The Industrial Revolution and the Growth of Science

Abstract

This lecture needs to be prefaced by the statement that I am an economic historian, not a historian of science. Apart from recognizing that this makes me a mere lion in a den of Daniels — particularly in this company — it is an admission of critical relevance for this text. In common, I suspect with most scholars, I tend to view outwards from my own discipline. Our point of departure is the core of our own interests, and we document relationships — particularly inward influences — impacting upon our own scene, which we profess to understand, rather than following up the outgoing influences from our own area of concern, as they radiate outwards to impact elsewhere, in distant lands where we are strangers. Such a built-in linearity of direction is always inadequate; and itself encourages misleading assumptions. To do justice to inter-relationships of this kind one needs to straddle all the disciplines (and master all the bibliographies) within which influences are mutually reactive: to see relationships within a single, all embracing field of analysis. To fully respond to the invitation to explore the influences of technological change upon science — rather than the influences of science upon technical change, which is more studied by economic historians — one needs to be also a historian of science; which I am not. As a general proposition, that well-worn, rather throw-away remark of L. J. Henderson, that <science owed more to the steam-engine than the steam-engine to science> has, in fact, been little researched in relation to the general analysis of the impact of the Industrial Revolution (or the advance of technology in the early phases of industrialisation in the century 1750–1850) upon the growth of science.