Due in 8 hrs exactly. The sooner turned in the better. Econ Hwk. Read powerpoints and answer word doc.
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lect19_f16_industrial_revolution.pptxLecture 19 Industrial Revolution
f16
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution (IR) is a major event in world history
It occurred 1760-1850 in Britain and spread elsewhere
Three technological breakthroughs: mechanization of cotton textiles, using coal to smelt iron, and invention of the steam engine:
Factories appeared: workers did not own the means of production
Three new technologies supported each other: iron for the new machines; coal replaced charcoal in iron production; steam engine to drive the machines; machines revolutionized cotton textiles
IR
Landes, Chap 13 describes the technological innovations
Steam engine: Newcomen 1710, Watt 1768 (separate condenser, rotary motion), compound engine 1781 (practical in 1850s); turbine 1884
Iron from coke: Darby 1709 cast iron (pots, pipes) (took off in 1750s); Cort 1783 wrought iron (1800-1860s); Bessemer 1856 cheap steel
Cotton textiles: Hargreaves spinning jenny 1766; Arkwright water frame 1769; Crompton mule 1779; Cartwright power loom 1787; Roberts self-acting mule 1830
IR
Perfection or improvements in technologies took a long time, and involved many tinkerers, most of them anonymous
Tinkering cost money and time and often failed to make the inventor rich; patents did provide hope and probably encouraged effort
Inventors were free to experiment and had the hope of getting rich from “disruptive technological change”
IR
We ask first why the IR occurred in Europe rather than in China or India
Eurocentric explanation 1: Europe had good economic institutions: private property rights, contract enforcement, and well-functioning markets; these institutions provided incentives for innovation in the form of profits for innovators
Eurocentric explanation 2: autonomy of intellectual inquiry; Europe was open to new ideas; Scientific Revolution; experiments to establish truth about nature
IR
Landes, Chap 14 asks Why Europe?
1. Autonomy of intellectual inquiry; challenges to Catholic doctrine, from Reformation and from Explorations to Asia and New World; repression of thought in one country did not suppress it elsewhere
2. Method of experiment. Believe what you can prove by expt; advances in precision measurement in 1600s; mathematical advances: logarithms, analytic geometry; pendulum clock 1657, balance spring 1675; simplified models of nature (no air resistance to gravity); telescope and microscope early 1600s
IR
3. Routinization of discovery. Learned societies in Rome, Paris, London in 1600s; competition for prestige based on claim of priority and replicable experiment; printing press disseminated findings
Scientific Revolution: astronomy; blood circulation; vacuum and weight of column of air; Newton’s theory of gravity
See “Condemnation of Galileo” pp. 181-84 in Landes
IR
Revisionist school challenges Eurocentric interpretations; it was not the institutions nor the intellectual curiosity that distinguished Europe from China and India, but rather the particular challenges and opportunities that they faced
Marks Chap 4 presents this revisionist view; Pomeranz is a prominent scholar in the California School or Revisionist school. The Great Divergence book 2000
IR
Revisionist school says that institutions were not inadequate in China: there was a market economy, with “good enough” property rights and contract enforcement
China and India were running into the limitations of the “old biological regime”; land and labor were needed to produce food; labor could not be released for factories; energy was scarce, as forests were being depleted
IR
Western Europe had two great advantages; natural resource products from the New World (and also eastern Europe) and the convenient availability of coal; “ghost acres” of available land relieved the pressure on land in western Europe
Would China have produced an IR on its own, in the absence of European interference in the 19th century?
Would Europe have been stuck without African slaves? Without the New World?
