Science and Culture and Industriall Revolution

Hist. Sci.
, xlvi (2008)
THE GHOST OF ROSTOW: SCIENCE, CULTURE AND THE

BRITISH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
William J. Ashworth
University of Liverpool
By changing the way man looked at the world around him, the
Newtonian perception increased, in ways impossible to measure, the
supply of scientists, the supply of inventors, and the willingness of
entrepreneurs to introduce innovation.1
Walt W. Rostow, Journal of economic history, 1971
The intellectual case for protectionism is about as alive as a doornail.

To be sure, a few clever economists have constructed some pathological
scenarios in which a tariff could be benecial. For the protectionists
to take solace from this literature would be akin to at earthers nding
vindication in the fact that the Earth is slightly attened at the poles or
phlebotomists gloating about a few rare diseases in which removal of
blood can be benecial.2
Joel Mokyr, Reasononline: Free minds and free markets, 1996
The history of capitalism has been so totally re-written that many people
in the rich world do not perceive the historical double standards involved
in recommending free trade and free market to developing countries.3
Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans, 2007
Today the consensus, particularly within Anglo-American circles, is that the path to
wealth is through free-minds and free-markets. In his celebration of Friedrich
August von Hayek, the American economic journalist John Cassidy wrote: If there
are two things most people can agree on these days, they are that free-market capi-
talism is the only way to organize a society and that the key to economic growth
is knowledge. Thus accessible objective knowledge and free-market capitalism
are seen as mutually dependent upon each other with various scholars locating their
origin in eighteenth-century Britain. It was here that the rst knowledge economy
was forged by enlightened individuals left to apply their imaginations and creativity
free from state interference.4
The rich countries in charge of dictating the policy criteria for present day global
economic development underline the need for, primarily, liberty, democracy, and
free-trade, coupled with a set of primarily Anglo-American institutions; these
include an efcient bureaucracy, an independent judiciary, protected property rights,
and appropriate nancial bodies such as an independent bank. It is claimed that
these were the crucial components that lay at the root of Western industrialization
initially in Britain and then the rest. Britain emerged as the rst to experience
sustained economic growth because it had a relatively weak non-interventionist
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250 WILLIAM J. ASHWORTH
state, and emphasized a culture of freedom and individualism out of which, one
recent commentator claims, emerged a doctrine of economic reasonableness. This
naturally led to the country spreading a free market economy and rational mode of
thinking to the rest of the world.5
By contrast a peripheral voice has argued that the key factors to British indus-
trialization and, indeed, that of the USA in the nineteenth century were policies of
industrial protectionism and other strategies today scorned upon by the World Trade
Organization. Thus in setting the above criteria for developing countries to industrial-
ize, the rich nations are simply doing what Ha-Joon Chang, following the nineteenth-
century German political economist Frederick Lists analogy, describes as kicking
away the ladder. In other words, erasing those things rst used to industrialize and
then insisting upon criteria that came after modern economic development.6
This unfashionable historical critique has been convincingly told in the work of
some scholars, most recently Paul Bairoch, Chang and Robert Wade. However, what
is missing from these revisionist accounts is a challenge to the central pillar of the
prevailing argument, namely, the increasingly common view that the West industri-
alized rst because it was more scientic than the rest. This potent claim traces the
intellectual preconditions for later industrial take-off to the Enlightenment.7
The debate triggered by sociologists and social historians of knowledge that science
is ultimately a social activity informed by particular interests, in the end, has never
really bothered active scientists. Far more important is getting something to work
regardless of epistemological issues and getting paid for it. The real potential
losers in the debate were and are positivist social scientists and economists who
provide normative rules for a properly functioning society and economy. If there is
no epistemological justication to the axioms ordained by such experts, where does
that leave their authority? Moreover, where does it leave the credibility concerning
the culture and institutions insisted upon for so-called developing countries seek-
ing long term economic growth? The result is opinion and persuasion backed up
by unfounded claims to objectivity, military might and wealth. What if Britain and
the West industrialized as a result of aggressive and protectionist trading policies
coupled with particular ecological and artisanal factors, as opposed to simply some
innate scientic culture?
WALT W. ROSTOW
In 1984 Barry Supple concluded that no economic historian in the last generation or
two had made such an impact upon the theme of material development and decline,
however it is disguised as Rostow. Over two decades on and the same diagnosis can
be made. The ghost of Rostow still haunts, however it is disguised, the historiog-
raphy of industrialization and economic growth. Much of the latest manifestation
has come clothed, not in the faded colours of economic or social history, but the
revamped dress of cultural history.8
Rostow was born in 1916, the son of a Jewish Russian family that immigrated to
New York in the late nineteenth century. He was educated at Yale University, and at
THE GHOST OF ROSTOW 251
Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar (193638). During the Second World
War he successfully served as a Major in an intelligence unit entitled the Ofce of
Strategic Services. After the war he joined the Washington State Department as assist-
ant chief of the German-Austrian division and subsequently as an advisor for the
Marshall Plan in Europe. After teaching stints at Oxford and Cambridge he returned
to the USA to a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1950. It was
here, at the Center for International Affairs, that Cold War doctrine was being forged
the imprint of which can clearly be seen in Rostows best-known work, The stages
of economic growth, sub-titled An anti-communist manifesto published at the close of
the decade. By this point he had also started his career as a speechmaker and advisor
to USA presidents, rst in 1958 to Dwight D. Eisenhower and subsequently John F.
Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Fiercely anti-communist, his political credentials,
experience and almost missionary defence of Western liberalism from the 1940s
till his death in 2003 informed all his work as an economic historian.
Three of Rostows essential features of economic growth initially formulated in
the late 1940s and early 1950s were, rstly, the propensity to develop fundamental
science (physical and social), secondly, the propensity to apply science to economic
ends and, thirdly, the propensity to accept innovations.9 This trinity could only
truly thrive, he argued, in an environment of Western democratic liberalism. He rst
fully articulated this argument in The process of economic growth published in 1953,
and it is fair to say it became an argument that consistently underpinned Rostows
lifetimes work. These three factors were essential, he claimed, to any countrys
ability to take-off into a modern economic growth-led form of industrialization.
He identied Britain as the rst and subsequent model of such a process with the
emphasis upon sectoral-led industrial change, which, in the case of Britain, was
cotton and iron. The energy and the technical mastery embedded in these industries
became the impulse for the entire early industrial economy.
Interestingly, Rostow did occasionally allude to the importance of state regulation
such as taxation and scal policy as possibly important in guiding economic
growth, but never opted to pursue this line of thinking. Consider, for example, his
comments in the second edition of The process of economic growth in 1960, where
he wrote: The tax structure and scal policy of a country may often, for example,
be decisive to the course of its economic development. However, after making this
potentially important and suggestive claim he merely skirted the issue with a bland
comment that such a study would require a detailed and separate consideration.
Similarly, in the second edition of The stages of economic growth in 1971 he again
briey referred to the subject: The complexities of sorting out the impact of tariffs
from all the other factors at work are great I am not prepared to give my impression
of importance a quantitative form for tariffs on cotton trade. We can, perhaps,
conclude that we need more work on the subject before differences in impression can
be put to a mutually satisfying quantitative test.10 Such fudging was, perhaps, to be
expected from a Cold War advisor to the United States government seeking to under-
mine a communist policy of heavy state intervention as the basis of economic growth.
His primary mission was to uphold the values of democracy, Protestant individualism,
entrepreneurialism, deregulation, and a minimal state (apart from the military). His
argument for the imperative of science and technology to industrialization gained a
particular place within this highly charged context. Whoever was going to win the
Cold War would need more than political propaganda it was always going to be
the one with the greatest military technology and the material resources to fund it.
This had always been the case and always would be. As he reected in The stages of
economic growth, the basis of industrialization and the transformation into a modern
society hinges substantially on the demonstration effect of the relation between mod-
ernization and military power.11 The debate over the relationship between science,
technology and the industrial process particularly came to prominence in the aftermath
of the Second World War. Two of the main factors driving the discussion were, rstly,
the issue of politically vulnerable underdeveloped countries and, secondly, the sub-
sequent tension between communism and capitalism. The key concern was to locate
the primary impetus to long-term (modern) economic growth. Inevitably, the Cold
War and the question of third world development became fused on both sides of the
iron curtain.12 For predominantly Anglo-American commentators pedalling a liberal
democratic third world developmental policy, some form of historical uniquely
Western validation was required. The British Industrial Revolution seductively
beckoned as a convincing blue print and road map for developing countries to achieve
democratic industrial take-off. Surely such a concrete historical event, tried, tested
and successfully imitated across the West, would provide an alternative to communist
prescriptions. A critical component of this blueprint was nurturing the right culture
characterized by a distinct rationality, which would provide the necessary mentality
of applying science to industry.
The role of applying science to industrial production, as apparently rst shown
in the British Industrial Revolution, was the deciding factor for many commentators
most notably Rostow and earlier from the pen of Simon Kuznets, who came to New
York from the Soviet Union in 1922 and studied under the American institutionalist,
Wesley Clair Mitchell, at Columbia University. Like Rostow, he also argued that
driving the economy at any given period was one or more leading industrial sectors.
Fuelling these sectors was rapid technological innovation, which eventually declined
as the innovation effects wore off.13
Like Rostow, Kuznets emphasized the role of science in powering industry, and
wrote in 1959 that increased productivity is possible only through major innovations,
i.e. applications of new bodies of technical knowledge to the processes of economic
production. He concluded: In these days it is hardly necessary to emphasize that
science is the base of modern technology, and that modern technology is in turn the
base of modern economic growth.14
The wealth of nations was through applied scientic knowledge, rather than, say,
simply labour or capital investment. An early example of this, argued Kuznets, was
James Watts development of the steam engine. Further extensive historical British
examples were offered by A. E. Musson and Eric Robinson during the 1960s. They
both claimed very close links were forged in eighteenth-century Britain between
industrialists and science. Other commentators, however, argued that such examples
were driven primarily by artisanal or workshop knowledge rather than any new sci-
ence.15
The whole argument over the importance of science to Britains Industrial Revolu-
tion, at one level, hinges upon the actual meaning of the term science. For Musson
the demarcation between empiricism and applied science was misleading: The
fundamental basis of modern science, pure or applied, is the scientic method
of combining theory or hypothesis with practical experiment: modern science is
experimental science. This, he claims, is what Britains leading industrialists were
doing. Thus rather than just crude empiricism based on trial and error, men like Watt
and Wedgwood were applying a scientic method that dated back to the Scientic
Revolution. This was robustly challenged by others such as A. Rupert Hall who
pointed out that Craftsmen have always experimented and talked of experiments:
but not scientically.16
Despite Mussons and Robinsons insistence upon the role of science to industri-
alization, doubts do creep into their analysis. For example, they write,
we do not wish to exaggerate the extent to which natural philosophy contributed
to arts and manufactures in the Industrial Revolution. The period was, of course,
a transitional one, and traditional handicrafts, with the rule-of-thumb procedures,
proved remarkably long-lasting in many industries, while even in those industries
which were being most rapidly revolutionised it is clear that practical empiri-
cism was largely responsible for technical advance.
Indeed, they write elsewhere, we do not wish to push this thesis too far, and that the
mass of manufacturers in the late eighteenth century had little scientic knowledge.17
During the same period Charles C. Gillispie, writing with similar doubts to Hall,
made a simple but forceful point, namely, that if the dening industry of the British
Industrial Revolution was cotton, then one searches their history in vain for any trace
of scientic inuence, except in the bleaching or dyeing of the nished product.
And here the pioneering work was done by French savants. While in France, textile
entrepreneurs were shown the way, not by scientic research, but by Englishmen
and Scotsmen. John Holkers establishment at Rouen is the most famous example,
and he was just the tip of an iceberg consisting of hundreds of British artisans selling
their engineering and workshop skills to the French.18
From the 1970s the debate over the role of science, technology and industry seemed
to fade into the background as the number crunching of the new economic historians
took over. However, since the 1990s a rostovian interpretation has been rejuvenated
and re-cloaked under the guise of a cultural based perspective.
ROSTOWS RESTORATION
In his witty, well-written and self-assured book, The wealth and poverty of nations,
rst published in 1998, David Landes forcefully argues that Western rational culture,
rst nurtured in Britain, gave birth to modernity. His claims are deliberately bullish
with much of what he argues common to a great deal of present historiography. In a
swift dismissal of those who see the rise of Europe as simply a recent development
along a much longer time-line, despite the imminent return of China and India to
global industrial dominance, he quips: This is patently incorrect. As the historical
record shows, for the last thousand years, Europe[the West] has been the prime mover
