conveying the idea of knowledge acquired through experience, as the first lexicons of modern European language attest. Especially since Karl Marx, praxis has been used to describe concrete transformations in the physical environment and in human thought. However, “practice” or “praxis” usually carries meanings that new generations, which have not necessarily studied Greek and Latin, have forgotten. At the time of the Republic of Letters, in a European community steeped in classicism, “practice” was a term indelibly marked by Aristotle’s reflections on the different dispositions (ethoi) to knowledge. He divided these into two main groups. On the one hand, there is the disposition to know what is necessary: science (episteme). On the other hand, there is the disposition to know what is contingent: praxis and poiesis.45 Within contingency, praxis is the knowledge of moral actions (phronesis, moderation, is its virtue). Moral actions are their own end (a good action); they do not aim at production, and their motives are not external. Poiesis, by contrast, is the knowledge of technical actions, where the end is not the action itself but the external object that results from it. The virtue of poiesis is techne (art): the excellence of production. In short, praxis is to acting what poiesis is to making, although one could change the terms and keep the same distinction: acting and making, doing and making, doing and producing, acting and crafting. These distinctions established by Aristotle remained an important reference among scholars. At the end of the 18^th century, they were updated by Immanuel Kant’s three critiques: the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787) deals with the speculative use of reason and the conditions of possibility of necessary knowledge, i.e., science; the Critique of Practical Reason (1788) describes the practical use of reason and the conditions of possibility of morality; the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment (1790) examines the possibility of making judgments about both works of art (aesthetics) and the products of nature (Technik).46 Barely thirty years ago, it was still from an ethical perspective that Pierre Bourdieu collected some of his lectures at the Collège de France under the title Raisons pratiques: sur la théorie de l’action.47 Thus, for more than two millennia, the words “practice” and “practical” have not only been associated with moral and ethical discussions, but have also been epistemologically distinct from technical matters. From Christian Wolff to Johann Beckmann, the distinction between these activities gave rise to technology as a field of knowledge and as a discipline.48

• 49 Sennett, 2008.
• 50 Coleridge, 1907 [1817], vol. i, p. 58.

21“Skill” might be a better choice, first of all because it is a simple term. Richard Sennett, whom Matteo Valleriani likes to quote, recommended it in The Craftsman.49 Besides “skill,” Sennett frequently uses two more words: “craftsmanship,” with a suffix that denotes a state that can be acquired or lost (the state of one who possesses a “skill”), and “technique” in its French-language form. According to Sennett, “skill,” “craftsmanship,” and “technique” refer to almost all human activities, including theoretical ones, for he partially rejects distinctions between intellectual and bodily activities. We are not sure that blurring these activities is beneficial. Nevertheless, his choice is interesting because it incorporates the central meanings of techne. Like the Greek word, “skill” is part of the lexical field of ability, mastery, and excellence. The Anglo-Saxon roots of “skill” can be found in Icelandic, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. Sennett views “skill,” “craftsmanship,” or “technique” as a “basic human impulse” inscribed in the body and potentially prior to conscious reflection. His use of the noun “technique” is particularly significant. First, he uses “technique” to distinguish technical processes from the applied sciences and scientifically enriched production processes, which we call “technology” today. Second, the meaning he gives to “technique” is often denied to that word in English. His definition of “technique” is thus highly original, since this noun, from the moment it was introduced into the English language, carried the meaning of “mindless procedure.”50 By trying to rehabilitate “technique” along with “skill” and “craftsmanship,” Sennett defines a stable semantic field that allows for the distinction between a bodily tendency of human activity and useful knowledge or applied science (technology). After all, what is the point of giving “technology” too many meanings, if it makes it more equivocal than it already is?

• 51 Iribarren, 2021.
• 52 Camolezi, 2021.

22To further the discussion, we want now to highlight a key moment in French intellectual history: when activities and skills, whether equipped with tools or not, came to be seen as essential topics for the human and social sciences. To this end, we would start by noting that the feminine noun “technique” in French, whose first occurrences date from the 18^th century, took on a new form in the 1940s, when this word, used in a specific way (la technique, with the definite article and without being followed by “of”) when it began to refer to human actions rather than artificial procedures. At this point technical actions started to be understood as a social fact.51 Indeed, this new meaning of the word, different and even contrary to its original meaning (in the same way that a process differs from a procedure), was invented by human and social scientists who were trying to forge more precise vocabularies for their new sciences.52 Let us not forget that those who created the first lexicons of the human and social sciences at the beginning of the 20^th century were very attentive to the precision of their language. In the mid-1920s, Henri Berr launched the project of a Vocabulaire historique supported by the Centre international de synthèse. At the same time, Lucien Febvre, one of the main contributors to Berr’s initiatives, argued that there are terms whose history is the sole responsibility of historians:

• 54 Schatzberg, 2018, p. 235-236.

