Essays in Industry and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: England and France by John R. Harris

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 685 Essays in Industry and Technology in the Eighteenth Century: England and France. By John R. Harris. Brookfield, Vt.: Variorum (Ashgate Pub­ lishing), 1992. Pp. x + 223; notes, index. $59.95. This important, tightly focused anthology by a leading British histo­ rian of technology, economics, and business presents a major thesis involving two related themes. John Harris is concerned first with craft skills. The role of craftsmen has been neglected in the literature since Samuel Smiles concentrated on heroic engineers, inventors, and selfmade men. This initial bias was reinforced by class snobbery, which found the idea that working people have played an important positive role in industry and technological innovation to be repugnant. Diffusion has been neglected through nationalistic bias that focuses research on a few innovative nations (for their further glorification). But surely the norm is diffusion and the creative grafting of new technologies to old cultures. The time is ripe for new research on the role ofworkers and on the diffusionoftechnology, and therefore this anthology is mostwelcome. Chapter 1 reprints Harris’s classic essay, “Skills, Coal, and British Industry in the Eighteenth Century.” His thesis can be paraphrased briefly: “With the progressive adoption ofcoal as an industrial fuel from the late sixteenth century the technological basis of British industry” diverged from that of the Continent. One industry after another adapted coal fuel, glass, and nonferrous metals among them, reaching a sort of climax with the use of coke to produce cast and wrought iron. It was necessary to prevent contamination of industrial materials by harmful coal impurities, often using variations on the reverberatory (or “air”) furnace and other devices (e.g., covered crucibles for glass). The remarkable success of this series of interlocked innovations was made possible by “the creation of new skills and craft processes” that diffused by spinoff from one industry to another, “but which for any single industry came to depend upon a concatenation of both the specialized skills of separate groups of craftsmen and of new types of plant and equipment unknown, or less known in Europe. The craftsmen came to have a developed knowledge of the varieties of coal and of the vagaries of materials to be used with it.” Dependence on craft skills hampered diffusion and stimulated large-scale, organized industrial espionage on the part of England’s great enemy and rival, France (p. 173). There were many collateral developments associated with coal use, such as canals, long-wall coal mining, and the invention of the steam engine. The transfer of technology was not a one-way street, nor was France the only player. Chapter 2, “Saint-Gobain and Ravenhead,” deals with an interesting case of double diffusion: the British were recruiting French workers in order to learn French methods ofcasting plate glass while the French were attempting to emulate the British use of coal instead of increasingly scarce wood in glass production. Chapter 3, “Attempts to Transfer English Steel Techniques to France in the Eighteenth Century,” shows that the determined efforts by the French government to gain a 686 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE critical technology, crucible steel, were unsuccessful precisely because of the complex range of craft knowledge involved. Despite the conspicuous failure to transfer the technology of crucible steel, French government-organized industrial espionage was very suc­ cessful, as indicated by Harris’s pathbreaking overview, “Industrial Es­ pionage in the Eighteenth Century.” French agents, at some risk, pene­ trated Boulton and Watt’s factory, the Carron Iron Works, and much more; the French were surprisingly well informed concerning British technical advances. They developed successful methods of recruiting craftsmen and gaining knowledge. Indeed, the noted British ironmaster John Wilkinson willingly collaborated with the French, and his brother William went to France to establish a cannon foundry near Nantes and then helped create a great coke-based iron complex at Le Creusot. In chapter 4, Harris presents a detailed case study of one of the most successful transfers, that of the Birmingham “toy” trade (but­ tons, hardware, etc.). This transfer was not arranged by espionage; the mentally unstable (but skilled) Michael Alcock fled bankruptcy to settle in France. Thus his poor head for business and inability...