of development and modernity. This is primarily a dismissal of arguments stemming
from recent work by R. Bin Wong, Andre Gunder Frank, Kenneth Pomeranz and
Prasannan Parthasarathi, among others.19
For Landes the beginning of modernity was at the turn of the eighteenth century,
and the hinge of this metamorphosis was the Industrial Revolution, begun in Britain
in the eighteenth century and emulated around the world. At the root of this trans-
formation, he claims, is Max Webers argument concerning the impact of a Protestant
ethic. This created a new business breed of gifted entrepreneurs and a labour force
that worked hard. Of equal importance was the rise of knowledge specically
scientic knowledge, that dictated economic possibilities.20
Prior to the rise of Northern Europe, claims Landes, it was the South that was
the centre of European learning. However, the Protestant Reformation changed all
that: It gave a big boost to literacy, spawned dissents and heresies, and promoted
the scepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of the scientic endeavour.
The Catholic countries, instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure
and censure. Landes cites the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper to support his
Weberian argument. Trevor-Roper has argued that this reactionary, anti-protestant
backlash by the Spanish and Portuguese, far more than Protestantism itself, sealed
the fate of southern Europe for the next three hundred years. Trevor-Roper is the
same historian who famously announced that pre-colonial Africa had no history till
the Europeans arrived.21
Ultimately, for Landes, the hitherto most industrialized country, China, lacked
curiosity: They went to show themselves, not to see and learn. They were what
they were and did not have to take or make. This could, of course, be countered by
the fact that the then much more industrialized China did not have desperately to
see and learn because it already made or had all it wanted.22
Landes nds enthusiastic support for his culturally-based Weberian argument
in the recent work of Liah Greenfeld. However, where Landes places a great deal
of emphasis upon Webers Protestantism, Greenfeld underlines the centrality of
a nationalist culture. This nationalism is, however, intimately linked to Webers
spirit of capitalism and rst erupts upon the scene in sixteenth-century England.
From here it eventually spreads, in a manner similar to Rostows trajectory of those
countries achieving industrial take-off, to France (The First Convert), North
America, Germany and then Japan. She writes: Unlike Protestantism, nationalism
necessarily promotes the type of social structure which the modern economy needs
to develop. In particular, cultural values of egalitarians provide the basis for social
mobility and free markets. Such a structure is embedded with a strong sense of
dignity and a healthy competitive view. Dignity, not unlike Mokyrs economic
reasonableness, manifests itself in fair international competition and the natural
pursuit of wealth by individuals (ultimately for the general good) all of which
fuelled the emergence of modern economic growth. Nationalism may well indeed
have played a key role in nurturing industrial development, but in Britain this was
dened far more by protectionism, desperate industrial catch-up and war, rather
than egalitarian values.23
Landes concludes his study on a gloomy note and res a warning shot that these
vital cultural values and the fate of Western civilization in general are now in danger.
The fruits of scientic knowledge and technological capability, he cautions, are
today under sharp attack, even in the Academy. He reminiscences about a time
when it was all so clear and recalls an era where most people viewed the past
thousand years as a period of great advance. The driving force in this progress has
been Western civilization and its dissemination: the knowledge, the techniques, the
political and social ideologies, for better for worse. Such a perspective is being
eroded by bad history driven by a world of relativistic values and moral equality,
the very idea of a west-central [Eurocentric] global history is denounced as arrogant
and oppressive.24
Landes could not have expressed it better. European and North American history
has frequently been ad hominem in tenor, driven by an embedded, almost unconscious
bias that has become entrenched. As Jack Goody has thoughtfully remarked in his
The theft of history, a particular ethnocentricity rose as Europe attained a dominant
global economic position (the same, of course, could be said for the United States).
In the context of domination, he writes, wherever it occurs, ethnocentricity begins
to take on a more aggressive aspect. Other breeds are automatically lesser breeds
and in Europe a sophisticated scholarship manufactured reasons why this should
be so. Some thought that God, the Christian God or the Protestant religion, willed it
that way. And many still do.25
Typically the traditional story of the rise of a distinct Western rational culture, ideal
for industrialization, begins in Elizabethan England with Sir Francis Bacon, who, the
story goes, hatched the scientic method newborn from his own head. It then takes
root, especially during the English Civil War, and becomes institutionalized within the
Restoration and the founding of the Royal Society of London. It is during this latter
period that the key works of Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle and John Locke appeared.
However, the diffusion of Newtonian natural philosophy (the new science) was not
primarily via the Royal Society or State institutions, so the recent history goes, but
through the market. It emerged in the unregulated coffee houses and public lectures
of London and then spread out to the provinces. It was here that the new science
informed and nurtured a culture of innovation and technological development, which
proved fundamental to the nations eventual manufacturing dominance.26
According to Margaret Jacob it was Britains ability to absorb the new science
differently to other nations that enabled it to industrialize rst. The reasons for this,
she writes, lie in the different British social and cultural landscape. This was a
culture that from at least as early as the mid-seventeenth century uniquely wrapped
science in an ideology that encouraged material superiority. A century later in
1750, she robustly declares, a new person had appeared in Britain generally
but not exclusively a male entrepreneur, who approached the productive process
mechanically, literally by seeing it as something to be mastered by machines, or
on a more abstract level to be conceptualized in terms of weight, motion, and the
principles of force and inertia. We are here back to Rostows take-off, Landess
Unbound Prometheus and most recently Mokyrs Industrial Enlightenment an
argument emphasizing a distinct British scientic-market-technological rationality
being unleashed upon the world, a culture whose sole ends are the production and
acquisition of material wealth.27
The embodiment of Jacobs new person was the French Huguenot refugee John
(Jean) Theophilus Desaguliers and, then, industrial entrepreneurs like Josiah Wedg-
wood, Matthew Boulton and James Watt. It was through men like this, claim Jacob
and Larry Stewart citing Mokyr, that Britain became the rst apparent knowledge
economy.28 This is an argument with a long and impressive historical pedigree with,
perhaps, the greatest exponent being Rostow.
Recent arguments such as those offered by Mokyr, Jacob, Greenfeld, and one
can also add the new biological interpretation of Gregory Clark to this list can be
seen as united by their belief that the trigger of the modern industrial process was a
unique British rational, hardworking and peculiarly inventive culture (whether trans-
mitted socially or biologically). If we learn anything from the history of economic
development, writes Landes, it is that culture makes all the difference. One of the
earliest and most resolute proponents of such an argument was Rostow.29
The most recent attempt to resolve the debate over what we mean by science and
its role in British industrialization is offered by Mokyr. His technique is to subsume
science into a much larger and vaguer category of useful knowledge (a term coined
by Kuznets). In this way he can include artisanal, engineering and shop oor under-
standing, which was clearly of much more import than leading savants of the day.
The end result, however, is an argument that takes us no further than that already
argued by Musson and Robinson.
In his acclaimed book, The gifts of Athena, Mokyr denes useful knowledge as
an understanding of natural phenomena that excludes the human mind and social
institutions meaning objective knowledge independent of humans but accessible
by humans otherwise known as positivism. Mokyr then constructs a structural
functionalist model that divides knowledge into two types: one that holds beliefs
about natural phenomena and regularities (propositional knowledge), which can be
applied to create another form of knowledge (prescriptive knowledge) that objec-
tively describes how something works although he is careful to emphasize that
this is a dialectical, as opposed to linear process (a point earlier made by Kuznets).30
Propositional knowledge retains elements of practical informal knowledge that con-
tains a tacit element, whereas prescriptive knowledge is public knowledge (science)
and thence can be stored and travel across geographical and social boundaries. Mokyr
describes these two types of knowledge as in many ways akin to the relationship
between genotype and phenotypes. Not every gene ends up coding for a protein, but
for any phenotype to emerge, some basis for it has to exist in the genome. In other
words, some basis of prescriptive knowledge that enables it to be formal, visible and
objective was originally in propositional knowledge. For Mokyr, like Landes minus
the classicatory terminology, it was the surge in propositional knowledge and the
cross-over to prescriptive knowledge that fuelled the British Industrial Revolution.
The wider and tighter propositional knowledge came to be i.e. the rise of modern
science the more prescriptive knowledge could be diffused into other areas.31
The spread of such knowledge was multiplied by the rise in print, a successful postal
service, growth in efcient transport, and the spread of cheap newspapers and books.
This greatly speeded the accessibility and connections between propositional and
prescriptive knowledge, resulting in the creation of the rst knowledge economy,
Britains industrial take-off and the launch of modern economic growth. The key
moments in this development were, rstly, the Scientic Revolution and, secondly,
what Mokyr terms the eighteenth century Industrial Enlightenment. The latter phase,
he suggests, captures the bridge between the Scientic and the Industrial Revolution.
A scientic mentality, which he describes as a Baconian mind, was propagated by
scientic lecturers, the Lunar Society, coffee houses and Masonic lodges. Crucially,
this unregulated market of knowledge operated much like an economic free market
it was broadly left to private interests and free from state interference. In France,
by contrast, scientists depended on economic and personal relations with the political
establishment in short, it was nurtured by the state as opposed to individuals.
This was even more the case, Mokyr claims, in the Austrian Netherlands, the German
states, and Russia.32
There can be no doubt, concludes Mokyr, that the Industrial Revolution and the
subsequent age of modern growth coincided with a revolution in useful knowledge.
The Scientic Revolution provided the Industrial Enlightenment with the scien-
tic method, scientic mentality, and scientic culture that was critical to Britains
subsequent Industrial Revolution. Between 1760 and 1830 an entire class of British
engineers had obtained a scientic mentality, which placed applied science at
the service of commercial and manufacturing interests. Objective knowledge and
commonsense reasoning overcame age-old prejudice. Quoting Jacob, he further
writes that by 1750 British engineers and entrepreneurs had a shared technical
vocabulary that could objectify the physical world forever. Mokyr concludes:
The Industrial Enlightenment learned from the natural philosophers especially
from Newton, who stated it explicitly in the famous opening pages of Book Three of
the Principia that the phenomena produced by nature and the articial works of
mankind were subject to the same laws. So, like Rostow and more recently Jacob,
it was Newton (along with Bacon) who ultimately lay at the heart of the subsequent
Industrial Enlightenment.33 However, one can make an equally, if not more forceful
argument, for French civil engineers spearheading the march to control nature. For
example, Janis Langins has traced the origins of the modern science of engineering
to Frances Royal Corps of Engineering. While Antoine Picon has revealed the
impressive interplay between the education and practice of French engineers and
architects in overcoming physical problems. Mokyr dismisses the importance of
this by claiming French engineering knowledge was limited by its state-based and
political objectives. By contrast in Britain, he claims, the subsets of prescriptive
knowledge of interest to the engineers and scientists of the time were far more
industrial and commercial. Then citing Jacob he claims this was recognized by
French contemporaries.34
Behind Mokyrs argument is that the British Industrial Enlightenment smashed
secrecy in knowledge and material production and, by implication, created open
science, British open-mindedness and eventually free-markets that led to an open
society. We are here back to Rostow and, indeed, the Cold War philosophy of Karl
Popper and Friedrich Hayeks defence of democracy and attack upon centrally
planned states. Not surprisingly, just as Landes trembles over the apparent relativistic
values and moral equality that have impregnated recent studies on industrialization,
Mokyr attacks social constructivists and their approach to the history of science and
technology as unhelpful to the purposes of his book (The gifts of Athena). Such
radical thinkers are quickly dismissed in little more than a page. The maturation
of a socially based history of science certainly does have epistemic implications that
Mokyr and Landes rightly fear, precisely because the legitimacy of the West has
always been based on the view that it was built upon a rational and objective base
(the Enlightenment project and legitimation of the moral high ground). No wonder
Mokyr writes that the growth of knowledge is far too important to be left to the
historians of science.35
There is, of course, another key theme underlying Mokyrs argument. According
to his interpretation, the Enlightenment brought the belief in free markets (and thus
free-minds) to centre stage and thus rendered the market as a neutral arbiter of what
new technology (or new knowledge) should or should not be used. Once that prin-
ciple is allowed for, resistance to new technology becomes almost impossible, since
the essence of such institutional resistance is to use non-market controls to prevent
new techniques from being adopted (the market being an objective arbiter of right
or wrong knowledge/technology). Thus the key is a free market, because otherwise
the fuel of economic growth (technological change) would be thwarted. In other
words the antithesis to growth is regulation and protection. Yet, as we shall see, it
was precisely in the latter environment that Britain industrialized.36
Many historians, as Rosalind Williams has recently reected, may sense that such
arguments feel like entering a wormhole that sucks us back to a time when technology
meant progress, when the people who counted were a few great-man-inventors, when
knowledge was dened as truth about nature out there, when the West ruled, and
when the question what did women know, and when did they know it? assumed that
women were housewives. However, for Mokyr, like Landes, any negativity toward
the notion of technological progress is misplaced and politically correct nonsense.
In our time, he claims, well-meaning environmentalists, greedy product liability
lawyers, and feather-bedding unionists are contributing to the problem of hostility to