24Words constantly rewrite the past—which is why we will not discuss the relevance of technique from a chronological point of view, since the German noun Technik was established before its French cognate, nor from a logical point of view, as if this word were universal and axiologically neutral. In light of recent historical and critical studies, we would like to encourage the use of the noun technique where “technology” no longer seems appropriate. The best way of going about this is, it seems to us, to describe from a historical point of view the introduction of the human and social sciences in France. What this historical perspective shows is that the “rehabilitation of technology”54 advocated by Eric Schatzberg has, in fact—as concerns its main purport—been systematically discussed and analysed by the founders of the human and social sciences in France since the beginning of the twentieth century, except that they were proposing, for their part, a rehabilitation of technique.

• 55 Several studies have already been dedicated to French philosophers.

25Indeed, global history lacks a comprehensive study of the invention of the concept of technique that would go beyond the idea of a linear transmission of the concept of techne from Antiquity to the Modern Age and not be restricted to a particular discipline.55 We still seem to ignore how this invention came about, even though the attention paid to la technique was an essential and original feature of French intellectual history in the 20^th century: it appeared as a conceptual tool for all the humanities simultaneously, from ethnology to history and psychology. When did this intellectual and social phenomenon happen, who were its main contributors, what were the significant institutions behind it, what were its most important results, and, last but not least, what were its main shortcomings?

• 56 Seibicke, 1968, 1969; Marx, 2010 [1997]; Séris, 1994; Schatzberg, 2006, 2018; Sebestik, 2007, p. 12 (...)
• 57 Hendriksen, 2017.

26Of course, the very recognition that la technique was invented has taken time, as it required researchers to distance themselves from linguistic and intellectual habits deeply rooted in contemporary European cultures. With a few exceptions,56 we have forgotten that the nouns “technics,” technique, and Technik are relatively recent inventions that have been integrated into common national languages only since the nineteenth century. In addition, the existence of the nominal forms “technology,” technologie, and Technologie and of the adjectives “technical,” technique, and technisch, some of which date back to the time of the creation of the national European languages, may also have led to the belief that the nouns “technics,” technique and Technik have existed since the same period. In French, the formal identity between the adjective (technique) and the feminine noun (technique) still leads researchers to the erroneous assumption that one is equivalent to the other, making them suppose that the noun was already widely used in the 18^th century. However, the appearance of one did not influence the appearance of the other. Some consider the presence of the entry “Technique” in Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie as proof of the existence of the “word,”57 ignoring the fact that “technique” is considered exclusively as an “epithet” by the author of this entry.

• 58 Diderot, 1798a [2^nd printed edition of Le Salon de 1765], p. 40, passim; 1798b [1^st printed edition (...)
• 59 Lenormand, 1822, p. xxvi. See Mertens, 2002.

27Moreover, the confusion between adjectives and nouns still tacitly leads scholars to project the material culture of the 19^th century, when the noun came to be widely used, onto the material culture of the 18^th century, when only the adjective was in widespread use. The meanings conveyed by these words result from material, social, and intellectual transformations that took place at different rhythms within different linguistic communities. However obvious this may sound, we should not forget that the adjective and the noun technique and their German, English, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese (and so on) cognates have different histories and had to overcome different obstacles. In the second half of the 19^th century in France, the noun technique expressed the methods and procedures of the arts—i.e., the treatment of the material part of the arts, which Diderot called le technique (masculine noun) in his Salons, printed more than 30 years after they were written.58 This “material part” was usually contrasted with the spiritual part of the arts in relation to the fine arts (in art criticism and aesthetics). Gradually, the noun technique became more frequently used to refer to the methods and procedures described in technological treatises and lexicons. However, even if the noun technique was already in use, the French word technologie throughout the course of the 19^th century did not refer to the “science of techniques,” but the “science of industrial (or mechanical) arts.” Louis-Sébastien Lenormand’s Dictionnaire technologique gives us a clear example of this linguistic and intellectual habit, which is highly unusual today: “Technology encompasses the entire field of the industrial arts.”59 While the semantic development of each of these words differs from one linguistic community to another, in France, from the mid-nineteenth century onwards, the noun technique became part of both the vocabulary of art criticism and the vocabulary of the industrial arts. In these contexts, technique alluded to the sequence of actions, most often those that imparted motion (manual or mechanical actions through time and space), to which an art could be reduced from an operative point of view. Technique applied to the method or procedure of an art, e.g. as in a technique of (technique de) goldsmithing or blacksmithing.

• 60 Lembré, 2016.
• 61 Poucet, 1999. For a history of the noun “aesthetics,” see Décultot, 2002.

