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Technical Education and Economic Performance: Britain, 1850–1914*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Roderick Floud
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Extract

Since the time of the British “Great Depression,” and with increasing urgency as the relative decline of the British economy has gathered pace in the twentieth century, economists and economic historians have sought to explain both depression and decline and to suggest remedies. Until recently, it has been fashionable to ascribe the decline to the failings of British management, often working in conjunction with workers and trade unions, and to focus attention particularly on the failure to innovate, to adopt inventions which would have significantly lowered British production costs and improved international competitiveness in the manufacturing industries which were the basis of British prosperity. In the last fifteen years, however, studies of specific industries and investment decisions have made this global explanation for British decline less attractive, so much so that a recent summary of these studies can conclude that:

While some examples of “technological backwardness” and other types of failure have been found, and more undoubtedly remain to be found, it is not established that the failure rate was any higher than in other countries, including the United States and Germany, during the same period or than in Britain during earlier periods. Much less has it been shown that the British “entrepreneurial failures” in this period exceeded those in Germany and America by so much that they can materially have contributed to Britain's relative economic decline.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 14 , Issue 2 , Summer 1982 , pp. 153 - 171
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1982

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Footnotes

*

This paper was originally prepared for the Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, March 1981. The author is grateful to Professor Sheldon Rothblatt and others who were present for their comments.

References

1 Sandberg, L.G., “The Entrepreneur and Technological Change,” in Floud, Roderick and McCloskey, D., eds., The Economic History of Britain Since 1700, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1981), 2:19.Google Scholar

2 See, for example, Kennedy, W.P., “Foreign Investment, Trade and Growth in the United Kingdom, 1870-1913,” Explorations in Economic History 11, 4 (1974): 415–444.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Wiener, Martin J., English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (Cambridge, 1981)Google Scholar. I disagree profoundly with Wiener's analysis, for reasons which are set out in my review of his book, forthcoming in 1982 in Journal of Economic Literature: there is no space to expand on them here.

4 Landes, David S., The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, 1969), p. 344.Google Scholar

5 Sanderson, Michael, The Universities and British Industry, 1850-1970 (London, 1972).Google Scholar

6 More, Charles, Skill and the English Working Class, 1870-1914 (London, 1980)Google Scholar; Roderick, Gordon and Stephens, Michael, eds., Where Did We Go Wrong? (Lewes, 1981).Google Scholar

7 Landes, Unbound Prometheus.

8 Ibid.

9 Parliamentary Papers (PP), vol. 26 (1867)Google Scholar, “Report of the Schools Enquiry Commissioners on Technical Education”; PP, vol. 15 (1867-68), “Report of the Select Committee on Scientific Instruction to the Industrial Classes”; PP, vol. 27 (1882), vols. 29-31 (1884), C. 3981, “Report of the Royal Commission on Technical Instruction”; and the reports by British Consuls in “Diplomatic and Consular Reports,” Misc. Series 600, 601, 603 (in PP, vol. 96[1904]). Examples of similar inquiries in the United States are the Eighth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor on Industrial Education (1892, Senate Ex. Docs., 65, 52 Congress, 2nd Session), the Seventeenth Annual Report of the Commissioner of Labor on Trade and Technical Education (1902), and the Report of the Commission on Industrial Education of the Legislature of Pennsylvania (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, 1889).Google Scholar

10 This description draws on the official inquiries mentioned in Note 9, on the Annual Reports of the Department of Science and Arts, and on, inter alia, Cotgrove, Stephen F., Technical Education and Social Change (London, 1958)Google Scholar; Abbott, Albert, Education for Industry and Commerce in England (Oxford, 1933)Google Scholar; Thomas, D.H., “The Development of Technical Education in England, 1851-1889, with Special Reference to Economic Factors” (Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1940)Google Scholar; Musgrave, Peter W., ed., Sociology, History and Education: A Reader (London, 1970)Google Scholar; Foden, F.E., “A History of Technical Examinations in England to 1918, with Special Reference to the Examination Work of the City and Guilds of London Institute” (Ph.D. diss., University of Reading, 1961)Google Scholar; Argles, Michael, South Kensington to Robbins, An Account of English Technical Education Since 1851 (London, 1964)Google Scholar; Musgrave, Peter W., Technical Change, the Labor Force and Education (London, 1967)Google Scholar; Roderick, Gordon W. and Stephen, M.D., Education and Industry in the Nineteenth Century: the English Disease? (London, 1978).Google Scholar

11 Argles, , South Kensington to Robbins, P. 35.Google Scholar

12 Eighth Annual Report of the U.S. Commissioner of Labor on Industrial Education (Washington, D.C., 1892).Google Scholar

13 Other measures of the impact of technical education may be found in More, Skill and the English Working Class, ch. 10. While More and I follow similar lines in our calculations, he gives less weight to the value of part-time education and does not undertake international comparisons; it is, however, comforting that our conclusions as to the development of technical education, although arrived at independently, are in general accord.

14 Regulations for Science and Art Examinations, 1859, quoted in Abbott, , Education for Industry and Commerce, p. 27.Google Scholar

15 For descriptions of technical education in the United States, see Note 10 above. Technical education in continental Europe is described in many of those reports and discussed in Landes, Unbound Prometheus, in Ahlstrom, G., “Higher Technical Education and the Engineering Profession in France and Germany during the Nineteenth Century,” Economy and History 21, 2 (1978)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and in Day, C.R., “The Development of Higher Primary and Intermediate Technical Education in France, 1800 to 1870,” Historical Reflections 3 (1976).Google Scholar

16 PP, vol. 29 (1898), “Forty-fifth Annual Report of the Department of Science and Art,” Appendix B, p. 130.

17 PP, vol. 29 (1884), “Report of the Royal Commission on Technical Instruction,” vol. 1, p. 48.

18 Wickenden, William E., A Comparative Study of Engineering Education in the United States and Europe (n.p., 1929)Google Scholar, Bulletin #16 of the Investigation of Engineering Education, p. 7.

19 Ibid.

20 Calvert, Monte E., The Mechanical Engineer in America, 1830-1910: Professional Cultures in Conflict (Baltimore, 1967), p. 12.Google Scholar

21 Landes, , Unbound Prometheus, pp. 345–6.Google Scholar

22 Cotgrove, , Technical Education and Social Change, p. 23.Google Scholar

23 Ibid., p. 16.

24 Abbott, , Education for Industry and Commerce, p. 41.Google Scholar

25 Cotgrove, , Technical Education and Social Change, p. 15.Google Scholar

26 Becker, Gary S., Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education (New York, 1964).Google Scholar

27 Ibid., pp. 13, 18.

28 Fuller, William P., “Education, Training and Productivity: A Study of Skilled Workers in Two Factories in South India,” (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1970).Google Scholar

29 Floud, Roderick C., The British Machine Tool Industry, 1850-1914 (Cambridge, 1967), p. 10.Google Scholar

30 For Germany, see, “Report of the Royal Commission on Technical Instruction,” pp. 193-94; “The number of engineers passing out from the various technical schools far exceeds the present demand for such persons in after-life, one estimate making the number annually training to be 1,000 in excess of the demand.” For the U.S.A., see Calvert, The Mechanical Engineer.

31 “Report of the Royal Commission on Technical Instruction,” p. 454.