new technology. Elsewhere he applauds economic historians who, he claims, speak
of technological progress without as yet the misgivings of many well-meaning
but misguided historians and social scientists who feel that the normative tinge of
the word progress reeks of Whiggish positivism or worse.37
For Rostows Cold War argument it was important to sustain a picture of an open
and weak non-intervening British state. Drawing upon the anti-Marxist economic
historian and United States government advisor on the Soviet economy, Alexander
Gerschenkron, he claimed that the extent and rigor of the states role in the mercantil-
ist period, as opposed to changes brought about by the pursuit of private advantage,
increases as one moves to the East: from Holland and Britain through France, Prussia
and Austria, to the Russia shaped by Peter the Great, which is not so different to
Mokyrs geography of the increasing intensity of the European relationship between
the state and science. In other words, the prominent emphasis upon a highly regu-
lated and protected process of industrialization peddled by the Soviet-led communist
countries seemed to be rapidly expanding across the globe. Rostows message was
simple such an approach would follow an historical path of East European back-
wardness, and was not a good model for third world economic development. The
struggle of contemporary developing nations to move into take-off and beyond is
their inability to nurture a culture needed to promote innovating entrepreneurs. It
is worth remembering that Rostow, Gerschenkron and Kuznets all embraced Anglo-
American liberty and saw its evil antithesis in the Soviet Union.38
Mokyr has recently reiterated their arguments: Compared with Prussia, Spain,
or the Habsburg Empire, Britains government generally left its businessmen in
peace to pursue their affairs subject to certain restraints and rarely ventured itself
into commercial and industrial enterprises. Mokyr then adds: Mercantilism and
regulation in eighteenth-century Britain never took the extreme forms it took in
France under Colbert and in Prussia under Frederick the Great. This is an argument
we shall return to later.39
Rostows central premise explaining why Britain was rst to achieve sustained
industrial growth, was simple: it was Isaac Newton, the subsequent nurturing of experi-
mental philosophy and later, following the arguments of Weber, Protestant religious
non-conformism (an argument more central to Landes and Jacob than Mokyr). This
created a particular rational culture ideal at applying knowledge to technological
innovation the source of modern economic growth. It was a culture that kept in-
nitely at bay Ricardian diminishing returns and the spectre of Malthusianism. This
aspect of Rostows argument remains central to much of the recent cultural history of
science and industrialization. While Jacob is pulling the Rostovian argument to the
left by emphasizing the revolutionary or at least transformative power of capitalism,
Mokyr is dragging it to the right by underlining the naturalness of capitalism.40
Rostow claimed that at the heart of Britains inventive character was a web of
osmotic ties among scientists, inventors, and innovators, stemming not only from the
Royal Society but from the lively provincial societies, in Birmingham and elsewhere.
Unlike the state-run scientic academies of the Continent (rather like a nationalized
industry) they could not compete in the practical science stakes with Britains volun-
tary and self-funded philosophical societies freed from any inefcient, meddling and
individualistic crushing state.41 Industrialization was allowed free-reign and with it,
so the traditional history goes, came innovation. The most common example is the
Midlands based Lunar Society. Members of this society, claims Mokyr, may have
been an extremely tiny part of the population but such unrepresentativeness is the
heart of the process of technological change. As in biological selectionist models,
what matters to history is that under the right circumstances very rare events get
amplied and ultimately determine the outcome.42
Likewise for the Cold War Rostow, this progressive, albeit small, British culture of
Newtonianism, religious non-conformism and an entrepreneurial spirit, was injected
into the foundations of the edgling United States and other former white, Protestant
British colonies. Rostow taught: It is in the late seventeenth century that one can
observe on both sides of the Atlantic the Puritan ardor shifting from theology to the
market-place. Clearly, the nonconformists generated a disproportionate supply of
both inventors and entrepreneurs. This provided Rostow with a useful link to the
U.S. trajectory of industrialization during the nineteenth century. More recently Jacob
and Mokyr following the work of Larry Stewart have reached the same conclu-
sion and emphasize a philosophy geared toward the marketplace. Likewise they also
highlight the spread of Britains cultural rationality to the colonies.43
However, it was never just about the role of a distinct British rationality or sci-
ence in creating new technology and igniting industrial take-off. As we have seen,
for Rostow it was as much a defence of Western culture born out of Cold War fears.
The West is right because it is democratic, free and simply more rational (something
naturally reected in its institutions and promotion of science, along with its apparent
defence of liberty) than the rest. Landes similarly writes: Western societies, and
more particularly their intellectual and scientic leadership, established very early
the boundary line between fantasy and reality, drawing careful distinctions between
spiritual and material, between the realm of emotion and imagination on the one hand
and that of observation and reason on the other. This rational approach to problems
that we call the scientic method, he concludes, gave Britain, then the whole of the
West, the ability to invent and adapt new technology like no other time and place.
Britains original premier position in the league of industrial nations to rst enjoy
sustained economic growth was, as Rostow put it, no random walk.44
REGULATION, SKILLS, COAL AND BRITISH INDUSTRIALIZATION
Can the British Industrial Revolution ultimately be explained primarily by the arrival
of Newtonian experimental natural philosophy as Rostow and, more recently Jacob
emphasize, or in a more diluted form, the cultural embedding of an Enlightenment
rationality characterized by the scientic method that Landes and Mokyr
describe? The rst thing we need to do is bracket frequently taken-for-granted Anglo-
centric assumptions. As Christine MacLeod has recently warned: The questions
of technological creativity and economic development are rife with nationalistic

