Technological and Industrial Change: A Comparative Essay

Abstract

Everyone now seems to agree that eighteenth-century industrialization was strongly associated with qualitative changes in the ways in which such formal productive inputs as fixed capital or skilled labor were combined, organized, and exploited by new agencies operating in novel physical sites. Although the analytical details for any one nation are hotly debated and the histories of different nation-states and regions are varied even within Europe itself, it is now increasingly conceded that the story of industrial modernization is at heart a story of institutions and technologies. Without informed reference to both institutional and technological features, it is no longer feasible to argue that the rise of new industries in the eighteenth century was a clear function of, say, new sources of investment funds or higher levels of demand, even when such conventional “factors” can be shown to have themselves arisen or altered or increased as a consequence of prior, prerequisite institutional and technological changes. This is not to say that anything goes. This chapter will consider the real problems of interpretation regarding the sources of technological change, the relations between scientific and technological changes and institutional innovations, and the interactions among national and even continental systems. For instance, however haphazard may have been the technological interaction between national systems, the fact that it insidiously, uncontrollably, and chaotically occurred means that a story of creativity in one place cannot in itself be the story of technological and industrial change throughout, say, Europe. How and why did novel machines or solutions move from one location to another? Are we content to define “location” only in terms of physical geography, or do we require knowledge of the social or perhaps even cultural siting of new technologies?