28It remains the case that at the end of the 19^th century, technologie was not used by technologists as the “science of techniques,” and the noun technique was not employed by French scholars in the arts and humanities (Lettres). Technique (noun) was conspicuously absent from the vocabulary of university, secondary, and higher education schools’ arts programs. Education reformers were publicly urged to implement modernisation programs, as classical higher education curricula remained eerily silent about the outside world. However, not only was technique still not seen from a reflexive (historical and critical) point of view, but the modernisation focused on science. The implementation of technical education plans,60 which occurred in parallel with the reform of classical education but did not transform the classicism of the arts and humanities faculties, gave no place to technique in remained absent from secondary curricula. As for the high school discipline of philosophy, traditionally one of the most elitist, aesthetics61 became a theme of psychology in the 1880 secondary education curriculum, before becoming a separate subject in 1902, while technique appeared only in 1960.

• 62 Théodule Ribot (1839-1916), Alfred Espinas (1844-1922), Henri Bergson (1859-1941), Henri Berr (1863 (...)
• 63 Ribot, 1905; Guillaume, Meyerson, 1930, 1937; Wallon, 1935a, 1935b.

29In the French-language humanities, technique as an academic subject was not to originate in any of the branches such as art criticism, aesthetics, or technology (the science of the industrial arts). Rather, it acquired an importance because of the work of anthropologists, ethnologists, historians, philosophers, psychologists, and sociologists whose interest in technique developed almost simultaneously throughout the first decades of the 20^th century, thanks to the founders and key figures of these disciplines.62 That said, as is well known, the importance given to the concept of technique was quite uneven over the course of the humanities’ development in the 20^th century. In the case of psychology, the subject seems to have been largely abandoned, integrating the topics of method and instrumentation after having attracted psychologists interested in motricity and invention.63 In history, philosophy, and sociology, technique remains one topic among many. Few university chairs and institutes in francophone humanities and social sciences departments are dedicated to teaching and researching la technique. Despite such disparate development, the appearance of technique (noun and concept) in the French humanities cannot be reduced to the contribution of individual scholars, authors, and editors, whatever may have been their specific contributions to this emergence. Such a phenomenon must be considered in its collective dimension within the French humanities and social sciences community established in the interwar period; in no way are we claiming that the occurrences of this word that popped up once or twice in the books of famous scholars created what we understand by technique today.

• 64 Febvre, 1935, p. 531.

30Although the subject does not enjoy the academic prestige conferred to science, those who took part in the invention of la technique as part of humanities at the beginning of the 20^th century were betting heavily on the success of this concept, both as a field of knowledge and as a discipline. In 1935, Lucien Febvre opened the special issue of the Annales on “Les techniques, l’histoire et la vie” with these words: “Technique: one of those many words whose history is unwritten. The history of techniques: one of the many disciplines that are entirely in the making—or almost entirely. The Annales does not claim, today, to improvise the history of the word, nor to hastily make up for some of our most glaring ignorances. Its aim is to encourage its readers—the young, in particular—to reflect on a series of problems that history has neglected with far too much complacency. What does it mean to ‘make the history of techniques’?”64 Given the great importance that those scholars attributed to the subject of technique, what went wrong? Almost ninety years after Febvre’s declaration, why is the history of that word still missing, and why is the discipline of the history of techniques not yet widely established?

• 65 Espinas, 1878 [1877].
• 66 Espinas, 1890a, 1890b. Papers collected in Espinas, 1897.
• 67 Espinas, 1897, p. 9.

31The first French arts and humanities scholar to place techniques at the centre of his intellectual project was Alfred Espinas, a philosopher with a passion for the sciences, whose famous Ph.D. dissertation, Des sociétés animales, had introduced the subject of sociology into the university.65 In two articles published in 1890, written when he was the dean of the University of Bordeaux, Espinas developed the idea of a “Technologie générale.” According to Espinas, “General Technology” is the study of thoughtful and useful actions, which should be considered as a subset of all practices—the most general actions, whether thoughtful or not, which concern “Praxeology.”66 As an erudite professor addressing his colleagues and students, he drew on the classical tripartition (episteme, praxis, and poiesis). He opened a discussion on the meaning of the word “art” by distinguishing, on the one hand, arts that aim to create an aesthetic emotion from, on the other hand, productive arts that somehow relate to our sense of utility, even if usefulness is a value that depends on the society under consideration—“under what conditions,” he asks, “and by what laws, does each set of rules come into play, and to what causes do they owe their practical effectiveness”?67

• 68 Ibid., p. 7.

32This was how Espinas launched his project of “General Technology”: he intended to study the emergence of the useful arts not as if he were an archaeologist dealing with material objects but as an interpreter of the logos (thought, discourse, and speech) on technai conveyed by the archaic, classic, and Hellenistic literature—we shall soon see why. For reasons of linguistic precision, however, he proposed to keep the term “art” to indicate the first type of arts (aesthetic) and to call the second type (productive or useful) otherwise: unlike the Greek-French dictionaries of the time, he suggested translating technai as techniques.68 Espinas’s “Technology” thus seeks to trace the beginnings of thinking, writing, and talking about those arts he called techniques. In turn, his vast project of “General Technology” included, first, the descriptive analysis of all techniques at any moment of history and, second, the study of the origins and functioning of techniques. Thirdly, the combination of the two perspectives was intended to depict the birth and death of all techniques throughout history.