undertones, and as long as we imagine that Britain had become a peculiarly inven-
tive society, this paradox cannot be resolved. Trying to sweep out the nationalistic
and political economy of such a long historiography has proved an extremely hard
battle.45
For defenders and promoters of the rise of Western liberalism it is important to
place a culture of rationality dened by what we now call science at the heart of
its ascendance. Not only does this provide a self-reinforcing validity to a superior
culture, but it can be seen as having exposed an objective economic and political
system that is natural and therefore for the good of the many, i.e. democratic. It is
only within such a political and economic structure that real knowledge open and
accessible to all can be produced. Perhaps, more than ever, such accounts need to
be more rigorously scrutinized.
The rise of sustained economic growth in Britain was, the following argues,
primarily the product of an array of non-cultural factors, as opposed to a unique
Industrial Enlightenment or scientic ethnicity. No new knowledge was required
in the mechanizing process of textiles or even in the new technology that grew up
around the use of coal.46
Let us rst turn to the role of the state. In 1640, England was a weak second-rate
power with a small and backward industrial base. Just over two hundred years later
it was the worlds foremost industrial and imperial power. Indeed, so successful was
this transformation, a dramatic restructuring of tax policy during the rst half of the
nineteenth century was made possible only by a general condence in the ability of
Britains entire industry, old and new, nally to thrive in the world without a protective
barrier. The former combination of protection and the nurturing of domestic industries
had been so triumphant that the fact many of these manufactures would not have
existed without high tariffs was largely ignored by leading politicians. Indeed, while
Britain was knocking down its industrial enclosure, other nations most notably
Germany and the United States intensied or erected theirs. As the leading his-
torian of Britains free trade policies recently suggests: Arguably by the 1870s, the
most logical cunning of the state would have led Britain to consolidate her empire
behind tariff walls in order to defend her industrial lead against the newly industrial-
izing economies of the world; a policy belatedly formulated by Joseph Chamberlain
in the early twentieth century.47
Britains industrial development during the eighteenth century owed a great deal
to a policy of nurturing domestic industry behind a wall of tariffs, skill in imitating
and subsequently transforming foreign (especially Asian) products, unparalleled
exploitation of African slave labour, the domestic use of cheap female and child
labour, rich resources of coal, a monopoly of trade with British North America,
aggressive military prowess and, not least, a relatively efcient body for the collection
of inland revenues.48
From its inception in 1643 by Parliament to raise money to ght the Crown, the
excise was loaded with political meaning and connections. Originally an inland tax on
a multitude of products (as well as a levy on certain imports and exports), it quickly
mutated into a tax upon a restricted number of items. Crucially, instead of levying at
the point of retail the excise switched its focus to the more private and less publicly
visible space of production. During the 1680s the administrative organization of
the excise also under went a revision, spearheaded by the Commissioner, Charles
Davenant. He later reected: I have given them all one method and ordered them
to keep it.49
The excise became the chief source of manufacturing knowledge for the govern-
ment, advising it through the Treasury. Here the excise suggested levels at which to
pitch tax, gave extensive details on the nature of production, liaised with manufactur-
ers, and engaged with issues of quality since allowing the production of second-
rate items simply stoked the illicit importation of superior goods, and in the long
run could destroy the survival of an industry. Taxing a good frequently required it to
be rendered visible both in regard to its ingredients and in the way it was produced,
ultimately calling for attempts to regulate its qualities and for its site of production to
be recongured to meet the excises process of measurement. In this sense, it could
be argued, the excise encouraged monopolies and a standardized product.50
Protecting domestic industry, especially infant sectors, through high tariffs duties
may not have been a full-blown, systematically applied industrial policy, but it did
represent a recognized, actively pursued and successful strategy. The protective
barriers allowed manufacturers to develop, which enabled the excise to expand as
it farmed them; revenue collection became more efcient and, crucially, relatively
predictable (in contrast to customs and the land tax), something essential for sus-
taining public credit. Protectionist policies made possible the fertility necessary to
nurture domestic manufactures and the subsequent extensive taxing of its fruits, all
of which along with the specication of ingredients, production and system of
gauging devised to measure commodities was important in dening the shape of
both taxed and eventually untaxed manufactures.51
Could it also be the state, rather than the market, that nurtured many of the values
we now associate with the emergence of modern science? Landess suggestion that
the effort to nd a surrogate for the replicated experiment by the use of explicit
international comparisons in mercantilism is onto something if we invert it: namely,
that principles associated with natural philosophy were actually modelled on mer-
cantile and state administrative developments. The careful accumulation of data, the
use of inductive reasoning, the pursuit of the economical explanation were actually
unfolding within certain state bodies prior to the institutionalization of a recogniz-
able scientic method.52
At the turn of the seventeenth century Britains industrial base was backward and
vulnerable compared to its chief European rivals, the Netherlands and France, as well
as, of course, with China and India. War forced Britain to adopt policies that would
increase its revenues, in particular, industrial and trade protection along with scal
innovations including an unprecedented tracking of money and mapping of the
balance of trade. In this sense it could be argued that developments in commercial
tools that were crucial to defending trade and ghting wars (such as bookkeeping,
comparative national trading gures, and increasingly elaborate gauging instruments
to measure tax revenues) were the real harbingers of the values of measurement,
counting and precision (values we now explicitly associate with science).53
Mokyr rightly observes: The success of Britain in the late eighteenth century is
perhaps surprising to those who rmly believe that taxes and government debts are
a guarantee of economic disaster. Despite its high taxes and a government debt
that climbed from 5 percent of GNP in 1688 to 200 percent of it in 1815, Britain
had a viable and strong economy, strong enough to withstand a quarter century of
scal stress following the French Revolution. This is precisely the point thanks
to a policy of protection and a scal system built around the nurturing and taxing of
domestic industry, England/Britain was elevated from a second-rate European power
to a leading global force.54
If the experimental method associated with the rise of the new science is appro-
priate, it was connected to the expansion in an emphasis upon observation; from
instruments devised to mechanically monitor processes such as the thermometer,
hydrometer, barometer and pyrometer. Such devices were created to support rather
than subvert empirical techniques. They enabled administrators and taxed manufac-
turers to reduce the empirical practices to rule wherever possible. The well-known
need for ever more precise calculations to gauge the tax from the brewing and distill-
ing industries was a characteristic of nearly all the excised industries. In addition,
there was a surge in the interest in mathematical textbooks within disciplines such
as navigation, bookkeeping, and tax collection not to mention a massive increase
in trying to record the ow of trade and commerce. Thus the rise of a knowledge
economy in Britain was as much, if not more, state-led than privately-led.55
In this sense, the quest for precision was being developed under the umbrella of
protection within state engineering projects and political administration far more
than in eighteenth-century natural philosophy a trait normally associated with
the French. In fact, natural philosophy during this period scrutinized and studied
industry far more than manufacturers drew upon natural philosophy. The result, as
Gillispie pointed out, was a description and classication a natural history of
the trades and their principles.56
State protectionism also indirectly led to the emergence of the British cotton
industry. Printed or painted calico from India was banned from English consump-
tion in 1701 followed by a total prohibition of domestic sales of Indian unprinted
cotton in 1721. This was the case till such legislation was removed in 1774. How-
ever, between these dates the production and consumption of mixed cotton fabrics
most notably fustians were permitted, while plain pure cottons were also still
allowed to be imported if they were subsequently (after being domestically printed)
re-exported. By contrast most other European countries, apart from the Dutch, placed
a complete ban on imported cottons and linens. This provided a major impetus to the
subsequent expansion of the British cotton industry over the rest of Europe (the Dutch
concentrated on the re-export side rather than production). Indeed, while Holland
kept its market open for dyed and printed Asian textiles, its hitherto European lead
in bleaching, dyeing and printing declined.57
It was also the case that the nature of raw cotton made it ideal, compared to other
bres, to mechanize spinning and weaving. It was thus, as MacLeod argues: If
textile-spinning machinery were going to be invented in eighteenth-century Europe
it was likely, for technical reasons, to be cotton, and if it were cotton-spinning
machinery, then it was unlikely to be anywhere but England specically Lancashire
and Derbyshire because nowhere else had a cotton industry of any size. If you
combine these facts with the intense competition British cotton had with superior
Indian calicoes in Africa and the increasing demand for the cloth in the American
colonies, you have a convincing non-cultural impetus behind technological innova-
tion in cotton. Joseph E. Inikori has persuasively shown how the export-led nature
of the British Industrial Revolution also mirrors the development of those regions
where the new technology sprung up. He concludes: Here we have a clear example
of export-led technological progress, which is contrary to the technology-led trade
expansion argued by Ralph Davis and Joel Mokyr.58
Consider, too, the important role of coal in Britains industrialization dismissed
by Mokyr as a simplistic model of the British Industrial Revolution that has long
been abandoned. England/Britain had a shortage of timber and as a relatively small
island it only had a limited area of cultivable land. One way out of this was to extend
its land via colonization to produce scarce items such as timber; however, this proved
disappointing. Another solution, much closer home, soon beckoned. The island could
tap into its own uniquely accessible rich domestic deposits of coal as a substitute. This,
for a number of historians, was crucial to Britains Industrial Revolution. Indeed, for
E. A. Wrigley the switch from an organic to a mineral economy was the key factor
in explaining Britains Industrial Revolution. As Rolf Peter Sieferle has calculated,
by 1820 it would have taken a forest the size of England to have supplied as much
energy as it was now using per year from coal.59
The switch to coal was adopted by a number of England/Britains infant industries
that, in turn, fuelled the evolution of technologies connected to coal-burning. All this
was developed ad hoc over a long period of time. Its use in soap, malt, salt, sugar,
iron, dyeing and bleaching textiles commenced long before the political/institutional
establishment of applied/industrial science. The technique used by maltsters was later
copied by the iron producer Abraham Darby in 1709, when he also decarbonised the
coal to make coke. However, to make unwrought iron required the coke pig to be
further processed, which made it really commercially viable only when the cost of
charcoal increased and greatly exceeded the price of coal from the mid-century.60
Mokyr dismisses the argument that Britain switched to coal because of an energy
shortage. He claims it suffers from the logical difculty that the scarcity of natural
resources and their abundance cannot both be regarded as stimulating factors for
technological progress, i.e. raw cotton (imported) and coal (indigenous). J. R.
Harris answered this in his review of Mokyrs The British Industrial Revolution: On
resources, there is the usual playing down of the importance of the coal endowment
and the fanciful idea that Britain could have imported coal if necessary. Where from,
one may ask, in the classical Industrial Revolution period? Jack A. Goldstone,
although sympathetic to Mokyrs cultural argument, is resolute that the creation
of engines specically designed to convert fossil fuel energy to useful work in
eighteenth-century England was the key to the countrys divergence from the rest. It
was this factor that underlay the Rise of the West.61
If there was any geographical good luck, claims Mokyr, it was because Britain
was an island with good coastal transport. However, he adds, being an island does
not seem to have done much for Ireland, and good internal transportation was not
very helpful to the Dutch economy in generating a phenomenon similar to the Indus-
trial revolution. The fact Ireland was little more, during this period, than a British
colony, and the Dutch chose early-on a far more merchant-based economy, surely
had something to do with their different trajectories. For a culturally deterministic
picture of technology, however, state, ecological and geographical factors have to
be eliminated.62
Britains unique access to the right sort of coal became less and less expensive
throughout the eighteenth century thanks to improvements in mining and transporta-
tion especially after the surge in canal construction. The industry to benet the
most was iron. The total transformation of iron to mineral fuel occurred after Henry
Cort, an agent for the states Royal Navy, patented his puddling and rolling process
in 178384. This was a transition born of long accumulated experience rather than
any new experimental philosophy. Within an economic context Britain had stopped
importing any iron by 1804 and by 1815 nearly a third of production was exported.
Such an expansion had an important knock-on effect in other industrial processes,
most importantly, machine tool making.63
Not only did the new techniques make possible the mass production of cheap
wrought iron, they united the historically separated processes of furnace and forge.
A crucial aspect in the success of this transformation was the role of government
protectionary policies. Charles K. Hyde writes: The high bar iron prices prevalent
over the period 17951815 were not simply a reection of high wartime demand.
The tariff policy followed by the government during these years kept bar iron prices
articially high and allowed British iron masters to drive foreign competition from
the domestic market. The tariff on imported bar iron had been 2.81 per ton over
the years 178295, but was then rapidly increased to 6.49 per ton by 1813. He
concludes: The widening price differential between British and foreign bar iron was
largely a result of tariff policy, which effectively priced both Russian and Swedish
iron out of the British market.64
The demand for coal via mining was also fundamental in the development of
steam technology. Coal mines were dangerous places and vulnerable to oods. Not
surprisingly mine owners, not just of coal but tin too (which along with copper was
a market Britain excelled in), sought a way of solving this problem. In 1698, the
army engineer, Thomas Savery, marketed his steam engine as the miners friend,
but it was Thomas Newcomens atmospheric engine in 1712 that provided the rst
real solution. Interestingly, the hero of promoting the spread of Newtonian experi-
mental philosophy, the French refugee Desaguliers, referred rather dismissingly to
the Iron Monger, Newcomen, and his partner, the glazier, John Calley, as having
very luckily by accident found what they sought for. For Desaguliers they must
have just stumbled across their steam engine since they were neither philosophers or
mathematicians and thus incapable of understanding how it worked. The expansion of
the steam engine then underwent a number of major improvements, including Watts
adaptation of the engine to power rotative motion applicable to the textile industry.
It was not, however, till the mid-nineteenth century that cotton mills signicantly
replaced water power with steam power.65
The steam engine had also made an early appearance in the Habsburg hard-rock
mines of lower Hungary. However, no one took it seriously as a productive tool,
since it was viewed as too cumbersome and inefcient there. It was widespread
knowledge during the eighteenth century that if you wanted to view the latest and
best mining technology especially water pumping equipment you went to
the Harz mountains, the Erz mountains or the Habsburg mines in the Carpathians.
Unlike England, however, these states had developed scientic forestry to provide a
constant supply of wood for their mining and smelting operations. This was simply
not an option for English mining and thus its owners had to turn to something else
to alleviate the problem of ooding. It seems likely they turned to steam out of des-
peration than innovation.66
It is almost inconceivable that steam would have taken-off in England in the
manner it did without its unique access to the right sort of coal and severe shortage
of timber. The case of Sweden serves as another good counter example. Like the
German states, Swedish technology during the eighteenth century was mainly based
upon wood. The Newcomen engine seemed an attractive option to solve the need for
mechanical energy that could not be supplied by traditional sources such as muscle,
water and wind. However, unlike Britain, Sweden had little fossil fuel but good sup-
plies of timber. This, explains Svante Lindquist, triggered a major source of conict.
For example, a scarcity of timber was perceived to be a threat to the countrys most
important industry, namely, the production of bar iron (constituting seventy percent of
all exports) as well as other manufactures and, of course, material culture in general.
The amount of timber required to fuel a Newcomen engine was huge compared to
coal due to the formers much lower heat content. This was one of the initial concerns
expressed by the Board of Mines over the attempt to introduce the engine in 1725.
As Lindqvist writes: The Newcomen engine was economic in the context in which
it had been developed i.e. the British coal industry. The basic economic reason
for the failure of the Dannemora engine was thus the difculty of reproducing the
cost-effectiveness of the technology in a new environment (authors italics).67
Clearly the place of coal in the British economy was an important source in fuel-
ling some of its central technological achievements. John Harris has emphasized the
lead Britain obtained in tacit, unformalized knowledge in the development of coal
as a source of energy and artisanal knowledge in general. Such understanding could
not be written but only carried in the movement of workers.68

