Potentially global: 'Useful and reliable knowledge' and material progress in Europe, 1474-1914

International History Review

Volumn 28, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 237-286

  Inkster, Ian ^a  

^a NOTTINGHAM TRENT UNIVERSITY   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60949665319     PISSN: 07075332     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/07075332.2006.9641093     Document Type: Review

References (250)

1. For an example of redundancies and repetitions in the global history debate, see 'Frank-Landes Debate: ReOrient versus The Wealth and Poverty of Nations', Dec. 1998; http://www.whc.neu.edu
2. See, e.g., S. Pollard, Marginal Europe: The Contribution of Marginal Lands since the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1997)
3. See A. Toynbee, A Study of History (Oxford, 1960)
4. For more precise, if modest, comparisons, see A. Macfarlane, The Savage Wars of Peace: England, Japan, and the Malthusian Trap (Basingstoke, 2003)
5. I. Inkster, The Japanese Economy: Late Development and Cultural Causation (London, 2001)
6. For the newer, broad-brush, approaches, see J. Goldstone, 'Cultural Orthodoxy, Risk, and Innovation: The Divergence of East and West in the Early Modern World', Sociological Theory, v (1987), 119-35
7. S. A. M. Adshead, Material Culture in Europe and China, 1400-1800: The Rise of Consumerism (Basingstoke, 1997)
8. W. P. Alford, To Steal a Book Is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Properly Law in Chinese Civilization (Stanford, 1995), who shows the lack of functional equivalence between the early Chinese system and that developing in Europe, tends to compare historical China with all-but-contemporary Europe or North America, and takes insufficient account of the reward and honour elements in European patenting prior to the 1830s, as well as the inefficiencies, corruptions, and monopolies that clouded their functions as intellectual property systems (see W. H. Price, The English Patents of Monopoly [Boston, 1906])
9. Alford ignores the work of C. MacLeod, Inventing the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1988)
10. and L. Hilaire-Perez, L'invention technique au siècle des Lumières (Paris, 2000)
11. For the ineffectual character of early legislation in a country seen as exemplary, see E. W. Hulme, 'Privy Council Law and Practice of Letters Patent for Invention from the Restoration to 1794', Hayuard's Patent Cases, 1600-1883 (Abingdon, 1988), ii. 607-29
12. But not quite, as S. Naquin and E. S. Rawski, Chinese Society in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1986)
13. and K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (Princeton, 2000) illustrate. Pomeranz's argument centres on the windfall of cheap energy from coal combined with American resources, which, in fact, did not combine in higher British growth until machinofacture in the 1820s. His approach to exogenous causation ignores the transitions of the eighteenth century
14. M. C.Jacob and L. Stewart, Practical Matter: Newton's Science in the Service of Industry and Empire, 1687-1851 (Cambridge, MA, 2004)
15. and J. Mokyr, The Lever of Riches (New York, 1990)
16. For warnings about implied contrasts and about the breadth of our ideas of useful knowledge, see A. W. Crosby, The Measure of Reality (Cambridge, 1998)
17. D. S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Kations (London, 1998), pp. 35,336-42
18. See also, E. Balazs, La Bureaucratie céleste: recherches sur l'économie et al société de la Chine traditionelle (Paris, 1968)
19. N. F. R. Crafts, 'The First Industrial Revolution: A Guided Tour for Growth Economists', American Economic Review, lxxxvi (1996), 199
20. For an approach to Japanese industrialization that links government expenditure on human capital formation to technology transfer and absorption, see I. Inkster, 'Capitale umano e trasferimento di tecnologia. Il caso giapponese in una prospettiva di lugo periodo', Annali di Storia dell'impresa, xi (2000), 379-400
21. D. Hume, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, London 1741-2, Works of David Hume: XXXIII (London, 1903)
22. T. S. Ashton, The Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850 (London, 1948), p. 16
23. Notable for building of two watermills at Zurich in 1824, for working as an engineer for the Ottoman government, and superintending, in conjunction with Robert Stephenson, the construction of the tubular bridge across the Menai Straits in 1848
24. W. Fairbairn, The Rise and Progress of Manufactures and Commerce in Lancashire and Cheshire (Manchester, 1869), pp. iii-vii
25. The volume also composed vol. II of J. Baines, Lancashire and Cheshire, Past and Present
26. He did note (pp. xvii-xxviii) the scientific-technical links in the work of the society's members such as John Dalton, William Henry, Eaton Hodgkinson, and Joule. And he emphasized the URK character of the society's Memoirs and Transactions from 1781
27. See also, A. Thackray, 'Natural Knowledge in Cultural Context: The Manchester Model', American Historical Review, lxxix (1974), 672-709
28. Fairbairn, Rise and Progress of Manufactures, esp. pp. xxxii-xxxv
29. For technical versions of this approach, see C. Freeman, 'The National System of Innovation in Historical Perspective', Cambridge Journal of Economics, xix (1995), 5-24
30. D. Rooney and T. Mandeville, 'The Knowing Nation: A Framework for Public Policy in a Post-Industrial Knowledge Economy', Prometheus, xvi (1998), 453-67