• 69 Ibid., p. 11, footnote.
• 70 Ibid., p. 45, footnote.
• 71 Ibid., p. 11, footnote.
• 72 Ibid., p. 45.

33Espinas understood that techniques are not just objects or methods of production, but rules of action that characterise human groups. Their evolutionary roots are “unconscious,”69 he declares, accepting the influence of Herbert Spencer’s sociology and Ernst Kapp’s philosophy of Technik, whose “theory of projection [is] of the utmost importance for the philosophy of action.”70 For him—a long time collaborator of Théodule Ribot, his close friend and a talented editorial entrepreneur who became the founder of “scientific” psychology in France—, sociology and psychology must collaborate.71 “[A]stonishingly,” he adds in a psychological tone, “neither tools nor even machines always force the worker to become clearly aware of the ends achieved by their means, and especially of the power that man has to vary his processes indefinitely in the light of experience, in order to satisfy new needs. The tool becomes a single entity with the worker; it is the continuation, the outward projection of the organs; the worker uses it as if it were an extended limb, seldom thinking to notice its structure or to investigate how its various parts fit together so well for their purpose. The work done with its aid may still seem natural. As for the machine, it is no longer a projection of the terminal parts of the limbs but of the articulation that connects the limbs to each other and the trunk, allowing them, by playing on each other, to perform certain movements to the exclusion of others.”72 Over time, however, humans reflected on their actions and slowly organised them into productive ensembles that were no longer ordinary actions. These ensembles (techniques) became both individual and social actions, as individual consciousness is subordinated to the life of the group (“collective consciousness”), considered in turn as an individual. Determining when this social shift occurred may be just as difficult as determining when one species evolved from another, or when an idea became an invention.

• 73 Espinas, 1991 [1894], p. 268-269.

34In his inaugural lecture at the Sorbonne Faculty of Arts and Humanities (Faculté des lettres de Paris) in 1894, for his History of Social Economy course, Espinas explained why we should use the word technique to designate these ensembles and then predicted the future of techniques and technology: “At present, the arts or practices or techniques—usage will decide—develop symmetrically with the classification of the sciences, but with no other relationship to it than a general correspondence, a vast hierarchy of rules of action, the base of which is occupied by the acquisition and preparation of raw materials, and the summit of which is crowned by politics and morals. The scientific study of the forms they take, how they function, and what happens to them is a long-term task, and the efforts of a single person will not suffice. Our ambition is limited to showing that there is a vast domain abandoned by present-day philosophy that needs to be cleared and enclosed; others will come after us to cover it with buildings.”73 This is probably the first time that someone was to advance an intellectual project concerning techniques and technology in the context of an inaugural lecture given at the Sorbonne.

• 74 Espinas, 1897, p. 9.

35Why, then, did Espinas choose to write the history of technical thought before focusing on the history of techniques? He was unable to begin his project of “General Technology” with a consideration of its “base” because he was overwhelmed by his administrative and pedagogical duties. Fully aware of this impossibility, he nevertheless understood that he had to point out such a “vast domain abandoned by present-day philosophy,” which no French humanities scholar seems to have even distinguished at that time. Of course, contemporary readers may have the impression that Espinas was embarrassingly delusional when he decided to write a book on Les origines de la technologie that dealt only with Greek literature, as if Greece were the root of all technological thought. However, Les origines de la technologie was to be the first stage of the “General Technology” project, which would consist of studies on every discourse on techniques that ever existed, in the same way that botany studies the structures and the functions of all plants.74

• 75 Lenoir, 1922, p. 270 (our emphasis).

36Of course, the popularity of Espinas’s works paid a high price for certain of his choices. Not only did he remained attached to classical literature, while researchers in the humanities were turning their attention to objects from vernacular cultures, but he was overshadowed by Durkheimian and Marxist thinkers. Nevertheless, as confirmed by his influence on some students and colleagues, it was thanks to him that technique was to become an essential conceptual tool for studying the laws and rules of society. Raymond Lenoir was undoubtedly correct when he wrote: “Espinas’s action, which was subtle and moderate, was more profound than superficial. Some ideas have passed into the common domain and become part of our daily lives; others are strikingly topical today. Neither of these has helped to enhance Espinas’s reputation. Wishing to produce a scientifically rigorous work, he lacked the art of highlighting his ideas, he was not concerned with developing their logical consequences; he did not have the power of affirmation that inspires disciples.”75

• 76 See, in particular, Bouglé, 1935, p. 160; Schuhl, 1938, p. 1, p. 7; Canguilhem, 2009 [1952], p. 130 (...)
• 77 Bouglé, 1922.
• 78 Bouglé, 1935, p. 135-136. See also Sigaut, 2010a, 2010b.

