Co-edited by Dagmar Schäfer, Francesca Bray, Shadreck Chirikure. Tiago Saraiva and Matteo Valleriani, CHoT is an iconoclastic experiment in decolonialising and demystifying the history of one of the most powerful fetishes of the modern world. With more than a hundred essays exploring innovative approaches to situating technololgy in the making of history, this is a manifesto for long-term global history as method. Rather than taking today’s technological systems as reference for identifying the significant technologies of the past, by defining technology in anthropological terms, as skilled material practices of world-building, laden with power and impregnated with meaning, CHoT opens much broader horizons on histories of human making and doing. This encompassing approach to artefacts, knowledge and control allows for radical comparisons and conversations across time and space. It subverts various problematic, stubbornly modernist teleologies, periodisations and geographies that have structured the format and questions of so many influential studies of technology’s historical role, and in blurring the supposed category distinction between pre-industrial and industrial technologies and ways of operating in the world, its investigations of the past raise new questions about technology in the present.

Currently (as of May 2023) we expect publication of the first of the 3 volumes in 2025.