31. A. Guilder Frank, ReOrient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley, 1998)
32. R. Southey, 'Improvement of the People', Essays Moral and Political (London, 1832), p. 112
33. M.Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (New York, 1997), p. 1
34. For classic studies of the earlier period, see A History of Technology: II: The Mediterranean Civilisations and the Middle Ages, ca. 700 BC to AD 1500, ed. C. Singer et al. (Oxford, 195G)
35. L. White Jr., Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford, 1962)
36. J. Gimpel, The Medieval Machine: The Industrial Revolution of the Middle Ages (New York, 1976)
37. J. Gimpel, The Cathedral Builders (New York, 1961)
38. W. M. Stevens, 'Euclidean Geometry in the Early Middle Ages: A Preliminary Reassessment', in Villard's Legacy: Stuthes in Metheval Technology, Science, and Art in Memory of Jean Gimpel, ed. M.-T. Zenner (London, 2004), pp. 229-63
39. I do not wish to detail here the issue of defining property rights, and thus their possible ancient origins: see G. Aldous et al., Terrell on the Law of Patents (11th éd., London, 1965), p. 6
40. The first known patents as such in Europe were issued by the republics of Venice in 1416 and Florence in 1421: see G. Mandich, 'Venetian Origins of Inventors' Rights', Journal of the Patent Office Society, xlii (1960), 378-82
41. Actually enacted as the Statute of Monopolies, 25 May 1624, 21Ja. C.3. For it and cases under it, including the monopoly awarded to the Elizabethan courtier Edward Darcy, see H. G. Fox, Monopolies and Patents (Toronto, 1947)
42. For a summary of claims that Saxony was ahead of England during the 1400s and 1500s, see H. Pohlmann, 'The Inventor's Right in Early German Law', Journal of the Patent Office Society, xliii (1961), 121-39
43. The Venetians granted some l,Goo such privileges in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries mostly as copyrights, with only a small proportion of recognizable mechanical inventions. See 'History of the Patent Office', Journal of the Patent Office, xviii (1936), 1-17
44. And henceforth increasingly in the vulgate-thus the pacesetting translations of the Bible between 1466 and 1522 and the huge market for abridgements: B. Cottret, Calvin: A Biography (Edinburgh, 2000), pp. 93-4
45. A. Birrell, Seven Lectures on the Law and History of Copyright in Books (London, 1899). The Star Chamber was abolished in 1640, but during 1642-3 the house of commons continued the work of searching for and destroying seditious pamphlets and imprisoned the printers and vendors
46. For evidence for how restrictions could be evaded and the circumstances in which they were not imposed, see D. McKitterick, A History of Cambridge University Press: I: Printing and the Book Trade in Cambridge 1534-1698 (Cambridge, 2003)
47. C. Blagden, The Stationers' Company: A History, 1403-1959 (London, 1960)
48. Records of the Court of the Stationers' Company 1576-1602: Register B, ed. W. W. Gregg and E. Boswell (London, 1930)
49. See Crisis in Europe, 1560-1660, ed. T. Aston (London, 1965)
50. France in Crisis, 1620-75,ed. P. J. Coveney (Totowa, 1977)
51. C. R. Ashbee, A Table cf the Arts and Crafts of the Renaissance (London, 1892)
52. Only rarely may one trace diffusion for usage. For Copernicus's De Revolutionibus of 1543, 601 of an initial print run of around 1,000 copies have survived, with annotations that allow the tracing of usage and influence: see O. Gingerich, The Book Nobody Read (London, 2004)
53. See S. Shapin, The Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1996), ch. 2
54. and A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, 1994). Such assets were not easy to emulate or transfer and have not been uncovered elsewhere
55. T. Hagerstrand, The Propagation of Innovation Waves (Lund, 1952) and 'Quantitative Techniques for Analysis of the Spread of Innovation and Technology', in Education and Economic Development, ed. C. A. Anderson and M. Y. Bowman (Chicago, 1965), pp. 244-80
56. S. R. Epstein, 'Craft Guilds, Apprenticeship, and Technological Change in Preindustrial Europe', Journal of Economic History, lviii (1998), 688
57. Cf., Mokyr, Lever of Riches, esp. chs. 1-2
58. For the analogy of evolution applied to technological innovation, see Technological Innovation as an Evolutionary Process, ed. J. Ziman (Cambridge, 2000)
59. Shapin, Scientific Revolution, p. 134
60. J. Goody, 'Civil Society in an Extra-European Perspective', in Civil Society: History and Possibilities, ed. S. Khilnani and S. Kaviraj (Cambridge, 2002), pp. 155-76
61. For scepticism about non-European civil society, especially in the Islamic world, see E. Gellner, Conditions of Liberty: Civil Society and Its Rivals (London, 1994)
62. For more general theorizing, see J. Cohen and A. Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory (Cambridge, MA, 1992)
63. See, e.g., K. A. Chaudhry, 'The Myths of the Market and the Common History of Late Developers', Politics and Society, xxi (1993), 245-74
64. F. Bacon (1561-1626), Novum Organum (London, 1620)
65. See A. Smith, 'A New Way of Raising Water by Fire: Denis Papin's Treatise of 1707 and Its Reception by Contemporaries', History of Technology, xx (1998), 139-82
66. C. Bartels, 'Georg Winterschmidt's Water Pressure Engines in the Upper Harz Mining District, 1747-63: Plans, Experiments, Problems, Results', ICON, Journal of the International Committee for the History of Technology, iii (1997), 24-43
