Merritt Roe Smith

Merritt Roe Smith is the historian whose question—does technology drive history?—has never been more practically urgent. His decades of archival research on the federal armories at Springfield and Harpers Ferry demonstrated something that sounds obvious but that most public discourse about technology systematically ignores: technologies do not develop according to an internal logic of improvement. They are pushed and pulled by institutional actors pursuing specific goals. The interchangeable parts that became the foundation of American mass production did not emerge because the technology was ready or the market demanded them—they emerged because the U.S. War Department needed weapons that could be repaired in the field by soldiers who were not gunsmiths. The institutional context determined the technological trajectory. Not the technology's internal logic. Not the invisible hand. The specific choices of specific actors operating within specific institutional frameworks. Smith's research established a principle that his edited volume Military