David S. Landes

The Unbound Prometheus:

Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969

When dealing with ambiguous terms, the first duty of a writer is definition. The words 'industrial revolution'—in small letters—usually refer to that complex of technological innovations which, by substitut­ing machines for human skill and inanimate power fox human and animal force, brings about a shift from handicraft to manufacture and, so doing, gives birth to a modem economy. In this sense, the industrial revolution has already transformed a number of countries, though in unequal degree; other societies are in the throes of change; the turn of still others is yet to come.

The words sometimes have another meaning. They are used to de­note any rapid significant technological change, and historians have spoken of an 'industrial revolution of the thirteenth century, an 'early industrial revolution', the 'second industrial revolution', an 'industrial revolution in the cotton south'. In this sense, we shall eventually have as many 'revolutions' as there are historically demarcated sequences of industrial innovation, plus all such sequences as will occur in the future; there are those who say, for example, that we are already in the midst of the third industrial revolution, that of automation, air transport, and atomic power.

Finally, the words, when capitalized, have still another meaning. They denote the first historical instance of the breakthrough from an agrarian, handicraft economy to one dominated by industry and machine manu­facture. The Industrial Revolution began in England in the eighteenth century, spread therefrom in unequal fashion to the countries of Con­tinental Europe and a few areas overseas, and transformed in the span of scarce two lifetimes the life of Western man, the nature of his society, and his relationship to the other peoples of the world. The Industrial Revolution, as it took place in western Europe, is the subject of this book.

The heart of the Industrial Revolution was an interrelated succession of technological changes. The material advances took place in three areas [(1)] was a substitution of mechanical devices for human skills; (2) inanimate power—in particular, steam—took the place of human and animal strength; (3) there was a marked improvement in the getting and working of raw materials, especially in what are now known as the metallurgical and chemical industries.[1]

Concomitant with these changes in equipment and process went new forms of industrial organization. The size of the productive unit grew: machines and power both required and made possible the concentra­tion of manufacture, and shop and home workroom gave way to mill and factory. At the same time, the factory was more than just a larger work unit. It was a system of production, resting on a characteristic definition of the functions and responsibilities of the different partici­pants in the productive process. On the one side was the employer, who not only hired the labour and marketed the finished product, but sup­plied the capital equipment and oversaw its use. On the other side there stood the worker, no longer capable of owning and furnishing the means of production and reduced to the status of a hand (the word is significant and symbolizes well this transformation from producer to pure labourer). Binding them were the economic relationship—the 'wage nexus'—and the functional one of supervision and discipline.

Discipline, of course, was not entirely new. Certain kinds of work— large construction projects, for example—had always required the direction and co-ordination of the efforts of many people; and well be­fore the Industrial Revolution there were a number of large workshops or 'manufactories' in which traditional unmechanized labour operated under .supervision. Yet discipline under such circumstances was com­paratively loose (there is no overseer so demanding as the steady click-clack of the machine); and such as it was, it affected only a small portion of the industrial population.

Factory discipline was another matter. It required and eventually created a new breed of worker, broken to the inexorable demands of the clock. It also held within itself the seeds of further technological advance, for control of labour implies the possibility of the rationaliza­tion of labour. From the start, the specialization of productive functions was pushed farther in the factory than it had been in shops and cottages; at the same time, the difficulties of manipulating men and materials within a limited area gave rise to improvements in layout and organiza­tion. There is a direct chain of innovation from the efforts to arrange the manufacturing process so that the raw material would move down-wards in the plant as it was treated, to the assembly line and trans­mission belts of today.

