Reassessing Technological Backwardness: Absolving The “Silly Little Bobtailed” Coal Car

Abstract

Rarely are judgements of entrepreneurial failure and technological backwardness rendered as harshly as when they are rendered upon Britain in the early 1900s.1 The use of old technologies in manufacturing and transportation are claimed to have locked Britain onto a lower growth path than would have followed if new technologies had been used instead. Technological backwardness, it has been said, was a shackle and Britain lagged behind because of it.2Thorstein Veblen made this argument and marshalled a specific example: “silly little bobtailed carriages [railway wagons].”3In my dissertation I argue that the small coal wagons were not technologically backward, as Veblen and others since have claimed.