67. For the long term, see C. Bartels, 'The Development of the Turm-Rosenhof Mine, 1540-1820, Clausthal, Upper Harz', MASCA Research Papers in Science and Archaeology, vi ( 1989), 47-64
68. P. Dear, Discipline and Experience: The Mathematical Way in the Scientific Revolution (Chicago, 1995), pp. 2, 246
69. For the effects of the socio-intellectual divorce of Japanese natural science from mathematics, see J. Bartholomew, 'Why Was There No Scientific Revolution in Tokugawa Japan?', Japanese Stuthes in the History of Science, xv (1976), 111-25
70. See C. Cipolla, Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400-1700 (New York, 1965)
71. M. Adas, Machines as a Measure of Man: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (New York, 1989)
72. Scientific Aspects of European Expansion, ed. W. Storey (Aldershot, 1996)
73. and Technology and European Overseas Enterprise, ed. M. Adas (Alder-shot, 1996)
74. Nature in Its Greatest Extent: Western Science in the Pacific, ed. R. MacLeod and P. Reh-bock (Honolulu, 1988)
75. and I. Inkster, 'Global Ambitions: Science and Technology in International Historical Perspective, 1450-1800', Annals of Science, liv (1997), 611-22
76. See J. E. Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices: IV: 1401-1582 (Oxford, 1881 ), pp. 463-73
77. See I. Inkster, Scientific Culture and Urbanization in Industrializing Britain (London, 1997)
78. M. C.Jacob, Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West (New York, 1997), pp. 62, 129
79. See I. Inkster, 'Technological and Industrial Change: A Comparative Essay', in The Cambridge History of Science: IV, ed. R. Porter (Cambridge, 2003), pp. 845-81
80. S. Schaffer, 'Enlightened Automata', in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. W. Clark, J. Golinski, and S. Schaffer (Chicago, 1999), p. 129
81. J. Mokyr, The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton, 2002), pp. 34-41
82. K.-G. Hildebrand, Swedish Iron in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Oslo, 1992), pp. 53-4
83. Of more interest is the range of machinery that fell under the act, which included such equipment and tools as metal thes, stamps and presses, rollers, lathes, and specimens of metallurgy
84. J. Feather, A History of British Publishing (London, 19SS), pp. 69-74
85. For detailed stuthes of overt and prolonged commercial attempts at technology transfer, which illustrate the importance of the character of institutions of site and agency, see J. Harris, Essays in Industry and Technology in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1992), chs. 3 and 4
86. See also, The French Revolution and British Culture, ed. C. Crossley and I. Small (Oxford, 1989)
87. and International Technology Transfer in Historic Perspective, ed. D.J. Jeremy (London, 1991)
88. F. Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Century. II (London, 1985), p. 570
89. Gross measures of all European literature of the eighteenth century may not be extrapolated from the analysis of printed subscription lists of works of'scientific' URK
90. A. and N. L. Clow, The Chemical Revolution (London, 1952)
91. A. E. Musson and E. Robinson, Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution (Manchester, 1969)
92. W. H. G. Armytage, A Social History of Engineering (London, 1961)
93. S. Pollard, The Genesis cf Modern Management: A Study of the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain (London, 1965)
94. P. Mathias, The Transformation of England (London, 1979)
95. A. R. Hall, 'What Did the Industrial Revolution in England Owe to Science?', in Historical Perspectives: Stuthes in English Thought and Society, ed. N. McKendrick (London, 1974), pp. 37-56
96. see, for a recent overview, The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective, ed. J. Mokyr (Boulder, 1993), chs. 1 and 5
97. As an example of how the notion of 'Science1 is utilized to explain Europe, the Universe, and Everything, here is Kurt Mendelssohn: 'The white man's intellectual departure from the rest of the world had begun four centuries ago when, compelled by an unexplained impulse, he set out to explore the world around him ... The West built better ships and forged more effective arms than the other great civilizations ... Power production, even if they could not have developed it, was of course not beyond their comprehension, but they could never have formulated the concept of energy. It was a creation of Western thought for which the others utterly lacked the basis. Energy, its conservation, and the usefulness of the notion of conservation, were ideas that had grown out of more than two centuries of natural philosophy. And this was a field of development in which none but the white man had participated. He had not withheld his ideas from others; they were just not interested, because the white man's way of thinking was alien and seemed of little meaning to them': Science and Western Domination (London, 1976), pp. 141-2
98. For nuanced wrestling with this sort of Eurocentrism, see History of Technology, xxv (2004), a special issue edited by I. Inkster and P. K. O'Brien
99. It was not uncommon, especially in Britain, for apprenticeship schemes to be formally linked with educational charity foundations, such as that established with the legacy of Humphrey Chetham in 1651. Whether such foundations acted more as suppliers of cheap labour than as systems of useful training is yet to be determined
