The past twenty years have seen a transformation in the thinking of historians on the relations of technology and culture in twentieth-century Britain. Martin Wiener's noto rious English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1981) was an expression of a widespread view that the British elite in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries was hostile to technology. These assumptions, so central to the cultural history of modern Britain, have come under sustained attack in a wide range of work. Bernhard Rieger's book is an example of a new approach that follows from the withering away of the declinist focus on British culture as antitechnological. British attitudes to technology now appear to be similar to those of comparable countries and not (as was previously implied), very different.

Rieger's work covers the period 1890–1945 and deals with a number of important technologies—aviation, transatlantic passenger liners, the cinema, and amateur film. It is a notable contribution to both British history and the cultural history of early twentieth-century technology. It has the advantage of being comparative, and in particular with one of the countries that, in British assumptions, was particularly protechnological—Germany. It is broad-ranging too in its bases in existing historical literature in two languages, drawing on the historiography of technology as well as culture. Its main conclusion, and it is a significant one, is that British and German attitudes were fairly similar and differed in ways that are readily explained by geopolitical position and the nature of the dominant political ideology. British attitudes were more concerned with the maintenance of an existing position, especially an imperial one; Germany was more aggressive in its technological enthusiasm, especially in the Nazi period.

Within this overall account are many interesting readings of particular aspects. For example, the treatment of the reporting of major accidents is used in interesting ways to capture the ambivalence felt toward modern technologies. There are also some interesting points about workers being removed from photographic representations—the labor process is effaced—but much more could be said on this issue. There are also some suggestive remarks concerning the significance of a combination of awe and ignorance in the confrontation with technology.

In some respects a sharper analytical focus on the problems of studying technology would have been very helpful. For example, the book repeatedly uses the terms “technological innovation” and “innovative technology” and sometimes just “innovation” to describe what is being discussed. There are two problems. The first is that “technology” was not widely used at this time; it was not obvious that the German technik would have been, or should be today, as one assumes in this book, translated as “technology.” Second, the term “innovation” did not have the same meaning that it does today. Furthermore, the identification of “technology” with “innovation” is itself problematic. For example, the interwar airplane was many things, including a “wonder of science” and a “modern invention,” but it was not a “technological innovation.” All this is particularly pertinent to a cultural history since the conceptual apparatus used by actors is a central concern of the enterprise.

A second issue is nationalism. The book is framed, though not explicitly, around the idea that techno-nationalism is crucial to understanding modernity's enthusiasm for technology. In this it follows a now substantial literature, much of it centered on German aviation in the interwar years, though the national as a category is now very widely invoked in the study of attitudes toward technology. Clearly techno-nationalism has been of huge importance, as this study amply demonstrates as well. However, this analytical frame has often, and to an extent does so here, obscured the significance of techno-internationalist rhetoric in relation to technology, not least aviation, shipping, and to some extent the cinema, in both Britain (where it was indeed strong) and Germany.