In all of this diversity of technological improvement, the unity of the movement is apparent: change begat change. For one thing, many technical improvements were feasible only after advances in associated fields. -The steam engine is a classic example of this technological in-terrelatedness: it was impossible to produce an effective condensing engine until better methods of metal working could turn out accurate cylinders. For another, the gains in productivity and output of a given [2] innovation inevitably exerted pressure on related industrial operations. The demand for coal pushed mines deeper until water seepage became a serious hazard; the answer was the creation of a more efficient pump, the atmospheric steam engine. A cheap supply of coal proved a godsend to me iron industry, which was stifling for lack of fuel. In the meantime, the invention and diffusion of machinery in the textile manufacture and other industries created a new demand for energy, hence for coal and steam engines; and these engines, and the machines themselves, had a voracious appetite for iron, which called for further coal and power. Steam also made possible the factory city, which used unheard-of quantities of iron (hence coal) in its many-storied mills and its water and sewage systems. At the same time, the processing of the flow of manufactured commodities required great amounts of chemical substances: alkalis, acids, and dyes, many of them consuming mountains of fuel in the making. And all of these products—iron, textiles, chemi­cals—depended on large-scale movements of goods on land and on sea, from the sources of the raw materials into the factories and out again to near and distant markets. The opportunity thus created and the possibilities of the new technology combined to produce the railroad and steamship, which of course added to the demand for iron and fuel while expanding the market for factory products. And so on, in ever-widening circles.

 in man's history. To that point, the advances of commerce and industry, however gratifying and impressive, had been essentially superficial: more wealth, more goods, prosperous cities, merchant nabobs. The world had seen other periods of industrial prosperity—in medieval Italy and Flanders, for example—and had seen the line of economic advance recede in each case; in the absence of qualitative changes, of improve­ments in productivity, there could be no guarantee that mere quantita­tive gains would be consolidated. It was the Industrial Revolution that initiated a cumulative, self-sustaining advance in technology whose repercussions would be felt in all aspects of economic life.

To be sure, opportunity is not necessarily achievement. Economic progress has been uneven, marked by spurts and recessions, and there is no reason to be complacent about the prospect of an indefinite climb. For one thing, technological advance is not a smooth, balanced process. Each innovation seems to have a life span of its own, comprising periods of tentative youth, vigorous maturity, and declining old age. As its technological possibilities are realized, its marginal yield diminishes and it gives way to newer, more advantageous techniques. By the same token, the divers branches of production that embody these techniques follow their, own logistic curve of growth toward a kind of asymptote. [3]

Thus the climb of those industries that were at the heart of the Industrial Revolution—textiles, iron and steel, heavy chemicals, steam engineer­ing, railway transport—began to slow toward the end of the nineteenth century in the most advanced west European countries, so much so that some observers feared that the whole system was running down. (At this point, the Industrial Revolution in these countries was substantially complete.) Similar dire prognoses accompanied the world depression of the [1930]'s, particularly by those Marxist critics who saw the capita­list economy as incapable of sustained creativity. In feet, however, the advanced industrial economies have given proof of considerable technological vitality. The declining momentum of the early-moderniz­ing branches in the late nineteenth century was more than compensated by the rise of new industries based on spectacular advances in chemical and electrical science and on a new, mobile source of power—the internal [combustion] engine. This is the cluster of innovations that is often desig­nated as the second industrial revolution. Similarly, the contraction of the 1930'$ has been followed by decades of unusual creativity, consisting once again primarily in innovations in the application of chemical and electrical science, plus advances in the generation and delivery of power —the abovementioned third industrial revolution.

A more serious cause of concern lies outside the productive system proper—in the area of political economy and politics tout court. Even assuming that the ingenuity of scientists and engineers will always generate new ideas to relay the old and that they will find ways to over­come such shortages as may develop (whether of food, water, or in­dustrial raw materials), there is no assurance that those men charged with utilizing these ideas will do so intelligently—intelligently, that is, not only in the sense of effective exploitation or their productive possi­bilities but in the larger sense of effective adaptation to the material and human environment so as to minimise waste, pollution, social fric­tion, and other 'external' costs. Similarly, there is no assurance that noneconomic exogenous factors—above all, man's incompetence in dealing with his fellow-man—will not reduce the whole magnificent structure to dust

In the meantime, however, the climb has been spectacular. Improve­ments in productivity of the order of several thousand to one have been achieved in certain sectors—prime movers and spinning for example. In other areas, gains have been less impressive only by comparison: of the order of hundreds to one in weaving, or won smelting, or shoe-making. Some areas, to be sure, have seen relatively little change: it still takes about as much time to shave a man as it did in the eighteenth century.

