Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This book is a serious overview of what impact the diesel engine and the gas turbine have had on important aspects of globalization, i.e., in moving cargo and people around the world. In roughly the first third of the book, the author discusses the history and development of engines and how the diesel engine and the gas turbine came to stand out for certain applications, i.e., to power cargo ships and jet engines, respectively. Highlights of the lives of some of the inventors are also briefly presented. The rest of the book is mainly devoted to further developments and uses of these devices. Near the end, the author presents a brief overview of what the future is likely to hold.
The author, an expert on this subject, does not waste words. The book reads more like a textbook or scientific/engineering monograph than a work that is meant to entertain the casual reader. As a result, the book is clear, rather dry and dense with extensively referenced information. The theory and practice of how the machines work are covered rather briefly, but ample references are provided for those wanting to dig deeper. On the down side, I found several passages to be rather tedious to read and, for me, rather boring, i.e., mainly lists of types of ships or airplanes or engines (including lists of model numbers) as manufactured by various companies in different countries, their specifications, cargo capacities of various carriers as a function of time, type of transporter and destination, geographical routes followed during shipping, types of products imported and exported by different countries, etc., etc. But despite these relatively minor shortcomings, I did overall enjoy reading the book and I learned quite a bit.
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The many books on globalization published over the past few years range from claims that the world is flat to an unlikely rehabilitation of Genghis Khan as a pioneer of global commerce. Missing from these accounts is a consideration of the technologies behind the creation of the globalized economy. What makes it possible for us to move billions of tons of raw materials and manufactured goods from continent to continent? Why are we able to fly almost anywhere on the planet within twenty-four hours? In Prime Movers of Globalization, Vaclav Smil offers a history of two key technical developments that have driven globalization: the high-compression non-sparking internal combustion engines invented by Rudolf Diesel in the 1890s and the gas turbines designed by Frank Whittle and Hans-Joachim Pabst von Ohain in the 1930s. The massive diesel engines that power cargo ships and the gas turbines that propel jet engines, Smil argues, are more important to the global economy than any corporate structure or international trade agreement. Smil compares the efficiency and scale of these two technologies to prime movers of the past, including the sail and the steam engine. The lengthy processes of development, commercialization, and diffusion that the diesel engine and the gas turbine went through, he argues, provide perfect examples of gradual technical advances that receive little attention but have resulted in epochal shifts in global affairs and the global economy.
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