100. J. Creed and F. Bangs, 'Know-How Licensing and Capital Gains', Patent, Trademark, and Copyright Journal of Research and Education, xciii (1960), 4-17. Optimally for the inventor or owner, before such know-how can be protected by law it must have become in effect a trade secret. There may be a pre-patent phase when the know-how is known by several, all of whom are attempting to protect it from others in the trade or industry
101. For the United States, see E. W. Stevens, The Grammar of the Machine: Technical Literacy and Early Industrial Expansion in the United States (New Haven, 1995)
102. P. K. O'Brien, 'Regimes for the Production and Diffusion of Useful and Reliable Knowledge in Western Europe and the Chinese Empire from the Accession of the Ming Dynasty to the First Opium War', read before the 4th GEHN Conference, Leiden, Sept. 2004
103. N. Rosenberg and L. E. Birdzell, How the West Grew Rick: The Economic Transformation of the Industrial World (London, 1986)
104. For critical analysis of bow global historians have utilized notions of 'science and technology' in their large interpretations, see I. Inkster, 'Pursuing Big Books: Technological Change in Global History', History of Technology, xxi (2000), 233-54
105. See F.Jacob, 'Evolution and Tinkering', Science, cxcvi (1977), 1160-6, who argues for the association of creativity with new combinations, which became a feature of patent legislation from the midnineteenth century
106. For the drag effect of tacit knowledge on decision-making in large Japanese enterprises, see I. Inkster, The Japanese Industrial Economy: Late Development and Cultural Causation (London, 2001), pp. 114-19
107. M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (London, 1958) and The Tacit Dimension (New York, 1966)
108. G. Vickers, The Art of Judgement (London, 1965)
109. D. Landes, 'Technological Change and Industrial Change in Western Europe, 1750-1914', in Cambridge Economic History of Europe: VI, ed. H. J. Habakkuk and M. Postan (Cambridge, 1965), p. 550
110. See Mokyr, Gifts of Athena, pp. 85-104
111. and D. C. Mowery and N. Rosenberg, Technology and the Pursuit of Economic Growth (Cambridge, 1989)
112. See, e.g., G. Thomas, Memoirs and Letters of Gilchrist Thomas (London, 1891). Bessemer earned £50,000 within months of registering his patents of 1856, with five firms paying £10,000 apiece
113. C. F. Carter and B. R. Williams, Investment in Innovation (Oxford, 1958), p. 8
114. S. Taylor,A History of Industrial Chemistry (London, 1957)
115. J. Jewkes, D. Sawers, and R. Stillerman, The Sources of Invention (London, 1958)
116. See A. Thackray, 'Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution', History of Science, ix (1970), 27-63
117. and R. Fox, 'Science, Practice, and Innovation in the Age of Natural Dyes, 1750-1860', in Technological Revolutions in Europe, ed. M. Berg and K. Bruland (Cheltenham, 1998), pp. 86-95
118. Behind many claims of Eurocentrism lies a reasonable suspicion of the very idea of science. See, e.g., B. Barnes, Scientific Knowledge and Sociological Theory (London, 1974), pp. 45-6
119. J. Needham, 'The Pre-Natal History of the Steam Engine', Newcomen Society Transactions, xxxv (1962-3), 23-67
120. Naquin and Rawski, Chinese Society, p. 233
121. Cf., Inkster, 'Technological and Industrial Change', pp. 871-81
122. When Adshead, Material Culture in Europe, differentiates potential information from actual information, he is thinking of the differential historical power of'number and concentration ... a more populous area will contain more potential information than a less populous ... Potential information has a spatial aspect' (p. 174)
123. See also J. Mokyr, 'Knowledge, Technology, and Economic Growth in the Industrial Revolution', in Productivity, Technology, and Economic Growth, ed. B. van Ark, S. K. Kuipers, and G. H. Kuper (Boston, 2000) and 'Evolutionary Phenomena in Technological Change' in Technological Innovation, ed. Ziman, pp. 52-65
124. The first commercial canal was opened in 1761. Between 1790 and 1793, there were 53 canal navigation bills; by 1815, there were 2,600 miles of canal. There was one Enclosure Act in the years 1700-10, 38 between 1740 and 1750, and around 5,000 between 1750 and 1800
125. M. A. Landesmann and U. Pagano, 'Institutions and Economic Change', Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, v (1994), 201
126. See also, P. David, 'Why Are Institutions the "Carriers of History"? Path Dependence and the Evolution of Conventions, Organizations, and Institutions', in ibid., pp. 205-20
127. Cf. D. North, Understanding the Process of Economic Change (Princeton, 2005), pp. 59-66, whose seeming clarity (in which institutions are rules and organizations are the 'players' constrained within them) is gained at the cost of enormous abstraction, where firms and states become both institutions and (mostly) organizations, and where the latter appear to behave according to conventional assumptions about markets and competition
128. O'Brien, 'Regimes for the Production and Diffusion of Useful and Reliable Knowledge', p. 5