Quantitative gains in productivity are, of course, only part of the [4] picture. Modern technology produces not only more, faster; it turns out objects that could not have been produced under any circumstances by the craft methods of yesterday. The best Indian hand spinner could not turn out yarn so fine and regular as that of the mule; all the forges in eighteenth-century Christendom could not have produced steel sheets so large, smooth, and homogeneous as those of a modern strip mill. Most important, modern technology has created things that could scarcely have been conceived in the pre-industrial era: the camera, the motor car, the aeroplane, the whole array of electronic devices from the radio to the high-speed computer, the nuclear power plant, and so on almost ad infinitum. Indeed, one of the primary stimuli of modern technology is free-ranging imagination; the increasing autonomy of pure science and the accumulation of a pool of untapped knowledge, in combination with the ramifying stock of established technique, have given ever wider scope to the inventive vision. Finally, to this array of new and better products—introduced, to be sure, at the expense of some of the more artistic results of hand craftsmanship—should be added that great range of exotic commodities, once rarities or luxuries, that are now available at reasonable prices thanks to improved transportation. It took the Industrial Revolution to make tea and coffee, the banana of Central America and the pineapple of Hawaii everyday foods. The result has been an enormous increase in the output and variety of goods and services, and has alone has changed man’s way of life more than anything since the discovery of fire: the Englishman of 1750 was closer in material things to Caesar's legionnaires than to his own great-grand­children.

These material advances in turn have provoked and promoted a large complex of economic, social, political, and cultural changes, which have reciprocally influenced the rate and course of technological de­velopment. There is, first, the transformation that we know as industrial­ization. This is the industrial revolution, in the specifically technological sense, plus its economic consequences, in particular the movement of labour and resources from agriculture to industry. The shift reflects the interaction of enduring characteristics of demand with the changing conditions of supply engendered by the industrial revolution. On the demand side, the nature of human wants is such that rises in income increase the appetite for food less than for manufactures. This is not true of people who have been living on the borderline of subsistence; they may use any extra money to eat better. But most Europeans were living above this level on the eve of industrialization; and although they did spend more for food as income went up, their expenditures on manufactures increased even faster. On the supply side, this shift in de­mand was reinforced by the relatively larger gains in industrial as against [5]  agricultural productivity, with a consequent fall in the price of manu­factures relative to that of primary products.

Whether this disparity is inherent in the character of the industrial process, in other words, whether manufacture is intrinsically more sus­ceptible of technological improvement than cultivation and husbandry, is an interesting but moot question. The fact remains that in the period of the Industrial Revolution and subsequently, industry moved ahead faster, increased its share of national wealth and product, and drained away the labour of the countryside. The shift varied from one country to another, depending on comparative advantage and institutional re­sistance. It was most extreme in Britain, where free trade stripped the farmer of protection against overseas competition; by 1912, only 12 per cent of Britain's labour force was employed in agriculture; by 1951, the proportion had fallen to an almost irreducible 5 per cent. And it was slowest in France, a country of small landholders, where a more gradual introduction of the new industrial technology combined with high tariffs on food imports to retard the contraction of the primary sector. Over half the French labour force was in agriculture in 1789 (perhaps 55 per cent or more), and this was still true in 1866, after three quarters of a century of technological change; as recently as 1950, the proportion was still a third.¹

Industrialization in turn is at the heart of a larger, more complex process often designated [as] modernization This is [a] combination of changes—in the mode of production and government, in the social and institutional order, in the corpus of knowledge and in attitudes and values—that makes it possible for a society to hold its own in the twen­tieth century; that is, to compete on even terms in the generation of material and cultural wealth, to sustain its independence, and to pro­mote and accommodate to further change. Modernization comprises such developments as urbanization (the concentration of the population in cities that serve as nodes of industrial production, administration, and intellectual and artistic activity); a sharp reduction in both death rates and birth rates from traditional levels (the so-called demographic tran­sition); the establishment of an effective, fairly centralized bureaucratic government; the creation of an educational system capable of training and socializing the children of the society to a level compatible with their capacities and best contemporary knowledge; and of course, the acquisition of the ability and means to use an up-to-date technology.