37Today, when we trace the origins of technique in the French-language human and social sciences, we can confirm the intuitions of many scholars and researchers who referred to Espinas as one of the founders of technologie (the science or study of techniques).76 The Durkheimian philosopher and sociologist Célestin Bouglé (1870-1940) provides one of the first and most significant substantiations of his importance. Bouglé was Espinas’s successor in the chair of History of Social Economy in 1919. He made the connections between the industrial world and the arts and humanities that his predecessor had failed to make, for he was interested in both the industrial-sciences technology and the social-sciences technology. This is particularly evident in his Leçons de sociologie sur l’évolution des valeurs, in which he refers to sociologists such as Espinas, Durkheim, and Mauss, as well as to economists and technologists such as Jean-Baptiste Say, Paul Mantoux, Thorstein Veblen, and Henry Le Chatelier.77 In his 1935 review of French sociology, Bouglé considers recent technological works to be some of the “many indications that Alfred Espinas, the author of Les origines de la technologie, was also a pioneer [initiateur] in this field.”78 That same year, Bouglé became the director of the École normale supérieure.

• 79 Lalande, 1927, p. 356; 1925a, 1925b.
• 80 Lalande, 1997 [1926]. See Camolezi, 2021.
• 81 Société française de philosophie, 1921. See Lévy-Bruhl, 1971 [1903], p. 50, p. 233; Weber, 1913, p. (...)

38André Lalande (1867-1963), founder and director of the Société Française de Philosophie, professor of logic and methodology of science at the Sorbonne, and editor of the Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, provides further confirmation of Espinas’s silent importance in the history of the concepts of technique and technology. Espinas was a member of the examining committee of Lalande’s doctoral dissertations in 1899. After succeeding him at the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in 1922, Lalande wrote a detailed paper on the life and work of his predecessor, noting: “Of this great [planned] work, which would have been invaluable, we have only a few fragments.”79 The importance of Espinas’s work in Lalande’s Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie is easy to grasp.80 The entry technique (noun) quotes an excerpt from the 1890 essay “Les origines de la technologie.” It emphasises that Espinas “proposed” a “more specific” meaning of the word, which is “very widespread today.” Among the other four authors mentioned in this entry, three (Louis Weber, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, and Dominique Parodi) held Espinas in the highest esteem, and the former was explicit about his acceptance of the “thesis” defended in Les origines de la technologie.81 Likewise, the entry on technologie cites Espinas’s book and Edmond Goblot’s Essai sur la classification des sciences, which was originally defended as a doctoral dissertation before an examining committee that included Espinas. Lalande’s Vocabulaire remains a historical document and a reference work, translated into several languages and reissued and revised dozens of times. Its last fascicles, as well as its first complete edition (2 volumes, more than 1,065 pages), were published in the days when Lalande was president (1920-1927, 1929, 1931-1934) of the examining committee of the agrégation in philosophy.

• 82 See, for instance, Ribot, 1900, 1902.
• 83 Ribot, 1905, p. 27.
• 84 Espinas, 1897, p. 12, p. 45.
• 85 Janet, 1926, p. 102-103.

39Some of Espinas’s ideas about the primacy of action and techniques over science seem to have been adopted by his friend Ribot, who, after criticizing the outdated style of Les origines de la technologie, became more and more interested in the psychology of invention and instruments.82 In 1905, Ribot introduced the term la technique (without being followed by de) in one of his books. “Technique [La technique],” he wrote, “is the mother of rational logic.”83 This is the form and the meaning that has prevailed in the humanities in the 20^th century: la technique, an activity, or a faculty of human action. In Creative Evolution, Bergson, a collaborator and ally of Ribot, further elaborated the idea of the “extension” of natural organs through artificial organs that Espinas had introduced in France after reading Ernst Kapp.84 In one of his courses, Pierre Janet—Ribot’s successor, Bergson’s classmate at the École normale supérieure and his colleague at the Collège de France—pointed out that both Espinas and Bergson continued Buffon’s ideas about the intelligent use of instruments by animals. Indeed, Janet refers to the ability to use sticks as the first “intelligent act”: “This idea was taken up by Mr. Bergson, after Mr. Espinas. Instruments are the beginning of intelligence.”85 Until 1932, Bergson did not call this “intelligent act” a technique; he remained aligned with the position of the Académie Française, which did not recognise the feminine noun technique as part of the established French language until 1935.

• 86 Berr, 1920, p. v.