129. There was, and is, such a thing as tyranny by benefactors. State income, contracting, and guaranteeing may be large and regular, and that of the 'authence' may be small and tenuous, but the support of the latter is the more likely to forge an expanding URK through challenge, adaptation, and response mechanisms. Hume believed, with many of the early moderns, that the fine arts and philosophy thrived under princes, the sciences and arts under republics. The relationships between patterns of patronage and styles of thinking/ investigation have yet to be determined. For the early modern period, see M. Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier; The Practice of Science in the Culture of Absolutism (Chicago, 1993)
130. W. Hutton, An History of Birmingham to the Year 1780 (Birmingham, 1781), p. 63
131. See I. M. Kirzner, Discovery, Capitalistn, and Distributive Justice (Oxford, 1989), p. ix, 22-33, where discovery is associated with alertness, and developmental problems with the need for sequential logic, something that could be 'turned over, in principle, to a computer for their solution'
132. See J. A. Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development (1934; Oxford, 1969), pp. 74-94
133. The change in US patent law by the act of 1836 brought in novelty requirements. At the urging of George Washington, the first congress had enacted the first US patent act in 1790, modified in 1793. Under it, there was no examination for novelty and some 10,000 patents were issued for terms of fourteen years. In 1837, the US commissioner noted that the low number of patents that year (435) 'is to be attributed chiefly to the operation of the new law, which subjects all applications for patents to a careful examination as to the originality of the invention claimed': Report of the US Commissioner of Patents, 17 January 1838, 25th Congress, Doc. No. 112 House of Representatives (Washington, 1838), quote p. 1
134. The law followed the fire of Dec. 1836 that destroyed models and documents and cleared the system of redundant patents: patentees only re-registered commercially viable inventions. See G. S. Rich, 'The Vague Concept of Invention as Replaced by Sec. 103 of the 1952 Patent Act', Journal of the Patent Office Society, xlvi (Dec. 1964), 855-76. Between 1836 and 1961, three million patents were granted under the act, which was amended in 1861 to fix the period at seventeen years and reduce discrimination against foreigners
135. Manchester Courier,5 and 12May 1847
136. J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere [1962], trans. T. Burger with the assistance of F. Lawrence (Cambridge, 1989)
137. R. Vaughan, The Age of Great Cities (London, 1843), p. 108
138. D. Goodman, 'Public Sphere and Private Life: Towards a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime', History and Theory, xxxi (1992), 1-20
139. B. Cowan, 'The Rise of the Coffee House Reconsidered', Historical Journal, xlvii (2004), 21-46
140. J. Keane, Civil Society: Old Images, New Visions (Stanford, 1998), p. 169
141. see also, M. Edwards, Civil Society (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 54-92
142. T. Everard, Stereometry, Or the Art of Gauging Made Easy by the Help of a Sliding Rule (10th ed., London, 1738). Sliding rules on the basis of Napier's bones were first developed fairly crudely in the 1610S-1620S
143. For good examples of these venues acting as public associations for political and philosophical debate, see The Times 6, 12, 25 March (all p. 1), 3 (p. 1) and 6 April (p. 4), 26 June 1789 (p. 1), 9 July (p. 1), 13 Oct. 1791 (p. 2), 12 Jan. (p. 1), 10 March 1796 (p. 1)
144. Morning Chronicle, 8 (p. 1), 10 (p. 3), 27 Jan. (p. 2) 1780
145. The legislation of the mid-1790s against seditious meetings did move against small groups of tailors, shoemakers, and other working men, who had formed reading groups that culled from sources as varied as Chamber's Dictionary and Thomas Paine'sAge of Reason (an example from Dublin), and who defended their activities, usually ineffectively, as extensions of scientific societies. See The Times, 5 Jan. 1796, p. 4
146. The Times, 18 July, 25 Aug. 1791. The third meeting debated 'Was not the trial of Mr Rose an evident proof of the political duplicity of Mr Pitt and of the absolute necessity of a Parliamentary Reform?'
147. The figures are calculated from N. Hans, New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1951)
148. and R. M. Birse, Engineering at Edinburgh University (Edinburgh, 1983), especially table, p. 16. The Dictionary of National Biography was heavily imbued with the values of the late nineteenth century. It is the more remarkable that so many regarded even then as distinguished creatively should have emerged outside of the Oxford-Cambridge elite nexus
149. D. Hume, 'On the Jealousy of Trade', in Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary (Edinburgh, 1752), p.335
150. Here we might reflect upon the futility of trying to distinguish creativity from copying, or the creativity of the Chinese world versus thal of the Islamic or the Atlantic worlds. Given Hume's position, spotting creative texts or theories, or even applications in varying civilizations at different times, will not reveal much about their material histories
151. See, e.g., B. Willey, The Eighteenth-Century Background (London, 1972)
152. London and the Advancement of Science, ed. O.J. R. Howarth et al. (London, 1931)
153. John Dalton and the Progress of Science, ed. D. S. L. Cardwell (Manchester, 1968)
154. K. D. C. Vernon, 'The Foundation and Early Years of the Royal Institution', Proceedings of the Royal Institution, xxxix (1963), 1-30