All of these elements are interdependent, as will become apparent in [6] the discussion that follows, but each is to some degree autonomous, and it is quite possible to move ahead in some areas while lagging in others—witness some of the so-called developing or emerging nations of today. The one ingredient of modernization that is just about indis­pensable is technological maturity and the industrialization that goes with it; otherwise one has the trappings without the substance, the pretence without the reality.

It was Europe's good fortune that technological change and indus­trialization preceded or accompanied part passu the other components of modernization, so that on the whole she was spared the material and psychic penalties of unbalanced maturation. The instances of marked discrepancy that come to mind—the effort of Peter to force the westernization of a servile society in Russia, the explosion of population in Ireland in a primitive and poor agricultural environment, the urbani­zation of Mediterranean Europe in the context of a pre-industrial economy—yielded a harvest of death, misery, and enduring resentment.

Even so, industrial Europe had its own growing pains, which were moderate only by comparison with extreme cases of accelerated modernization or with the deep poverty and suffering of that outer world (the so-called Third World) of technologically backward, non-industrializing societies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. For one thing, if mechanization opened new vistas of comfort and prosperity [for men], it also destroyed the livelihood of some and left others to vegetate in the backwaters of the stream of progress. Change is demonic; it creates, but it also destroys, and the victims of the Industrial Revolu­tion were numbered in the hundreds of thousands or even millions. (On the other hand, many of these would have been even worse off without industrialization.) By the same token, the Industrial Revolu­tion tended, especially in its earlier stages, to widen the gap between rich and poor and sharpen the cleavage between employer and employed, thereby opening the door to class conflicts of unprecedented bitterness. It did not create the first true industrial proletariat: the blue-nails of medieval Flanders and the Ciompi of the Florence of the quattrocento are earlier examples of landless workers with nothing to sell but their labour. Indeed, as we shall see, the putting-out system was in its day as produc­tive of class hostility as the factory. But the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries did see the growth of a working class more numerous and concentrated than ever before. And with size and concentration came slums and class consciousness, workers' parties and radical panaceas.

In similar fashion, the Industrial Revolution generated painful changes in the structure of power. It did not create the first capitalists, but it did produce a business class of unprecedented-numbers-and strength. The hegemony of landed wealth, long threatened by the mobile fortunes of [7] commerce but never overturned, yielded to the assaults of the new chimney aristocrats. Largely as the result of a series of revolutions, domestic government policy came to be determined in most of western Europe by the manufacturing interest and its allies in trade and finance, with or without the co-operation of the older landed establishment. In central Europe—Germany and Austria-Hungary—the picture was dif­ferent: the attempt at revolution failed, and the aristocracy continued to hold the reins of government; business ambitions were subordinated to, rather than identified with, the goals of unity and power. Even there, however, the growing wealth and influence of the industrial and com­mercial bourgeoisie was apparent in the course of legislation and in the penetration by parvenus of the social and occupational strongholds of the old elites. In the course of the nineteenth century, much of the privileged knights' land (Rittergiiter) of east-Elbian Prussia came into the hands of commoners; while from 1870 to 1913, the proportion of aristo­crats in the officer corps of the Prussian army fell from 70 to 30 per cent.¹

To be sure, this kind of victory often spelled a kind of defeat: the rising bourgeois could be more snobbish than the blooded nobleman, stiffer and more arrogant than a Junker guardsman. Whereas in Britain and France, the new business elite competed for power, in Germany they acquiesced in the status quo and sold their liberal birthright for a mess of chauvinistic pottage seasoned by commercial legislation and adminis­tration favourable to business enterprise. The fact remains [that] they did have to be bought off; and indeed everywhere the balance of status and power shifted, in greater or lesser degree, from the older landed elite toward the new rich of industry and trade.

