Glass: A World History

by Alan Macfarlane, Gerry Martin

Picture, if you can, a world without glass. There would be no microscopes or telescopes, no sciences of microbiology or astronomy. People with poor vision would grope in the shadows, and planes, cars, and even electricity probably wouldn't exist. Artists would draw without the benefit of three-dimensional perspective, and ships would still be steered by what stars navigators could see through the naked eye.

In Glass: A World History, Alan Macfarlane and Gerry Martin tell the fascinating story of how glass has revolutionized the way we see ourselves and the world around us. Starting ten thousand years ago with its invention in the Near East, Macfarlane and Martin trace the history of glass and its uses from the ancient civilizations of India, China, and Rome through western Europe during the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Industrial Revolution, and finally up to the present day. The authors argue that glass played a key role not just in transforming humanity's relationship with the natural world, but also in the divergent courses of Eastern and Western civilizations. While all the societies that used glass first focused on its beauty in jewelry and other ornaments, and some later made it into bottles and other containers, only western Europeans further developed the use of glass for precise optics, mirrors, and windows. These technological innovations in glass, in turn, provided the foundations for European domination of the world in the several centuries following the Scientific Revolution.

Clear, compelling, and quite provocative, Glass is an amazing biography of an equally amazing subject, a subject that has been central to every aspect of human history, from art and science to technology and medicine.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Microhistory, Technology, Science, Art

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2002

About the author

Alan Macfarlane was born in Shillong, India, in 1941 and educated at the Dragon School, Sedbergh School, Oxford and London Universities. He is the author of over twenty books, including The Origins of English Individualism (1978) and Letters to Lily: On How the World Works (2005). He has worked in England, Nepal, Japan and China as both an historian and anthropologist. He was elected to the British Academy in 1986 and is now Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and a Life Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge.

Reviews

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of my favourite books, it got me on to microhistory as I enjoy the minutiae and detail of particular things, especially those we don't think about and take for granted.

The correlation in Asia of spectacle-wearing and windows (or natural sunlight in home for reading) was fascinating.

The profoundingly obvious of the generic never ceases to amaze me.

I can remember getting this and thinking, I can't believe I'm about to read about glass! Seriously, it's just sand that's been melted! Boy was I wrong.

There are so many microhistory books now: salt, spice, tea, coffee, all sort of foods and edibles, beer! And thanks to Mary Roach we have all sorts on single subjects from the Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at Warsoldier to eating/digestion with Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal!

Heck just see the list here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

You might also like Steven Johnson and see the BBC doco series How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a fantastic book! I read it for my Glass and Civilization course. It's one of those books that focuses on one aspect of life and culture (glass) and gives you a completely new take on history. Written clearly and cogently, it's a very good piece of work. The chapter on "spectacles" (glasses) is terrifically interesting--as is much of the rest of the book.

[Kayrah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Surprising book. Was expecting a dry retelling of invention and progress of glass, instead I am getting an education on experiments and hypotheses and the progression of art towards realism. Fascinating.

Glass was a necessary but not sufficient cause of today's modern world.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book, it was most illuminating.

[Mike Parkes · Rating 2 out of 5]

Really disappointing read, which unfortunately ended up being my sole source of entertainment during a six-hour vaccine lineup. The title and jacket description of this book are very misleading. The authors have almost no interest in the material and technological basics that you might expect to be discussed in a book titled “Glass: a World History” - what glass is, the methods for making it and how these evolved, the optics of lenses for eyeglasses, telescopes and microscopes, and the challenges associated with making such lenses, etc.

What we get instead are some cultural/historical arguments that glass was a key contributor to the Renaissance and the Scientific Revolution, and a partial explanation for why these events took place in Europe and not in Asia. Without a better material grounding in glass and optics, this material doesn’t stand that well on its own, although I did find a chapter on how the window and mirror facilitated 3-D perspective in art (for both creators and consumers) to be quite interesting. The book goes completely off the rails in the second half where it spends multiple chapters presenting a pet theory that Asian nations have high levels of myopia, which is tied to the history of glass by only the thinnest strands. There’s nothing at all on 20th century developments in glass technology (fibre optics, windshield technology, insulating windows, etc.).

I’m still searching for a true history of glass that covers both the visual history of glass art and artifacts, and its scientific and technological development, or at least the second topic. This one does neither.

[Steffi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Angefangen zu lesen habe ich das Buch, weil ich bei einer Besichtigung der Kirche in Klosterneuburg zum ersten Mal hörte, dass man mittelalterliches Glas daran erkenne, dass es nur weißes Licht durchlasse. Diesen Effekt könne man nicht nachahmen und die später ersetzten Fenster erkenne man daran, dass wenn von außen Licht auf sie fällt, die entstehenden Lichtflecken farbig sind.
Dazu habe ich leider nichts in dem Buch gefunden. Dennoch machen die Autoren klar, wie wichtig Glas in der Entwicklung der Menschheit war. Ohne Glas keine Fortschritte in der Wissenschaft, weil Glasbehälter, Mikroskope und Fernrohre fehlen, auch viel der späteren Technologien (Computer, Fernsehen) undenkbar wären. In der Kunst wird der Blick präziser aufgrund der so gemachten wissenschaftlichen Entdeckungen, Selbstporträts werden durch Spiegel möglich und der Individualismus der Renaissance wird auch dadurch geprägt, dass der Spiegel zum Medium der Reflexion dient.

[Manos (hoarding books) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well..there was an old vampire reading it before slumbering the early morning hours..so it's a recommendation, ain't it?
Anyway, it's a world history of glass-making.

Found it interesting..

[Sesana · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's a pretty decent history of glass, but it feels a bit compressed in places. This is probably mostly so the authors can air out their pet theory that glass is a key factor in the development of western science (which I can agree with) and that the lack of advanced glass making in Asia is a key factor in the lack thereof. The book could get pretty repetitive at times, repeating the same or very similar ideas quite a few times throughout the book, and even in the same chapter. Much more for commodity biography junkies like me than a casual reader.

[Heidi J. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this book searching for a history of plate glass making and found their theories fascinating! I'd never given much thought to where western civilization would be without glass so it was an eye-opening experience. The writing was clear and aimed at a general audience instead of higher academia, which made it quite readable. It did seem a bit repetitive at times-- and I wish there had been more information about the development of plate glass, since that was what I was primarily interested in. Overall, though, it was a very worthwhile read.

[Marcus Shibaba · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wow! A book that I will never be able to bring up in conversation with any of my friends. But, it has brought a lot of little things to my attention.
We would be nowhere without glass.
What a strange invention.
And I dork out on it with myself because I get to work with the shit all the time.

[Cy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Believe it or not, but this book is very dry.

[Dp4s · Rating 3 out of 5]

Technology
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