155. In the years that followed, the institution offered popular courses for subscribers as advocated by the barrister philanthropist Sir Thomas Bernard (1750-1818) and the barrister politician Sir John Hippisley (1748-1825): see T. Martin, The Royal Institution (London, 1961)
156. For the claim that the Royal Institution was an instrument of social order in the hands of improving landlords, see M. Berman, Social Change and Scientific Organization: The Royal Institution, 1799-1844 (Ithaca, NY, 1978)
157. See, e.g., J. Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge, 1994)
158. The Observer, 1 July, 1804, p. 1, advertisement
159. A. Walker, A System of Familiar Philosophy (London, 1801)
160. The Star, 27 Feb. 1793, p. 1
161. The Observer, 29 March 1801, p. 1
162. The Times, 17Dec. 1795, p. 1,30 Dec. 1799, p. 1
163. Morning Chronicle, 11 Jan. 1780, p. 1
164. The Times, 27 Feb. 1786, p. 1
165. advertisement; Morning Chronicle, 14 July 1785, p. 4
166. The Times, 26 March 1789, p. 1, advertisement
167. The Star, 17 Feb. 1795, p. I, advertisement
168. Nicholson's Journal, xiv (May-Aug. 1806), pp. 268-70
169. C. Pye, Modern Birmingham (Birmingham, 1818), pp. 37-8
170. S[heffield] P[ublic] L[pbrary], SLA 820.6.6, SLPSD 216, Ms Minute Book of the SSPUK, 4 Nov.1804
171. J. Alderson, Address to Members of the Hull Subscription Library on Annual Lectures (Hull, 1805 ), p.15
172. Thus William Higgins in his forty-lecture course at the Elaboratory of the Dublin Society, where he was professor of chemistry and mineralogy: Dublin Evening Post, 16 Jan. 1798, p. 3
173. Thus John Webster during his lecture tour of southern England; Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 11July 1808, p. 6, 15 Nov. 1813, p. 1
174. I. Inkster, 'Finding Artisans: British and International Patterns of Technological Innovation, 1700-1914', Cahiers d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences, III (2004), 69-92
175. In this case, John Sissons in Sheffield in 1841
176. Reports of the Sheffield Mechanics' Institute, viii (1841), p. 4
177. manuscript material relating to Sheffield Mechanics' Institute, SPL, SLA, MD, 19S5C, handbills 1841
178. and S. T. McCoy, French Inventors of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington, 1952). The French instituted a more formal patent system in 1791, parallel to the US system, after a long period of privilege. It limited novelty to France (an imported tool or machine not used in France was counted novel and the importer the inventor), entitlement to fifteen years, and allowed infringements when the patent description was deemed insufficient and voided the patent if the invention was not put to use within two years. Patent systems similar to those of Britain or France were adopted in Prussia in 1815, Belgium in 1817, Austria in 1820, and members of the Zollverein in 1842
179. See the lectures to the Manchester, Leeds, and other institutes given by William Fairbaim from 1852, and published as Useful Information for Engineers Being a Series of Lectures Delivered to the Working Engineers of Yorkshire and Lancashire (London, 1856), pp. 247-376
180. See G. Gooday, 'Lies, Damn Lies, and Declinism', in The Golden Age: Essays in British Social and Economic History, 1850-70, ed. I. Inkster et al. (London, 2000), pp. 105-20
181. The threat was voiced by interested parties long before; e.g., Morgan Cowie, principal of Owen's College, in A Letter to His Grace the Duke of Buccleugh (London, 1847): 'If our country is to maintain itself as the leader of civilisation and the first in the progress of nations, the rising generation must be prepared for a struggle which can only be successful if they have acquired familiarity with the principles of science and their application to the wants and necessities of man.'
182. R. M. MacLeod, 'The Support of Victorian Science: The Endowment of Research Movement in Great Britain, 1868-1900', Minerva, iv (1971), 197-230
183. P. Alter, The Reluctant Patron: Science and the State in Britain, 1850-1920 (Oxford, 1987)
184. For excellent early contemporary statements, see the lectures of George Wilson, professor of technology at Edinburgh, 'The Physical Sciences which form the Basis of Technology', The Technologist (1865), pp. 1-14, 74-89
185. and F. Grace Calvert, FRS, 'Chemistry Applied to the Arts', ibid., pp. 14-25, 97-105, 153-65, 197-209, 276-85, 343-55
186. General Evening Post, 1 July 1758, p. 4
187. W. Emerson, The Principles of Mechanics (2nd ed., London, 1758)
188. London Evening Post, 6 Feb. 1761, p. 2, advertisements
189. M. Combrune, The Theory and Practice of Braving
190. W. Pain, The Builders' Companion
191. T. Johnson, One Hundred and Fifty New Designs: all London, 1762
192. T. Malton, Complete Treatise on Perspective (London, 1785)
193. for the popularity of these lectures, see Morning Chronicle, 3 March, p. 1 and 7 March 1785, p. 4
194. A. Gray, The Experienced Millwright (London, 1804)
195. Published by Charles Say, also as Say's Weekly Journal from 1763 to 1771
196. T. Montefiore, The Traders and Manufacturers Compendium (London, 1804)
197. J. Adams, Elements of Useful Knowledge (3rd ed., London, 1804)
198. C. Hutton, Recreations in Mathematics and Natural Philosophy (London, 1800)
199. T. Cavallo, The Elements of Natural and Experimental Philosophy (London, 1804)
200. J. Parkinson, The Chemical Pocketbook (3rd ed., London, 1803)
201. F. Accum, A System of Theoretical and Practical Chemistry (London, 1804)
