Revolution without progress
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Revolution without progress Barbara Hahn: Technology in the industrial revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, 225pp, £18.99 PB Laurent Heyberger1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
This book proposes an excellent and updated approach to the history of the industrial revolution for undergraduate students and for anyone else who wants an intelligent introduction to this topic. On this very classic subject, Barbara Hahn proposes to go beyond the age-old question: Why did England industrialize before France? and instead to ask why did certain machines appear at specific times and places rather than others. In other words, she wants to take into account local—and, of course, global—contingencies within the multiple factors that explain the appearance of machines. Thus, this is an essay whose synthetic and pedagogical value in no way sacrifices the subtlety of historical reasoning. Since the nineteenth century, the received wisdom concerning industrialization and mechanization is quite simple: thanks to the genius of some individual inventors, mechanization created industrialization and thus “[the] mythological version of the industrial revolution is as simple as a family tree of machinery” (186). A first wave of mechanization in the weaving sector (John Kay) broke the link that had bound spinning and weaving activities within English—and more broadly European—rural families for centuries. The resulting technological bottleneck in the weaving sector was liberated thanks to the genius of a small number of inventors in the domain of spinning (Hargreaves, Arkwright, Crompton, et al.) This classic vision of the industrial revolution also implies a direct and simplistic link between the advent of capitalist thought (Adam Smith) and free trade on the one hand and the birth of efficient steam engines (Watt) on the other, the former creating the economic conditions for the introduction of the latter. Questioning this vulgate inherited from the nineteenth century, which has become a part of the “self-identity of Britons” (186), is the main theme of this brilliant synthesis by Barbara Hahn. The naïve celebrations of the triumph of industry so common in the nineteenth century offer superficial representations, while here the author * Laurent Heyberger [email protected] 1
Université de Technologie de Belfort-Montbéliard, UMR 6174, FEMTO-ST/RECITS, Sevenans, France
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Metascience
introduces the reader into the “black box” of the industrial revolution, illuminating it down to the last technical detail, but always with the concern to contextualize and explain technical changes by economic, social, demographic and political factors (chapter 2, “Myths and Machines”). Thus, she situates her account halfway between an internalist and a contextualist approach (Hughes 1983). For each of the three elements of the classic definition of the industrial revolution given by Landes (1969; mechanization of tasks, separation of production and consumption, development of regular flows of products and sta
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