Two of the factors conducing in this direction were the separation of the aristocracy from the mass of the country population and the general decline of rural forces in national life. Partly (though only partly) owing to industrialization, the traditional system of land tenure, with its vestiges of feudal privileges and its tenacious communal rights, was replaced by one of unlimited ownership of enclosed parcels. A certain amount of the traditional paternalistic authority of the 'lord of the manor* was lost in the process, especially in those regions where the changed was forced. Even more important, however, was a progres­sive anaemia of rural life: on the one hand, a massive exodus to the cities at the expense of marginal lands; on the other, an invasion of agricultural areas by industry—how green was my valley!

The growth of a factory proletariat, the rise of the industrial [8] bourgeoisie and its progressive merger with the old elite, the ebbing resistance of the peasantry to the lure of the city and to the competition of new ways and a new scale of cultivation—all of these trends en­couraged some observers to predict a polarization of society between a large mass of exploited wage earners and a small group of exploiting owners of the means of production. The trend to size and concentration seemed inexorable and pervasive. Every advance in technology seemed to hurt the ability of the small, independent operator to survive in the impersonally competitive market place.

Yet this was a serious misreading of the course of change. Mass pro­duction and urbanization stimulated, indeed required, wider facilities for distribution, a larger credit structure, an expansion of the educa­tional system, the assumption of new functions by government. At the same time, the increase in the standard of living due to higher produc­tivity created new wants and made possible new satisfactions, which led to a spectacular flowering of those businesses that cater to human pleasure and leisure: entertainment, travel, hotels, restaurants, and so on. Thus the growth of a factory labour force was matched by a prolifera­tion of service and professional people, white-collar workers, func­tionaries, engineers, and similar servants of the industrial system and society. Indeed, as productivity rose and the standard of living with it, this administrative and service sector of the economy —what some economists have: called the tertiary [sector]—grew more rapidly than industry itself.

In sum, the Industrial Revolution created a society of greater richness and complexity. Instead of polarizing it into bourgeois minority and an almost all-embracing proletariat, it produced a heterogeneous bour­geoisie whose multitudinous shadings of income, origin, education, and way of life are overridden by a common resistance to inclusion in, or confusion with, the working classes, and by an unquenchable social ambition.

For the essence of the bourgeois is that he is what the sociologists call upwardly mobile; and nothing has ever furnished so many opportuni­ties to rise in the social scale as the Industrial Revolution. Not every­one seized these opportunities. For many, the shift from country to city, from farm to industry or trade, marked simply the exchange of one labouring status for another. The factory worker could be, and usually was, as tradition-bound in his expectations for himself and his children as the peasant. But for thousands, the move to town, or often to another region or country, marked a decisive break with the past; the migrant found himself afloat in a fluid society. Some rose and founded un­exampled fortunes in their own lifetimes; others climbed slowly, generation by generation. For many, education was the open-sesame to [9] higher status, and this channel wa"s in itself evidence of the more explicit functional requirements of a technologically advanced society. More and more, it became important to choose someone for a job or place on universalistic rather than particularistic grounds, on the basis of what he could do rather than who he was or whom he knew.

But universalism cuts both ways. While some rise on merit, others must fall; some succeed, but others fail. It has been said of political revolutions that they devour their children. So do economic revolutions. Thus the small machines of the early Industrial Revolution were succeeded by big ones; the little mills became giant factories; the modest partnerships were converted to large public companies; the victims and laggards of the early decades were succeeded by new victims and laggards. The resulting concentration of enterprise in certain sectors of the economy did not displace the small firm or make it obsolete. The very forces that promoted industrial and commercial giantism opened new possibilities for small ventures: service enterprises, distribution agencies, subcontractors, and so on. The fact remains, however, that smaller firms in traditional lines were pressed hard by bigger and more efficient competitors; many collapsed in spite of all the resistance, ingenuity, and sacrifice that old-style family enterprises are capable of. Both casualties and survivors proved easy converts for the preachers of discontent and reaction: in some countries they turned the government into the instrument of vested interests; [in] others, they became the troops of right-wing revolution.

