ABSTRACT
The relevance of technology for social history begins long before the industrial revolution. Basic technical innovations created the context for agricultural rather than hunting and gathering societies. Inventive cultures like China (where innovations from wheelbarrow to paper were introduced) created distinctive political structures and population concentration. Improvements in agricultural ricultural al technology had a profound effect on medieval social relations in northern Europe. The heavy plough, the horse harness and nailed horseshoe, and the three field system of crop rotation resulted in surplus production but required co-operative land management on the part of peasant farmers, a combination which provided the economic foundation of manorialism. Surplus crops combined with faster animal transport to produce greater urbanization, since peasants could increase output from their fields and had the means to purchase manufactured goods. Eventually, mechanization of agriculture would promote heavy urban migration, providing the labor required by new factories.