Britains natural resources were obviously crucial to its industrialization, which,
in addition to coal, included easy access to deposits of iron ore (much more acces-
sible and of a better quality than that found in France), rock salt, and non-ferrous
metals. By contrast most of Britains primary European competitors still had easy
access to forests and timber. Moreover it was not till the rich coal mines of the Pas
de Calais and the Ruhr were developed in the mid-nineteenth century that coal close
to iron ore was found, while the Scandinavian countries and Italy had even fewer
sources of coal.
The switch to coal was important in nurturing British engineering and machine
tool making. Of particular note was the precision and manipulation of metals needed
to make large machines particularly, to begin with, in technology around pumping
water from coal and tin mines. This required extremely hard steel, for example, in
the use of les. An important development was the increasingly exact and elaborate
machine tools needed for cutting edges for shaping metals, the means of establish-
ing plane surfaces, exact joints for pipes, valves, cylinders, pistons and bearings at
the precision end of the scale, and cheap mass-produced iron for constructional uses,
castings etc. at the bulk end of the scale. Britains important tool-cutting and steel
industry, as Chris Evans and Goran Ryden have recently shown, would not have
been possible if Britain had not, crucially, gained a monopoly of the best Swedish
iron (Orground). In addition to developments surrounding coal extraction, Britains
skilled advantage was also the product of purposeful spaces, such as the countrys
largest industrial complexes for example, the Royal Naval dockyards.69
The skills needed for all this were not conducive to formal literary descriptions
despite the concerted attempts of French encyclopaedists to do so. In other words,
reducing to scientic, prescriptive or formal knowledge was not the primary impetus
to the development or transfer of such technology (as Mokyr seems to imply). Mean-
while the educational institutions we now take for granted to train people in such
skills were not around. Instead, a person would depend upon an apprenticeship at a
few places such as Boulton and Watts foundry, the Military arsenals and dockyards,
or Henry Maudsleys London workshop.
Along with spaces like these, another important area that produced engineering
prociency was in the manufacture of small metal luxury objects in London and
especially Birmingham. These specialised metalwares were created to quench fash-
ionable trends and, in so doing, argues Maxine Berg, created a exible core base of
metalworking skills and techniques. These were then honed and adapted across a
range of new commodities; metalworking and engineering expertise were directed
to the production of desirable consumer goods. In addition, new rolling mills and
die stamps were developed, particularly in Shefeld, for silver-plate tableware. Many
of the companies involved in the luxury metal trades operated large establishments
with factory production well-established before factory techniques were applied to
cotton.70
Leading textile manufacturers such as Richard Arkwright and Jedediah Strutt
were continually advertising for skilled smiths, woodturners, and clockmakers. The
importance of Britains clockmaking skills to the development of textile machinery
has been emphasized by Landes, who reminds us of the similarity between the way a
clock and textile machine works. He writes, it is no accident that cotton manufactur-
ers, when looking for skilled craftsmen to build and maintain machines, advertised for
clockmakers; or that the wheel trains of these machines were known as clockwork.
The repetitious work of these machines suggested in turn the rst experiments in
mass production based on interchangeable parts (clocks, guns, gun carriages, pulley
blocks, locks, hardware, and furniture). The transfers of new technology always
involved some movement of those artisans embedded with the necessary technical
skills. Despite legal prohibitions banning the emigration of such people and the
export of machinery from Britain it proved ineffective. These laws were eventually
repealed in 1824 and 184143.71
Ecological factors and desperation, rather than a unique rational culture, clearly
drove the early development of the steam engine by Newcomen, who had no connec-
tions as Desaguliers was quick to remind his readers with the leading savants
of his day. Likewise Watts work depended far more upon the skills of the artisan
working the metal or tting a piston than any formal knowledge. As Peter Mathias
concluded several decades ago, most of the pioneering of high pressure steam, the
adaptation of steam to traction, to small bench engines, to ships and the continuum of
improvement to Watt-style engine itself, belonged, for the most part, to the empirical
world of the obscure colliery engineers, the captains of Cornish mines, the brilliant
mechanics such as [William] Murdoch. Some of them were trained in the best preci-
sion workshops of the country such as Maudsleys, but remained nevertheless innocent
of scientic fundamentals and were not seeking to create their improvement in the
light of awareness of such fundamentals.72
CONCLUSION
So what can we conclude about innovation and British industrialization? Cotton,