202. T. Thompson, A System of Chemistry (2nd ed., London, 1804)
203. For a representative figure who would have heen utterly perplexed by such a distinction, see I. Inkster and M. Bryson, Industrial Man: The Life and Works of Charles Sylvester (Las Vegas, 1999)
204. W. Fairbairn, Treatise on Mills and Millwork (London, 1861-3 and many editions), quote from 4th ed., 1878, p. x
205. A. Nuvolari, 'The Making of Steam Power Technology: A Study of Technical Change during the British Industrial Revolution' (Ph.D. dissertation, Eindhoven University of Technology, 2004), pp. 50-8
206. For the avenues in Liverpool, see the instances given throughout the volumes of the Quarterly Journal of Science, whose editor, James Samuelson, lived in the city
207. The process was inhibited by its ill effects of the health of workmen, and awaited Charles Tennant's invention in 1799 of bleaching powder, which required the addition of slaked lime
208. O. Mayr, Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, 1986), p. 165
209. In Hume's essay 'On the Balance of Trade', self-regulation, liberalism, and property are intimately linked, although 'On the Jealousy of Trade' points
210. Metropolis and Province, ed. I. Inkster and J. Morrell (London, 1983)
211. See, e.g., J. G. Williamson, 'Regional Inequality and National Development', in Regional Policy: Readings in Theory and Application, ed. J. Friedmann and W. Alonso (Cambridge, MA, 1975), pp. 158-200
212. S. Pollard, Peaceful Conquest (Oxford, 1981), with the qualifications in S. Pollard, Marginal Europe: The Contribution of Marginal Lands since the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1997), chs. 1, 3-5
213. Thus the standard British (early starter/lagging institutions) to German (later starter/novelty of modernized institutions) contrast, for modifications to which see S. Pollard, Britain's Prime and Britain's Decline: The British Economy, 1870-1914 (London, 1989), ch. 3
214. P. K. O'Brien, 'Endogenous and Exogenous Technological Progress: Macro Inventors and Macro Inventions in the English Cotton Textile Industry from John Kay to Edmund Cartwright', read before The Penrosian Legacy, INSEAD, 11-12 May 2001
215. Crafts, 'First Industrial Revolution', p. 198
216. and N. F. R. Crafts and C. K. Harley, 'Output Growth and the British Industrial Revolution: A Restatement of the Crafts-Harley View', Economic History Review, 2nd series, xlv (1992), 703-30
217. For the big picture, see A. Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris, 2001)
218. For stuthes of patent systems, see the special issue of Technology and Culture, xxxii, no. 4, Oct. 1991
219. Machinofacture involved new arrangements of tools and machinery, an element of technological change that could not be patented. A good example was the Chorlton Mills factory of the machine-tool maker J. G. Bodmer (1786-1864), who employed the moving crane, endless belt, and travelling grate in an elementary assembly line: H. W. Dickinson, 'Diary of George Bodmer, 1816-17', Transactions of the Newcomen Society, ix-x (1928-30), 105-13
220. J. W. Roe, English and American Toolbuilders (New Haven, 1916). During the 1830s, James Nasmyth (1808-go), who later patented the steam hammer in 1842, when building the Bridgewater Foundry, proposed that the buildings should be 'all in a line ... we will be able to keep in good order'
221. For contemporary emphasis on innovation in machinofacture as organization, see P. Barlow, Manufactures and Machinery in Britain (London, 1836)
222. The earlier types of patenting continued: during the nineteenth century, more than 4,000 patents were issued in the United States and Britain for improved watches and clocks, more than 15,000 for ploughs: W. Doolitde, Inventions in the Century (London, 1903), pp. 21,395
223. W. Pole, The Life of Sir William Fairbairn (London, 1877), pp. 164, 182, 212, 258, 320, 338
224. For the landmark case, Kneass vs. Schuylkill Bank, Oct. 1820, see Public Acts of Congress Relating to Patents, Digest of Decisions under the Same Made in the Courts of the United States, January 1831 (Washington, DC, 1831), p. 30
225. Kirzner, Discovery, Capitalism, and Distributive Justice, p. 28
226. Robert Smith was a skilled machinist who had worked in the area of the 1837 patent for some time (e.g., his patent of 22 June 1836) but, as a former manager of the Manchester works, had acquired enough capital to invest £3,000 in Fairbaim's Millwall works. John Hetherington brought out a series of patents in the years 1844-55 concerning furnaces for stationary steam boilers, textile machinery and parts (reels, combing and doubling equipment, flyers), machine tools and pipe-casting, that together were to provide the foundation for a major nineteenth-century engineering firm
227. A good example of a chain of improvements that allowed lower cost and wider ranging applications was that following the first Cartwright/Jeffray-type weaving machine (1786-92): the protector that allowed direct action of the motive power (Robert Millar patented it in 1796); the improvements on this by the 'Stockport-group' of Radclifie, Ross, Johnson, and Horrocks; and dressing and sizing by power, which together may have been responsible for the time-lagged increase in the number of power looms in operation after 1815. By the l860s, the loom that powered the faster growth of industry incorporated the improvements of John Ramsbottom and Richard Holt (patent 1834), and William Kenworthy and James Bullough (patents in 1841-2, all for the detection and prevention of breakages), John Railton (patent 1842) and John Elce and John Bond
