Suzanne Moon's Technology and Ethical Idealism provides a meticulous and elegant history of the place of technology in debates about development in the late-colonial Netherlands East Indies. While most scholars and policymakers concerned with development issues will be familiar with the “small is beautiful” (Schumaker 1973) approach to development that emerged in the 1970s, few will be aware that many of the core arguments put forward in favor of “appropriate technologies” were in fact rehearsed in great detail in colonial debates about how best to increase production and improve human welfare in what is now Indonesia. Moon's book focuses on the period between 1900 and 1942, a span of time that saw the Dutch administration become deeply involved in the everyday life of its colonial subjects. This period is usually associated with high modernism and the view that the introduction of new technologies will lead to a better society (Barker 2002; Mrázek 2002). What Moon shows is that the faith in technology to deliver a better society was here not generally associated with a commitment to large-scale projects. On the contrary, in both agriculture and industry, the administration overwhelmingly used strategies that emphasized the benefits of small-scale technologies that were tailored to suit local needs and local knowledge. Moon thus provides a powerful challenge to the idea put forth by James Scott (1998) that high modernist state development projects obey a simplifying logic and tend to ignore the specificity of local circumstances. In the Netherlands East Indies, there was no shortage of disagreement over how best to pursue development, but there was a widespread acceptance of the view that new technologies would only encourage development if they were calibrated to fit local circumstances.