40By the end of the 1920s, publishers and researchers in the humanities had increasingly strong intellectual reasons for promoting research on techniques and technology. They sought to highlight these reasons and to encourage this reflexive process. Several of them regularly met at the Centre international de synthèse (CIS), founded by Henri Berr in 1925. Born into a family of artists and writers, and married to a woman from a wealthy family, Berr was already known for his Revue de Synthèse Historique, founded in 1900 (renamed Revue de Synthèse in 1931), and for the successful book series “L’évolution de l’humanité,” which he created in 1920. His ambition is close to what we now call “interdisciplinarity”: “For almost a century, more and more contributors—anthropologists, historians, archaeologists—have been pushing their patient investigation in all directions, into the deepest part of the human past. In the long run, the overwhelming knowledge of the detail imposes on our minds the problem of overview; the need is urgent for an ordering perspective from which we can understand time.”86 Berr was friends with Paul Doumer (1857-1932), a founding member of the CIS who became President of the French Republic in 1931 and was assassinated the following year. Lucien Febvre and Abel Rey, two key figures in the history of techniques and technology, headed two sections of the CIS and the Revue de Synthèse.

• 87 Berr, 1924 [1921], p. xiii; cf. 1921, p. xv.
• 88 Ibid.
• 89 Berr, 1924 [1921], p. vi (stressed by us).
• 90 Berr, 1923, p. xvi; 1934, p. 232. See Blay, 1997.

41As a publisher and scientific promoter, Henri Berr played a decisive role in the integration of techniques and technology into the humanities in the interwar period. Like many other polymaths in the run-up to the Great War, he was more interested in the sciences and Science than in techniques. However, with the encyclopaedic series “L’évolution de l’humanité,” techniques and technology became one of his main topics. In the foreword to the second volume of the series, he referred to Ribot’s reflections on la technique and to Espinas’s Les origines de la technologie. “Indeed, Man, in his beginning, is Homo faber rather than Homo sapiens. And he remains Homo faber,” he says in using a famous expression coined by Henri Bergson.87 He adds, “[w]e shall have to show later that the role played by technique, decisive at the beginning, is throughout human evolution immense: Man is ‘a worker and an engineer,’ ‘a tireless maker of tools, instruments, and machines.’”88 Clearly, Berr drew inspiration from Espinas’s and Bergson’s idea on the relationship between natural organs and artificial organs (tools). Berr thus reveals the matrix of the project: “evolution” should not be traced by gluing together external parts of history, but as a movement that is experienced from within, similar to Bergson’s concept of intuition. According to Berr, “[I]t was a question of [making the history of] this awakening of the spirit seeking to understand, and little by little taking possession of nature through thought and action.” Berr repeatedly stated that “History, in its broadest sense, is logic that is lived,—before it is either exteriorised logic (technique), collective logic (society), or reflective logic (reason)”89 and “science,” for him, “is indeed an organum,” “the instrument for the progress of thought.”90

• 91 Taton, 1984, p. 334-335. Concerning the Daumas’s succession at the CNAM, see Dray, 2021.
• 92 See Duhem, 2018; Simondon, 1989. See also Simondon’s chapters in Daumas’s Histoire générale des tec (...)

42The most robust institutional connection between the authors and scholars who were leading the debate on techniques and technology in the humanities at the time was Berr’s Centre international de synthèse. Maurice Daumas (1910-1984) and René Taton (1915-2004), two of the most influential figures in the history of science and techniques in the second half of the 20^th century in France, met at a seminar at this centre in 1946.91 A third scholar, who did not live in Paris in the 1930s and 1940s, is Georges Canguilhem (1904-1995), who became the director of the Institute for the History of Sciences and Techniques in 1955. These three figures were students of Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), a member and active collaborator of Berr’s centre, and Taton was a successor of Alexandre Koyré (1892-1964), also associated with the CIS. Gilbert Simondon (1924-1989), a major figure of the philosophy of la technique in the second half of the 20^th century, was a reader of Bachelard, a former student of Canguilhem, and a frequent collaborator of Daumas.92

• 93 Mauss, 1927 (1924-1925); Schlanger, 2012; Iribarren, 2021.

43Among the techniques-and-technology pioneers before the generation of Canguilhem, Daumas, and Taton, and after the generation of Espinas, Bergson, and Berr, two humanities and social sciences scholars, Marcel Mauss and Lucien Febvre, played a decisive role. Their heterogeneous contributions should be seen as complementary. As members of the council of the Institut d’histoire des sciences et des techniques created by Abel Rey in 1932 and professors at the Collège de France, Mauss and Febvre participated in the first of a successful series of international conferences organised by Berr, the Semaines Internationales de synthèse. On the one hand, Mauss had already tried to structure the domain of techniques and technology as editor of the journal L’Année sociologique in the mid-1920s, but he had not been successful at attracting contributors to his “Technology” section.93 His main contribution to this field, the 1935 essay “Les techniques du corps,” established a clear conceptual framework for the concept of technique. On the other hand, Febvre—assisted by his friend and collaborator Marc Bloch (1886-1944)—provided a disciplinary framework for the concepts of technique and technology. In this regard, the special issue of the Annales journal “Les techniques, l’histoire et la vie,” also published in 1935, was of unique importance.

