The conventional approach to telling the history of technology in the early-modem world has been to lay out a narrative focused on Europe as a red-hot crucible of irreversible change.In this story the foundation of the modem industrial world-order is attributed to the Wests unique capacity for technological creativity;the rest of the world, including China, is viewed as a recipient of European innovation.Global history offers new approaches to analysing the relations between West and non-West in this crucial early-modem period.Tracing and comparing how key technologies in Spanish Peru, Ming-Qing China and European states responded to the global circulation of silver suggests new approaches to locating technology in world or global history.A comparative, anthropological approach to the dynamics and interactions of local "technological cultures" offers some helpful alternatives and correctives to Eurocentric models, whether for early modem or for recent history.