coal and iron are the three industries that dene this historical process, and all were
characterized by key technological developments. However, as we have seen, this
was signicantly the result of a number of state, ecological, institutional, and shop
oor factors. In addition, as the recent work of Leonard N. Rosenband has shown,
another vital factor was simply sheer desperation born of war and enormous scal
pressure.73
Firstly, state protectionist policies had an extremely important impact upon the
development of British industry such as linen, cotton, iron, potteries, beer, spirits,
soap, candles, paper and glass. Secondly, a timber shortage together with unparal-
leled accessibility to the right sort of coal encouraged its use as an alternative energy
which, in turn, helped the development of steam engines due to the urgent need to
pump water out of coal mines. This was innovation driven by desperation and eco-
logical imperative, since they could not adopt the timber-based technology pioneered
by German engineers in hard-rock mines. This, then, created a large pool of skilled
tool and machine makers that would become crucial in other areas such as metals
and textile technology.
Lastly, the nature of cotton bre and the sheer size of the British cotton industry
the latter being an indirect product of state protectionist policies in comparison
to Europe, made it the most likely to make technological changes. These factors, then,
were not simply the result of a unique, inquisitive, imaginative, inventive scientic
or rational culture.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am extremely grateful to Rob Iliffe, Leonard N. Rosenband, Andre Wakeeld and