• 94 Gouarné, 2013; Verna, Dillmann, 2018.

44In the end, Mauss’s and Febvre’s contributions are some of the highlights of a heterogenous ensemble of papers and journal issues that started with a small dossier published in the Revue de Synthèse in 1933, which resulted from the activities of the General Synthesis section of the CIS under the direction by Abel Rey. In 1933, the Cercle de la Russie neuve also organised a series of conferences on techniques that were attended by other frequent CIS contributors, such as Febvre’s close friend Henri Wallon and the young Georges Friedmann.94 All these initiatives seem to have been sparked by the discussions raised at the Second International Congress of the History of Science (London, 1931), organised by those who founded the International Academy of the History of Science on the very occasion of the Second Congress—marked by the participation of the Soviet delegation—, when Berr and Rey met Charles Singer. From that moment on, techniques and technology started to be the subject of collective attention among humanities and social sciences specialists in editorial committees, reflecting transformations taking place mainly outside the traditional lieux de savoir. The preparations for the 1937 International Exhibition, entitled “Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne,” started under Paul Doumer’s term as President of the Republic.

• 95 Mauss, Beuchat, 2012 [1904].

45Marcel Mauss was very early interested in the problem of techniques, undoubtedly influenced by his professor Alfred Espinas. Following his uncle Émile Durkheim (1858-1917), founder of the journal L’Année sociologique (1898), he opposed sociology to geography. The Durkheimians criticised the German geography represented by Friedrich Ratzel for its ambition to demonstrate the intimate dependence of human beings on the soil without carefully studying societies, as if human beings were products of the soil. Mauss reminded them that there are societies without a fixed substrate, but still with a stable “morphology.”95 For him, the study of human settlements should be part of a detailed analysis of the techniques of each civilisation. For instance, instead of being determined by local natural resources, the construction technique of dwellings expresses many economic, political, scientific, and religious aspects that are specific to a given society and cannot be derived solely from environmental conditions.

• 96 The series of five papers begins with Guillaume, Meyerson, 1930, and ends with Guillaume, Meyerson, (...)
• 97 Meyerson to Mauss, 16 Feb., 27 Feb. and 8 May 1934, Collège de France Archives, 57 CDF 83-11, 16.
• 98 Mauss, 1935 [1934], p. 278. See, for instance, Leroi-Gourhan, 1964-1965; Haudricourt, 1987; Schlang (...)
• 99 Mauss, 2004 [1948]. See also Gouarné, 2019.

46Later, already moving away from his earlier Durkheimian approach, Mauss brought the discussion of techniques and technology closer to psychology, at the request of the Marxist psychologist Ignace Meyerson, secretary general to the Sorbonne’s Société de psychologie and associate editor of the Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique.96 Together with Paul Guillaume (1878-1962), vice-president of the Société de psychologie, Meyerson was about to publish a long series of papers on the intelligence of apes, as measured by the apes’ ability to solve problems and use instruments. Meyerson invited Mauss to give a lecture on “Les techniques du corps” at the Société de psychologie on 17 May 1934.97 On this occasion, Mauss gave one of the most emblematic definitions of la technique, understood as “traditional efficient action.”98 Instead of referring to instruments and methods, la technique was now openly understood as an act or activity. Undoubtedly, the integration between natural and artificial organs remains in the background in this definition: la technique uses the first and most fundamental instrument, i.e., the animal body, equipped with its limbs. The radical novelty of Mauss’s idea lies in the symbolic dimension he gives to la technique. While authors such as Berr remained attached to Bergson’s evolutionary history of life, Mauss opened the debate to psychological, folkloric, and religious dimensions inscribed in gestures. These gestures need not be technical from the point of view of those who make and observe them. They have a kind of efficacy within a given society that makes them technical in the eyes of the humanities and social science specialists who seek to understand the physiological, psychological, and social meanings inscribed in actions. Mauss maintained the importance of techniques in the study of societies in the last text he published in his lifetime, insisting on the importance of the discipline of technology, which became central to the intellectual project of his former students André Leroi-Gourhan and André-Georges Haudricourt.99 Such approaches are crucial to the recent developments in global history. Anne Gerritsen’s essay in this volume, which borrows Leroi-Gourhan’s concept of chaîne opératoire to rethink the extensive networks of production beyond ceramic sites, is a perfect illustration of the heuristic value of anthropological concepts.

• 100 Febvre 1970 [1922].
• 101 Ibid., p. 75.
• 102 Ibid., p. 78.
• 103 Ibid., p. 391.