228. See I. Inkster, 'Technology Transfer in the Great Climacteric: Machinofacture and International Patenting in World Development circa 1850-1914', History of Technology, xxi (1999), 87-106
229. See I. Inkster, 'Machinofacture and Technical Change-The Patent Evidence', in Golden Age, ed. Inkster et al., pp. 121-42
230. Prior to the 1850s, engineers were more active in the leading process areas. Thus, of 330 steam-engine patents for 1801-30, almost all were registered by engineers. See appendix to E. Galloway, History and Progress of the Steam Engine, with an Extensive Appendix by Luke Herbert (London, 1831), pp. 849-56
231. Both directly through the work of patent offices and through the production of journals and magazines. Thus, the Practical Mechanic's Journal of the 1840s-published by the agent and consultant engineer William Johnson from his offices in Buchanan Street, Glasgow-contained lists of all British patents and patentees and abstracts of many foreign ones, notes of scientific and technical associations, and essays and printed lectures on the physical sciences, chemistry, mechanics, and mathematics, as well as news, letters, and notes from the diaries and notebooks of practising artisans and engineers
232. T. J. Markovitch, 'Le revenu industrielle et artisanal sous la Monarchie de Julliet et le Second Empire', Economies et Sociétés, ser. AF 8 (1967)217-46
233. J. Kocka, 'Craft Traditions and the Labour Movement in 19th-Century Germany', in The Power of the Past: Essays for Eric Hobsbawm, ed. P. Thane et al. (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 95-117
234. J. J. Lee, 'Labor in German Industrialisation', in The Cambridge Economic History of Europe: VII, pt. I, ed. P. Mathias and M. M. Postan (Cambridge, 1978), pp. 442-97. Fifty per cent of all German apprentices were trained in firms of 6 workers or less, another 20 per cent in firms employing 6-20 workers. Large state-contracting industrial enterprises rode free upon artisan workshop production
235. N. F. R. Crafts, 'Industrial Revolution in Britain and France', Economic History Review, 2nd series, xxx (1977), 429-41
236. For varied applications and reflections, see Exceptionalism and Industrialization: Britain and Its European Rivals, 1688-1815, ed. L. P. de la Escosura (Cambridge, 2004)
237. See R. K. Merton, 'Singletons and Multiples in Scientific Discover)', Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, cv (1961), 370-86
238. and D. Lamb and S. M. Easton, Multiple Discovery (London, 1984)
239. Quantitative historians remain sceptical in a world where even basic measures are entirely disputable. Thus, Stanley Engerman: 'In the years after 1500, western European per capita incomes grew at a more rapid rate than did those in the rest of the world,' in Exceptionalism and Industrialization, ed. Escosura, p. 261
240. See P. A. Gerschenkron, Continuity in History and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA, 1968)
241. and I. Inkster, 'Politicising the Gerschenkron Schema: Technology Transfer, Late Development, and the State in Historical Perspective', Journal of European Economic History, xxxi (2002), 45-87
242. P. K. O'Brien, 'The Reconstruction, Rehabilitation, and Reconfiguration of the British Industrial Revolution as a Conjuncture in Global History', Itinerario, xxiv (2000), 126
243. N. F. R. Crafts, British Economic Growth (Oxford, 1985)
244. Crafts and T. C. Mills, 'The Industrial Revolution as a Macroeconomic Epoch: An Alternative View', Economic History Review, 2nd series, xlvii (1994), 769-75
245. Cf. C. K. Harley's comment that the 'famous technical breakthroughs ... of the "Industrial Revolution" were ... probably quite a small part of the process of growth', in which the term 'process' should be altered to read 'measure'. See C. K. Harley, 'Reassessing the Industrial Revolution', in The British Industrial Revolution, ed. J. Mokyr (Boulder, 1993), p. 224
246. See also J. de Vries, 'Economic Growth Before and After the Industrial Revolution', in Early Modern Capitalism: Economic and Social Change in Europe, 1400-1800, ed. M. Prak (London, 2001), pp. 177-94
247. Kirzner, Discovery, Capitalism, and Distributive Justice, p. 23 n. 81
248. See D. C. Mowery and N. Rosenberg, Paths of Innovation (Cambridge, 1998), p. 2
249. Using patent data only and partial construction of US occupational material, B. Z. Khan and K. L. Sokoloff suggest that, prior to 1850, the US patent system, which was more socially widely based than England's, reflected a difference in the character of technological change: see B. Z. Khan and K. L. Sokoloff, 'Patent Institutions, Industrial Organization, and Early Technological Change: Britain and the United States, 1790-1850', in Technological Revolutions in Europe: Historical Perspectives, ed. M. Berg and K. Bruland (Cheltenham, 1998), pp. 292-314
250. Most states that adopted patent systems in the 1840s had created technical universities and polytechnics before that time: Prague (1806), Berlin (1810), Breslau (1811), Vienna (1815), Bonn (1818), Darmstadt (1822 and 1836), Karlsruhe (1825), Munich (1826-7), Dresden (1828), Stuttgart (1829), Nuremberg (1829), Cassel (1830), Hanover (1831), Augsburg (1833), and Brunswick (1835)