two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.
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3. Ha-Joon Chang, Bad Samaritans: Rich nations, poor policies, and the threat to the developing world
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4. John Cassidy, The price prophet, New Yorker, 7 February 2000. For Britain as the rst knowledge
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10. Ibid., 12; Walt W. Rostow, The stages of economic growth: A non-communist manifesto, 2nd edn
(Cambridge, 1971; 1st publ. 1960), 222.
11. Rostow, Stages of economic growth (ref. 10), 106.
12. The eruption of studies on the science, technology and industry trinity from trade cycles to the
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in the eighteenth century (London, 1972), 168, pp. 914. Kuznets worked for a long time
at the National Bureau of Economic Research and for numerous other U.S. economic and
planning Boards. He ended up succeeding Abbot Usher as Professor of Economic History at
Harvard University (196071). In contrast to Rostow and Kuznets, their contemporary, Albert
O. Hirschman, forcefully argued that making the slack in third world economies productive
could work as a stimulus to economic growth as much as technological innovation. He attacked
standardized all-tting recipes, such as Rostows, to development and underlined the need to look
specically at each countrys resources, weaknesses and strengths. See his Strategy of economic
development (New Haven, 1958).
14. Kuznets is quoted in Musson, Introduction (ref. 13), 14.
15. Ibid., 1621.
16. Ibid., 5761, and A. E. Musson and Eric Robinson, Science and industry in the late eighteenth century,
Economic history review, 2nd ser., xiii (1960), 22244, p. 244; A. Rupert Hall, Engineering and
the scientic revolution, Technology and culture, iv (1961), 33341, p. 338; S. R. Epstein, Craft
guilds, apprenticeship, and technological change in pre-modern Europe, Journal of economic
history, lviii (1998), 684713, p. 699.
17. A. E. Musson and Eric Robinson, Science and technology in the industrial revolution (Manchester,
1969), 78, and Musson and Robinson, Science and industry (ref. 16), 244.
18. C. C. Gillispie, The natural history of industry, in Musson (ed.), Science, technology and economic
growth (ref. 13), 12135, p. 125.
19. David Landes, The wealth and poverty of nations: Why some are rich and some so poor (London,
1999), p. xxi; R. B. Wong, China transformed: Historical change and the limits of European
experience (Ithaca, 1997); A. G. Frank, ReOrient: Global economy in the Asian age (California,
1998); Kenneth Pomeranz, The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern
world economy (Princeton, 2000); and Prasannan Parthasarathi, The transition to a colonial
economy: Weavers, merchants and kings in south India 17201800 (Cambridge, 2001).
20. Landes, Wealth and poverty (ref. 19), 168, 177 and 179. For a balanced and informed overview of
Landess work see Leonard N. Rosenband, Never just business: David Landes, The Unbound
Prometheus, Technology and culture, xlvi (2005), 16876.
21. Landes, Wealth and poverty (ref. 19), 136, 179 and 181. For an interesting examination of the dilemma
or trap historians of Africa face in trying to understand the history of this vast continent by
such Western-centric comments, see F. Fuglestad, The Trevor-Roper trap or the imperialism of
history: An essay, History in Africa, xix (1992), 30926, and more generally Jack Goody, The
theft of history (Cambridge, 2006).
22. Landes, Wealth and poverty (ref. 19), 78, 96, 108 and 112. For a powerful and critical alternative to
Landess Eurocentrism see Francesca Bray, Technology and society in Ming China (13681644)
(Washington, DC, 1999).
23. Liah Greeneld, The spirit of capitalism: Nationalism and economic growth (Cambridge, MA, 2001).
Margaret Jacob also puts the emphasis upon Weber but feels he should have emphasized science
and Unitarianism much more. See her Commerce, industry, and the laws of Newtonian science:
Weber Revisited and Revised, Canadian journal of history, xxxv (2000), 27592. For the crucial
role of protectionism to British industrialization see Ashworth, Customs and excise (ref. 7). On
desperate industrial catch-up see Leonard N. Rosenband, Becoming competitive: Englands
papermaking apprenticeship, 17001800, in Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer and Peter Dear (eds),
The mindful hand: Inquiry and invention from the late Renaissance to early industrialisation
(Amsterdam, 2007), 379401.
24. Landes, Wealth and poverty (ref. 19), 513 and 523. Not all twentieth-century economic historians
have interpreted the past thousand years in this way. For alternative readings, particularly those
concerned with the impact of the British Industrial Revolution, see Cannadine, The present
and the past in the English industrial revolution (ref. 7); Pat Hudson, The industrial revolution
(London, 1992), 936; Patrick K. OBrien, Introduction: Modern conceptions of the industrial
revolution, in OBrien and Roland Quinault (eds), The industrial revolution and British society
(Cambridge, 1993), 130; Joseph E. Inikori, Africans and the industrial revolution in England
(Cambridge, 2002), 89155.
25. Goody, Theft of history (ref. 21), 6. For a powerful critique of the cultural thesis see Chang, Bad
Samaritans (ref. 3), chap. 9.
26. For Francis Bacon see, for example, Roy Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the creation of the
modern world (London, 2000), 14, 5657 and 1312; Eric Ash, Power, knowledge and expertise
in Elizabethan England (Baltimore, 2004); Mokyr, The gifts of Athena (ref. 4) and Intellectual
origins (ref. 5). For the diffusion of Newtonian experimental natural philosophy through the
market-place see Larry Stewart, The rise of public science: Rhetoric, technology, and natural
philosophy in Newtonian Britain, 16601750 (Cambridge, 1992); Margaret C. Jacob, Scientic
culture and the making of the industrial West (Oxford, 1997); and Margaret C. Jacob and Larry
Stewart, Practical matter: Newtons science in the service of industry and empire, 16871851
(Cambridge, MA, 2006).
27. Jacob, Scientic culture (ref. 26), 47; David Landes, The unbound Prometheus: Technological
change and industrial development in Western Europe from 1750 to the present (Cambridge,
1969, 1987), 21 and 546; Mokyr, Intellectual origins (ref. 5). Where this leaves Continental
manufacturers, such as Etienne Montgoler, is deeply problematic. The French printer from
Aix-en-Provence, Emeric David, described Montgoler as an affected man who conducted his
business by the rules of mathematics, and certainly saw himself at the vanguard of both the latest
knowledge and technology involved in papermaking. In addition, he conducted research with
Nicolas Desmarest, who was both a leading man of science and a state ofcial. For Montgoler
see Leonard N. Rosenband, Papermaking in eighteenth-century France: Management, labor,
and revolution at the Montgolfer mill (Baltimore, 2000), 2526 and 4344.
28. Jacob and Stewart, Practical matter (ref. 26), 94111. It is strange how Mokyr cites Jacob and Larry
Stewart to support his argument, while the former also cite Mokyr as authority for their case.
29. Landes, Wealth and poverty of nations (ref. 19), 516; Gregory Clark, A farewell to alms: A brief
economic history of the world (Princeton, 2007).
30. Although see Kristine Bruland, Technology selection and useful knowledge: A comment, History
of science, xlv (2007), 17983, p. 180.
31. Mokyr, Gifts of Athena (ref. 4), 26, 10 and 16, and his The knowledge economy: Theoretical
and historical underpinnings, Ad Hoc Expert Group on Knowledge Systems, United Nations,
45 September 2003, html://www.faculty.econ.northwestern.edu/faculty/Mokyr/papers; Landes,
Unbound Prometheus (ref. 27),104.
32. Mokyr, Gifts of Athena (ref. 4), 34 and 81; Joel Mokyr, Editors Introduction, in Mokyr (ed.), The
British Industrial Revolution: An economic perspective, 2nd edn (Boulder, 1999), 184, pp.
5152. For an alternative slant on France see Rosenband, Papermaking in eighteenth-century
France (ref. 27).
33. Mokyr, Gifts of Athena (ref. 4), 3639, and Mokyr, Editors Introduction (ref. 32), 51.
34. Janis Langins, Conserving the enlightenment: French military engineering from Vauban to the
revolution (Cambridge, 1992); Antoine Picon, French architects and engineers in the Age of
Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1992); Mokyr, Gifts of Athena (ref. 4), 74.
35. Mokyr, Gifts of Athena (ref. 4), 1, 24, 3537 and 54. For Karl Popper see his The open society and its
enemies (London, 1945, 2002) and for Friedrich Hayek see his The road to serfdom (Chicago,
1944, 1994). Both academics were born in Vienna, 1902 and 1899 respectively, and came
to England, ending up for a time at the London School of Economics. The output of social
constructivists in the history of science is huge but for a good overview see Jan Golinski, Making
natural knowledge: Constructivism and the history of science (Cambridge, 1998).
36. Joel Mokyr, Mercantilism, the enlightenment, and the industrial revolution, Conference in Honor
of Eli F. Heckscher, Stockholm, May 2003, revised October 2003, http://www.faculty.econ.
northwestern.edu/faculty/Mokyr/papers.html.
37. Rosalind Williams, Does progress have a future?, Technology and culture, xliv (2003), 3715, pp.
3734; Joel Mokyr, Creative forces, Reasononline: Free minds and free Markets, May 1993,
http://www.reason.com/news/show/29366.html, and Mercantilism (ref. 36). For an alternative
to Mokyrs notion of a Western knowledge/technological monopoly see, for example, Bray,
Technology and society (ref. 22).
38. Walt W. Rostow, The beginnings of modern growth in Europe: An essay in synthesis, Journal of
economic history, xxxi (1971), 54780, pp. 553 and 579. Gerschenkron was born in 1904 and
ed the Bolshevik Revolution in 1920, ending up in Austria. He then went to the United States,
via England, to take positions at the University of Berkeley and the Federal Reserve Board, and
nally he became Professor of Economic History at Harvard University.
39. Mokyr, Editors Introduction (ref. 32), 33.
40. On this last point I have benefited greatly from conversations with Professor Leonard N.
Rosenband.
41. This, of course, is wrong. For example, most of the scientic and economic societies in eighteenth-