47In La Terre et l’évolution humaine, published in 1922 in the collection “L’évolution de l’humanité,” Lucien Febvre’s reflections on the importance and the limits of sociology and geography also paved the way for his perspectives on techniques.100 While arguing that Durkheimian criticism would have no influence on the school of geography represented by Paul Vidal de la Blache (1845-1918), he advocated a collaboration between history and geography. He praised a “modest human geography”101 indispensable for understanding the relations between human beings and their environment. These relations produce “the traces” that humans “leave on the surface of the globe, by the imprint they leave there.”102 Historians need geographers to understand the evolution of these traces and successfully overcome event-based history, which is exclusively traced through written archives. “To act on the environment,” Febvre said, “human beings do not place themselves outside their environment. […] And, on the other hand, the nature that acts on men and intervenes in the existence of human societies to condition them is not a virgin nature, independent of any human contact; it is a nature that has already been deeply ‘acted,’ deeply modified and transformed by men.”103

• 104 Bloch, Febvre, 1929, p. 59.
• 105 Febvre, 1938, p. 341.

48Although they did not use the noun technique, these ideas prepared the historiographical interest in techniques that Febvre would express some years later. In the presentation of the collective research encouraged since the first volume of the Annales, he and his friend Marc Bloch stressed that the study of the evolution and of the morphology of instruments, in this case the plough, should reveal how nature acts on human beings and how they act in and on nature. Such a study is therefore of interest to the history of agricultural techniques, the history of human societies, and economic history.104 For Febvre, this interest became broader and more explicit in his response to the 1937 “Exposition internationale des arts et techniques dans la vie moderne:” “Through techniques, man is constantly modifying and transforming nature. He penetrates it more and more with humanity. But he does not wield with impunity the formidable weapons he has forged. In a fatal twist of fate—it is in him, now, that Technique is working to change Nature.”105

• 106 Febvre, 1935, p. 534.
• 107 Ibid.
• 108 Febvre, 1938, p. 343-344.

49In the opening essay of 1935 Annales special issue, Febvre praised the discipline of the history of techniques by inviting historians to reflect on the meanings of technique. By doing so, he recognised that the very interest that humanities scholars took in instruments and machines was new and had to be harmonised with other historiographical approaches, since instruments and machines also testify to needs and values. And he asked: “But what do we mean by collaboration?”106 According to him, the new history needs specialised historians of techniques, because these historians need to master the technical details of their sources. However, good historians of techniques should be in constant dialogue with social and economic historians, for instruments and machines exist because of society. In this sense, Febvre stressed that techniques express the “style”107 of a given society in a given period: “style” always escapes deterministic perspectives because it is the expression of values (aesthetic, ethical, scientific, pragmatic, etc.). It is also in this sense that he recalled—in a subtle departure from his 1935 paper—that the needs of a society cannot explain the emergence of techniques: many unnecessary cultural necessities, rooted in unconscious habits and traditions, drive the evolution of techniques.108 As Febvre indicated by recalling the importance of archaeologists, ethnologists, engineers, and biologists, techniques are thus a subject for historians who choose to be at the crossroads of all the humanities. In any case, this perspective is crucial today for the development of global history, which can no longer avoid integrating a plurality of approaches, including the French legacy of “la technologie, science humaine.”

• 109 Coupaye, 2021, p. 439.
• 110 Wiebe et al., 1989; Wiebe, 2010; Oldenziel, 1999.

50In a recent article, Ludovic Coupaye argues that “‘Technology’ has become a category vernacular to Euro-American-led modernity, infused with forms of essentializing determinisms” and has “colonised other languages.”109 For a long time, economic historians and even historians of technology did not pay attention to the logic of power and domination in which the word and its concepts can participate. Since the 1990s, several approaches have started to analyse “technology” historically and critically.110 One of the most recent criticisms comes in the wake of global history, based, as we have shown, on an analysis of the English expression “useful knowledge,” and from several attempts to rethink the category of technology. In his text, Coupaye adds that “the question, then, is to find which analytical category might be less intrusive and still able to take account of the phenomena encompassing such a diverse range of operations involving material culture, […] from fertility rituals to political actions, from New Guinea gardens to London design studios and the emergence of ‘machine-learning.’” From processes to devices, from objects to sociotechnical systems, he delves into the multiplicity of subjects that should be encompassed by the single word “technology.”

• 111 Leenhardt, 2021.

52Why is the history of the noun technique still missing, and why is the discipline of the history of techniques not yet widely established? Apart from the fact that the feminine noun technique was confused with the adjective form and thought to be historically derived from techne—thus mistakenly linking the history and the etymology of the word—, the emergence of “technology” (applied science) in the 1960s overturned the hitherto stable lexical field of technique and technologie in France. At the end of the 1970s, the importance of technology as an economic-industrial domain essential to the state,111 in addition to being a cultural activity, can be seen in the creation of a chair of Technology and Society at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers for the OECD expert Jean-Jacques Salomon, who succeeded Maurice Daumas and his chair of the History of Techniques. At a time when the capitalist bloc was moving towards more homogeneity, the replacement of la technique and techniques by technology made ideological sense. After all, were not la technique and techniques frequent words in books written by prehistorians?