INTRODUCTION

Technological change was a central component in the industrialisation process of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and thus in the making of the modern world economy. Nevertheless, more than two centuries after the beginnings of industrialisation, our understanding of the factors that impelled and shaped the development, diffusion and impact of the new technologies of early industrialisation remains far from complete. As a consequence, important questions concerning the place and interpretation of technological change in industrialisation remain unresolved.

The idea that we know relatively little about the sources and outcomes of innovation in the industrial revolution may seem strange, since there is a large historical literature organised explicitly or implicitly around the idea that technological change and industrialisation are intimately linked. Indeed there are many writers for whom new technologies are industrialisation, and so the emergence of new techniques is implicitly or explicitly a fundamental causal event. But the very size of the literature tends to obscure the fact that it actually tells us rather little about the dynamics of technological change in the industrial revolution, and particularly its impacts on growth. So although technological change is usually seen as a central element in the economics of industrialisation there is frequently no satisfactory account of the relationships between technological change and industrial growth. To put it differently, there are few comprehensive treatments of the technologies involved in the industrialisation process, in the sense of treatments that integrate economic, social and technological dynamics. Although such a task cannot be achieved within the space available here, nevertheless this chapter seeks to describe some broad patterns of technological change during the first industrial revolution, and to place them within an interpretative framework.