Technology in the Industrial Revolution by Barbara Hahn

Abstract

Reviewed by: Technology in the Industrial Revolution by Barbara Hahn Chris Evans (bio) Technology in the Industrial Revolution By Barbara Hahn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xii + 225. Technology in the Industrial Revolution By Barbara Hahn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xii + 225. The title of this short volume—perhaps imposed by the publisher?—is misleading. This is not a book about technology in the round; it is about innovation in British textiles between the 1760s and the 1840s. That aside, it is a well-written and accomplished account of technological change in a sector that often stands as proxy for the Industrial Revolution. The book is timely. The early twenty-first century has been a golden age for textile history. Giorgio Riello and Sven Beckert have, in their different ways, told stories of global transformation with cotton at their heart (Giorgio Riello, Cotton, 2013, and Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton, 2015). Other recent contributions are more narrowly drawn but carry major implications for the broader picture. Gillian Cookson's 2018 The Age of Machinery (Boydell Press) springs to mind, as does the work of John Styles on the spinning jenny ("The Rise and Fall of the Spinning Jenny," Textile History, 2020). So, a volume that can condense and consider all this scholarship is welcome. Hahn is quick to stress that machines of themselves change nothing. They only become operational when set within an appropriate institutional framework and when markets for what machines can produce are organised. Technologies must be thought of as systems—constellations of things, actors, and energy flows. Not surprisingly then, the book acknowledges the influence of Thomas P. Hughes's Networks of Power (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), with genuflection toward Actor Network Theory. It follows that Hahn is unconvinced by monocausal explanatory models that focus on, say, labor costs. At the onset, the author dismisses Robert C. Allen's much-contested belief that high wage levels in England incentivized mechanization (The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, 2009). Besides, lowering costs was seldom the aim of early innovators. They often embraced mechanization because it could improve the quality of the end-product or ensure consistent quality. Although Hahn writes about the signature machines of the early industrial era, Arkwright's water frame for example, she ranges widely in time and space. The woolen industries of medieval England provided a vital context for what was to come. Many of the eighteenth century's "new" technologies drew on principles and mechanisms known for centuries. Importantly, Hahn also takes a global view of the events that transformed northern England in the late 1700s. Building upon the insights of Riello and Prasannan Parthasarathi (Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not, [End Page 964] Cambridge University Press, 2011), she dwells on the relationship between India and Britain. Indian fabrics enjoyed a huge European vogue in the later seventeenth century, unsettling textile producers in England and elsewhere. Their response was to clamor for tariff barriers. Although nineteenth-century commentators lauded British industrialization as the outcome of free trade and free labor, in truth the Industrial Revolution hatched from a hardened protectionist chrysalis. Foreign fabrics were excluded from domestic and colonial markets wherever possible, and labor was subject to repressive controls. Indeed, the mobilization of labor is a vital part of the story. There were many different routes to the factory, as Hahn demonstrates in her discussion on the transfer of British spinning technology to New England. And while machine breaking is well documented, there was no across-the-board opposition to mechanization. Workers could be quite accommodating of new ways of working. Male operatives were especially open to arrangements that bolstered masculine authority. Workers were able to influence the ways new technologies were deployed. At the same time, worker resistance could spur technological change. The Lancashire spinners' strike in 1826, Hahn claims, hastened the development of the self-acting mule, which greatly diminished spinners' bargaining power. The author is to be congratulated for attempting to combine a complex narrative of technological change with the history of working-class politics in the early industrial era. They are indisputably connected. However, the work fails to bring the technological and the...