Kristine Bruland

Industrialisation and technological change

INTRODUCTION Technological change was a central component in the industrialisation process of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and thus in the making of the modern world economy. Nevertheless, more than two centuries after the beginnings of industrialisation, our understanding of the factors that impelled and shaped the development, diffusion and impact of the new technologies of early industrialisation remains far from complete. As a consequence, important questions concerning the place and interpretation of technological change in industrialisation remain unresolved. The idea that we know relatively little about the sources and outcomes of innovation in the industrial revolution may seem strange, since there is a large historical literature organised explicitly or implicitly around the idea that technological change and industrialisation are intimately linked. Indeed there are many writers for whom new technologies are industrialisation, and so the emergence of new techniques is implicitly or explicitly a fundamental causal event. But the very size of the literature tends to obscure the fact that it actually tells us rather little about the dynamics of technological change in the industrial revolution, and particularly its impacts on growth. So although technological change is usually seen as a central element in the economics of industrialisation there is frequently no satisfactory account of the relationships between technological change and industrial growth. To put it differently, there are few comprehensive treatments of the technologies involved in the industrialisation process, in the sense of treatments that integrate economic, social and technological dynamics. Although such a task cannot be achieved within the space available here, nevertheless this chapter seeks to describe some broad patterns of technological change during the first industrial revolution, and to place them within an interpretative framework.

From family firms to corporate capitalism : essays in business and industrial history in honour of Peter Mathias

What explains the growth of a business, and more broadly the development or decline of a whole economy? What role do particular entrepreneursor indeed a culture of entrepreneurship play? Does the evidence suggest that a particular structure or organizational form was or should be adopted to ensure best practice and commercial success? These fundamental questions have long pre-occupied business and economic historians. With the current expansion of business and management education and training, the investigations and findings of the historian may have wider significance and relevance. This volume has been stimulated by the work of Peter Mathiasone of the leading figures in this field in the post-war period. Here a number of his former studentsmany now internationally distinguished historianspay tribute in a book that explores the move from family firms to corporate capitalism. In a series of chapters they explore at the level of the firm the myriad of micro decisions that ultimately help to explain the overall performance of industries, sectors, and national economies as they evolve through time. The contributors argue that sustained growth has never been a matter of a few spectacular technical breakthroughs. Instead it rest on subtle economic and social transformations - in cultures, in economic organizations, and in the roles of science and technology.

What is the economy in economic history

Abstract Any study of economic processes rests on a view about the nature of the economy as its (usually implicit) point of departure. Prior to Adam Smith, the Mercantilist, Physiocratic and Cameralist traditions viewed the economy as being a household writ large — so the metaphor of household choices and management was used to discuss economic policy in particular. Smith dispensed with this, offering the first view of the economy as a self-organizing system, coherent without explicit coordination. Subsequent economic theorizing has refined this concept, in the process dramatically simplifying the view of the economy. The result is an influential neo-classical concept of the economy which largely avoids mention of government, institutions, and business organization. This paper argues that economic historians can overcome this conceptual ‘thin-ness’ by introducing ideas from institutional studies, business history, the history of work and the history of technology into our understanding of the economic process as a whole.

Technology selection and useful knowledge: A comment

Most writing about technology conceptualizes technology as knowledge — the theoretical (or systematized) and practical understanding that enables productive transformations. But few of those who use this concept actually go on to consider the nature and characteristics of knowledge itself, or the factors that shape its evolution. So over recent years we have had a strange situation, in which a dramatic expansion of the study of innovation has said surprisingly little about the nature of productive knowledge or about knowledge creation processes. From this perspective The gifts of Athena is a major step forward: the first systematic treatment of knowledge creation to link an analysis of the economic role of knowledge with a serious empirical founding in the history of science and technology. The book will without doubt be the point of departure for future studies in this area, and it is likely to give rise to considerable comment and discussion. There is much to discuss: the basic concepts, perspectives, insights and arguments are wide-ranging, and the book can be approached and assessed from many directions. This comment considers the The gifts of Athena from one dimension only, namely that of the processes affecting the directions in which knowledge changes over time. This process is the selection among technological options, and the ways in which such selection happens. The discussion here focuses mainly on chapter 6 ( “The political economy of knowledge: Innovation and resistance in economic history”) and chapter 7 (“Institutions, knowledge, and economic growth”). The basic issue here is that in principle the knowledge underlying technology can be developed in a very wide, possibly even infinite, number of directions. So the technology development process in fact has two broad dimensions: first, one of developing technological options, and second, a process of selecting among them. As a result of selection, technologies develop in ways that seem to be quite focused: some potential types of “useful knowledge” are explored in detail and developed, while others may be hardly considered at all, or explored and abandoned. Many actual or potential technology options exist, but there is selection among them, and only a relatively small set are explored and developed. So the selection process is central to understanding the actual evolution of knowledge and technology. The core idea in Mokyr’s treatment of selection is that “the economic history of useful knowledge must come to grips with the political economy of technological progress”. Mokyr is surely right about this, because although there may be many factors that shape the creation of ideas and knowledge, the practical selection of those that will survive and grow is strongly shaped by those social, political and economic

British Technology and European Industrialization: The Norwegian Textile Industry in the Mid Nineteenth Century

List of tables List of figures Preface Map showing location of firms 1. Technology and European growth 2. The historiography of European industrialization 3. Britain and Norway, 1800-1845: two transitions 4. Acquisition of technologies by the Norwegian textile firms 5. Flows of technological information 6. British textile engineering and the Norwegian textile industry 7. British agents of Norwegian enterprises 8. British workers and the transfer of technology to Norway 9. Interrelations among Norwegian firms 10. The European dimension Appendices Bibliography Index.