Transatlantic industrial revolution: the diffusion of textile technologies between Britain and America, 1790-1830s

Description

Winner of the 1980 Edelstein Prize given by the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT). and Winner of the John H. Dunning Prize in U.S. History sponsored by the American Historical Association. The social impact of a technical innovation—however great its intrinsic significance or originality—is entirely dependent on the extent and rate of its diffusion into practical life. The study of this diffusion—technology transfer—is a recent historical endeavor, but one that has already brought new understanding to past transformations of society and has important implications for future developments, especially in countries now emerging into the industrialized phase. Jeremy's book is central in this line of inquiry. It traces the transatlantic flow of a technology—textile manufacture, one of the first of the mechanized industries—from Britain, the fermenter of the Industrial Revolution and the world's most advanced country, to the post-colonial United States, still an isolated agrarian-mercantile society. But the author shows that by the early 19th century, this flow of technology was already moving in both directions across the Atlantic. The book examines the transfer of four specific technologies: cotton spinning, powerloom weaving, calico printing, and woollen manufacturing. These technologies all made successful transatlantic crossings in spite of the institutional and technical barriers to transfer that Jeremy describes, including industrial secretiveness, the English patent search system, the paucity of technical publications, the prohibitory laws, artisan resistance to technica change, variations in local technical traditions, and changes in the pace and direction of invention. Transatlantic Industrial Revolution is firmly based on modern economic theory. It is well illustrated with halftones and line drawings and its conclusions are by numerous primary sources, including British patents and American passenger (immigration) lists, customs documented records, and the manuscript version of the U.S. 1820 Census of Manufacturers, which yielded new estimates of the extent of America's textile expansion.