it provides comparative and connected studies of technology seen as 'techniques' on a global scale. While it puts particular emphasis on means of production and communication, the exploita-tion of natural resources, major technological systems, infrastructures, and networks, it also reflects upon overarching issues that both underpin and help renew our understanding of the field, whether it be the risk governance, repair and maintenance, conflict, everyday techniques and the time scales involved in different techniques. Far from painting a simplified picture of evolutions on a global scale, this book opens with a world tour of techniques in a bid to restore the complexity of regional historiographies and of the meanings given to technical activities in society. This approach seems particularly necessary considering the return of grand narratives which, in the name of global history, fall back on the mostly Eurocentric meta-narrative that long dominated this field of research (Berg, 2013; Bray, 2015; Bray, Hilaire-Pérez, 2016; Popplow, 2016). Part and parcel of our decentred vision, is our use of the terms 'technique' and 'technology', While 'technology' has become ubiquitous on a global scale and somewhat emphatically refers to the advanced technological productions of industrial societies ('new technologies') as opposed to traditional techniques, this meaning is rather ambiguous, and the term actually polysemic. For a long time, the term 'technology' did signify the science of technique (techno-logos), the science of the arts and of manufacture; in 1728 Christian Wolff defined technologia as 'the science of the arts and works of art, the science of things that men produce by the work of organs of the body, mainly by the hands', and in 1806 Johann Beckmann stated the same in his Entwurf der allgemeine Technologie or 'General Project of Technology' Global History of Techniques, ed. by Guillaume Carnino, Liliane