For if the first effect of the Industrial Revolution was to shift drasti­cally the balance of political power in favour of the commercial and in­dustrial classes, subsequent economic development raised up new enemies of the liberal, parliamentary system that was the symbol and instrument of bourgeois government. On the one hand, there was con­centrated, class-conscious industrial labour; on the other, the bourgeois victims of economic and social change: the marginal entrepreneurs, the discontented, the declasses. Between the two extremes the gulf widened, as each reacted to the other. The World War brought the latent conflict to a head by stimulating the demands of labour while ravaging the savings of the bourgeoisie. In all countries, the postwar years saw a flow of political power outward from the centre to the extremes. In a nation like England, the result was a new party alignment and gradual move­ment to a new position of compromise. In countries like Germany and Italy, the resolution was more radical. In France, the centrifugal trend was countered by the distraction of logrolling; the heterogeneous special interests of the bourgeoisie found a modus vivendi in the manipu­lation of government on behalf of the status quo and at the expense of a divided labour movement. [10]

In each case, of course, the nature of the political adaptation to the economic changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution was a function of the existing political structure and traditions, social attitudes, the par­ticular effects of the war, and the differential character of economic development. For the Industrial Revolution, as we shall see, was not a uniform wave of change; nor did it roll up on like shores. On the con­trary, it came to a great variety of places, with differing resources, economic traditions, social values, entrepreneurial aptitudes, and tech­nological skills.

This unevenness of timing and distribution in turn has had the most serious consequences. Politically it has meant a complete revision of the balance of power. The basis of military strength has shifted from sheer numbers—and tactical inspiration—to industrial capacity, particularly the ability to turn out guns and munitions and move them to combat. Money was once the sinews of war because it could buy men; now it must produce fire power as well. As a result, the nineteenth century saw a unified Germany rise to Continental hegemony on the strength of the Ruhr and Silesia; while France, slower to industrialize, was never again to enjoy the pre-eminence to which the levee en masse and the genius of Napoleon had raised her on the eve of economic revolution. With the spread of the new techniques, moreover, new powers arose: the twentieth century saw the millennial predominance-o£ Europe dwindle before the unprecedented might of the United States and Soviet Russia.

At the same time, the technological gap has made possible and economic interest has called forth a spectacular expansion of Western power in the preindustrial areas of the world; in this respect, the In­dustrial Revolution consummated the process begun by the voyages and overseas conquests of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And while in recent decades the tide of imperial dominion has receded, it has left its indelible imprint wherever its waters have rolled: all of the un­developed countries of the globe are converted to the religions of industry and wealth with a faith that surpasses that of their teachers. Never in the thousands of years of contact between civilizations has one of them enjoyed such universal success.

Yet up to now, at least, faith has not been enough. The nations of the Third World have yet to effect their industrial revolution, and the gulf in wealth and standard of living between them and the economically advanced countries has increased to the point of scandal and danger. The disparity has been aggravated by the partial character of their modernization. The West has brought them lower death rates, but not lower birth rates; so that population growth has eaten up, and in some instances outstripped, their gains in income. The West has provided

[11] them with some education — enough to know their dependence and to dream of freedom, but not enough to create and operate a modern economy. It has given them a distorted underview, the view from the kitchen, the mine, and the labour camp, of the potentialities and rewards of an industrial technology — a tantalizing taste of what seems to be a material paradise; but it has not given them the means to satisfy the appetite thus engendered. It has also left them a memory of brutality and humiliation, a stain that some have argued can be erased only in blood.¹

This is not to imply that the conduct of colonial powers has always been reprehensible or the consequences of their rule invariably bad. On the contrary, one could argue that many of the colonial peoples were better off under European rule than they have been since inde­pendence. But as we all know, the evil that men do lives after them; besides, most of the peoples in the world (with the possible exception of Puerto Rico) have opted for freedom even in mediocrity as against prosperity in subordination.

The explosive implications of this legacy of jealousy, frustration, hatred and alienation need not be laboured here.

In sum, the Industrial Revolution has been like in effect to Eve's tasting of the fruit of the tree of knowledge: the world has never been the same.  [The point is not whether this is] the better or the worse. The question is one of ends more than means and has its place in moral philosophy, not economic history.)