century Germany were the so-called patriotic societies, i.e. non-state-run, see Henry E. Lowood,
Patriotism, prot, and the promotion of science in the German enlightenment: The economic and
scientic societies, 17601815 (New York, 1991). I am grateful to Professor Andre Wakeeld
for pointing this reference out to me.
42. Rostow, Beginnings of modern growth (ref. 1), 561; Mokyr, Gifts of Athena (ref. 4), 5253,
Intellectual origins (ref. 5), and Editors Introduction (ref. 32), 39. It is also worth noting that
Frederick the Great had an extremely aggressive policy for attracting and settling colonists and
foreigners in his eastern lands. For a broader argument emphasizing biological selectionism as
a way of interpreting Britains Industrial revolution see Clark, Farewell to alms (ref. 29).
43. Rostow, Beginnings of modern growth (ref. 1), 572; Jacob and Stewart, Practical matter (ref. 26),
87; Mokyr, Mercantilism (ref. 36). For related claims see Greeneld, Spirit of capitalism (ref.
23), 24, and Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain made the modern world (Harmondsworth,
2004), pp. xxvii and 367.
44. Landes, Unbound Prometheus (ref. 27), 25 and 33; Mokyr, Intellectual origins (ref. 5), 291; Walt
W. Rostow, No random walk: A comment on Why was England rst, Economic history
review, 2nd ser., xxxi (1978), 61012.
45. Christine Macleod, The European origins of British technological predominance, in L. P. de la
Escosura (ed.), Exceptionalism and industrialisation: Britain and its European rivals, 16881815
(Cambridge, 2004), 11126, p. 111. Related sentiments are found in Colin Kidd, Hybridity,
London review of books, xxvi (2004), 1415.
46. Peter Mathias, The transformation of England: Essays in the economic and social history of England
in the eighteenth century (London, 1979), 1516 and 55; Macleod, European origins (ref.
45), 122. For an alternative to what follows see Mokyrs extensive Editors Introduction to The
British Industrial Revolution (ref. 32).
47. A. Howe, Restoring free trade, 17761873, in D. Winch and P. K. OBrien (eds), The political
economy of British historical experience (Oxford, 2003), 193213, p. 209.
48. Ashworth, Customs and excise (ref. 7); Maxine Berg, Luxury and pleasure in eighteenth-century Britain
(Oxford, 2005); A. E. Wrigley, Continuity, chance and change: The character of the industrial
revolution in England (Cambridge, 1988, 1990). The role of slavery and the domestic use of
cheap female and child labour to Britains industrialization are crucial and a notable absence in
this paper. By far the best and most recent compelling work on the former is Inikori, Africans and
the industrial revolution (ref. 24). For the latter, see for example, Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson,
Rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution, Economic history review, xlv (1992), 2450.
49. P. K. OBrien, The political economy of British taxation, 16601815, Economic history review, xli
(1988), 132; John Brewer, The sinews of power: War, money and the English state, 16881783
(London, 1989); Ashworth, Customs and excise (ref. 7). Davenant is quoted in C. D. Chandaman,
The English public revenue 16001688 (Oxford, 1975), 74. An excise, strictly speaking, is a
tax on goods manufactured or grown domestically. It is meant to be a duty on inland goods as
distinct from customs levied on imported commodities. However, this denition does not clearly
hold for the period surveyed here, in particular, certain imports came under the management
of the excise, a situation lasting from 1643 to 1825 when most of the excised imports were
transferred to the customs. To add to this confusion some exports during the English Civil War
and Interregnum also paid an excise.
50. Ashworth, Customs and excise (ref. 7), 26179.
51. William J. Ashworth Between the trader and the public: British alcohol standards and the proof
of good governance, Technology and culture, xlii (2001), 2750; Metrology and the state:
Science, revenue, and commerce, Science, ccvi, issue of 19 November 2004, 131417; Practical
objectivity: The excise, state, and production in eighteenth century England, Journal of social
epistemology, xviii (2004), 18197.
52. Landes, Unbound Prometheus (ref. 27), 32.
53. Ashworth, Between the trader and the public (ref. 51); idem, Metrology and the state (ref.
51); idem, Practical objectivity (ref. 51); James Sumner, The metric tun: Standardisation,
quantication and industrialisation in the British brewing industry, 17601830, Ph.D. dissertaion,
University of Leeds, 2004; idem, John Richardson, saccharometry and the pounds-per-barrel
extract: The construction of a quantity, The British journal of the history of science, xxxiv
(2001), 25573.
55. Peter Mathias, Who unbound Prometheus? Science and technical change, 16001800, in Musson
(ed.), Science, technology and economic growth (ref. 13), 6996, p. 95, and Transformation
(ref. 46), 8586; Ashworth, Customs and excise (ref. 7), chaps. 1213; Michael Braddick, State
formation in early modern England c. 15501700 (Cambridge, 2000); John Brewer, The sinews
of power: War, money and the English state, 16881783 (London, 1989).
56. Gillispie, Natural history (ref. 18); Ursula Klein, Experiments at the intersection of experimental
history: Technological inquiry, and conceptually driven analysis. A case study from early
nineteenth-century France, Perspectives on science, xiii (2005), 148.
57. P. K. OBrien, T. Grifths and D. Hunt, Political components of the industrial revolution: Parliament
and the English cotton industry, 16601774, Economic history review, 2nd ser., xliv (1991),
394423; H. J. Daunton, Progress and poverty: An economic and social history of Britain
17001850 (Oxford, 1995), 543.
58. Macleod, The European origins (ref. 45), 115. For the importance of competition in Africa and
colonial demand to British technological developments in cotton see Inikori, Africans and the
industrial revolution in England (ref. 24), 143. For the role of cotton bre in mechanization,
see Landes, Unbound Prometheus (ref. 27), 83, and Nathan Rosenberg, Science, invention and
economic growth, Journal of economic history, lxxxiv (1974), 90108, p. 103.
59. Joel Mokyr, Secrets of success, Reasononline: Free minds and free markets, December 1998, http://
www.reason.com/news/show/30804.html; Wrigley, Continuity, chance and change (ref. 48); R.
P. Sieferle, The subterranean forest: Energy systems and the industrial revolution (Cambridge,
2001; rst publ. in German in 1982); Thomas Brinkley, Escaping from constraints: The industrial
revolution in a Malthusian context, Journal of interdisciplinary history, xv (1985), 72953.
Pomeranz believes that British access and use of coal was the primary spur to its economic
divergence with China, see his The great divergence (ref. 19).
60. Macleod, The European origins (ref. 45), 11217; Chris Evans and Goran Ryden, Baltic iron in
the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century (Leiden, 2007).
61. Mokyr, Editors Introduction (ref. 32), 22; Jack A. Goldstone, Eforescences and economic growth
in world history: Rethinking the Rise of the West and the industrial revolution, Journal of
world history, xiii (2002), 32389, pp. 360 and 379; J. R. Harris, Reviewed Work: The British
Industrial Revolution: An economic perspective ed. Joel Mokyr, Technology and culture, xxxvii
(1996), 1801, p. 180. The issue of coal deposits in China and Belgium is dealt with by Pomeranz
in the case of the former and Landes in the case of the latter, see Pomeranz, The great divergence
(ref. 19), 65, and Landes, Unbound Prometheus (ref. 27), 139.
63. Thomas, Escaping (ref. 59), 7379.
64. Charles K. Hyde, Technological change in the British iron industry, 17501815: A reinterpretation,
Economic history review, 2nd ser., xxvii (1974), 190206, pp. 2005; Evans and Ryden, Baltic
iron (ref. 60), chap. 4.
65. Macleod, European origins (ref. 45), 11718. Desaguliers is quoted in John S. Allen, Newcomen,
Thomas (bap. 1664, d. 1729), Dictionary of national biography, 2004.
66. Andre Wakeeld, Police chemistry, Science in context, xiii (2000), 23157, and The disordered
police state (Chicago, forthcoming).
67. Svante Lindquist, Technology on trial: The introduction of steam power technology into Sweden,
17151736 (Uppsala, 1984), 3436 and 296.
68. John Harris, Essays in industry and technology in the eighteenth century: England and France
(Aldershot, 1992); Macleod, European origins (ref. 45), 119. This neglect of artisanal knowledge
in Mokyrs account has recently been emphasized by Maxine Berg in her essay The genesis
of useful knowledge, History of science, xlv (2007), 12333, and Liliane Hilaire-Perez in
Technology as a public culture in the eighteenth century: The artisans legacy, History of
science, xlv (2007), 13553.
69. Mathias, Transformation (ref. 46), 3335; Evans and Ryden, Baltic iron (ref. 60); Simon Schaffer,
The chartered Thames: Naval architecture and experimental spaces in Georgian Britain, in
Roberts, Schaffer and Dear (eds), The mindful hand (ref. 23), 279305; William J. Ashworth,
System of terror: Samuel Bentham, accountability and dockyard reform during the Napoleonic
wars, Social history, xxiii (1998), 6379.
70. Berg, Luxury and pleasure (ref. 48), 59 and 170.
71. Landes, Wealth and poverty (ref. 19), 191; Musson and Robinson, Science (ref. 13), 477; Mathias,
Transformation (ref. 46), 57.
72. Ibid., 5760. Simon Kuznets also underlined the importance of subsidiary inventions needed to
make something like Watts stationary steam engine, see his Innovations and adjustment in
economic growth, Swedish journal of economics, lxxiv (1972), 43151, p. 437.
73. Rosenband, Becoming competitive (ref. 23).

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Hist. Sci.

THE GHOST OF ROSTOW: SCIENCE, CULTURE AND THE

The intellectual case for protectionism is about as alive as a doornail.

0073-2753/08/4603-0249/$10.00 2008 Science History Publications Ltd

lawyers, and feather-bedding unionists are contributing to the problem of hostility to

REGULATION, SKILLS, COAL AND BRITISH INDUSTRIALIZATION

of technological creativity and economic development are rife with nationalistic

not be written but only carried in the movement of workers.68

So what can we conclude about innovation and British industrialization? Cotton,

I am extremely grateful to Rob Iliffe, Leonard N. Rosenband, Andre Wakeeld and

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