The history of refrigeration touches upon many different disciplines, sub-disciplines, and subjects. It obviously includes the history of technology, but it also involves social history, business history, the history of food, and many aspects of anthropology, public health, and sociology, too. It is unreasonable to expect any book to give all of these subjects equal or even significant attention, but the history of technology ought to be far closer to the center of the story than it is in this particular history. While Peavitt mentions the various technologies that made both refrigerators and refrigeration possible, she explains none of them. Indeed, for a book that is nominally about electric household refrigerators she includes an awful lot of material on very different kinds of refrigeration technology. Her argument is that consumers tend to overlook the importance of refrigeration in our history and in our lives, so including other technologies like ice and ice machines makes sense for that reason. However, failing to distinguish the technological differences between refrigeration and refrigerators only confuses the narrative.
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