Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Was British industrialisation exceptional?
- Part I The origins of British primacy
- Part II Agriculture and industrialisation
- Part III Technological change
- 5 The European origins of British technological predominance
- 6 Invention in the Industrial Revolution: the case of cotton
- 7 Continental responses to British innovations in the iron industry during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
- Part IV Institutions and growth
- Part V War and Hegemony
- Conclusions
- References
- Index
5 - The European origins of British technological predominance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables and figures
- List of contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Was British industrialisation exceptional?
- Part I The origins of British primacy
- Part II Agriculture and industrialisation
- Part III Technological change
- 5 The European origins of British technological predominance
- 6 Invention in the Industrial Revolution: the case of cotton
- 7 Continental responses to British innovations in the iron industry during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
- Part IV Institutions and growth
- Part V War and Hegemony
- Conclusions
- References
- Index
Summary
While western Europe as a whole had enjoyed an upsurge in inventive activity since the Middle Ages (Mokyr, 1990: 31–56), Britain assumed the technological leadership during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in specific, but economically important, industries and processes – primarily cotton textiles and the heavy industry network of coal, iron, and steam power. Why was it in Britain, a country previously on the periphery of European technical progress, that the technological changes characteristic of the Industrial Revolution were made? 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 inventive society, this paradox cannot be resolved. For a more critical perspective on British exceptionalism this chapter approaches the debate through a recognition of the specificities of the sites of technological change during European and American industrialisation (Inkster, 1996: 41–9).
The flowering of technological change in the Industrial Revolution had deep roots which led back, through several centuries, to medieval sources that were only partly British. Indeed, two separate streams of technological progress were converging. One was a pan-European stream, of which different parts of Europe assumed the leadership at different times and in different industries. The other, based on the technologies of coal extraction and use, was more distinctly British – until, in the mid-nineteenth century, it was diverted to encompass continental Europe and North America.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Exceptionalism and IndustrialisationBritain and its European Rivals, 1688–1815, pp. 111 - 126Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
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