The aim of this essay is to present a brief conceptual overview of what has become known as the “historical alternatives” approach to industrial history. The notion of alternatives is central to this approach in both a historical and a historiographical sense. Historically, the hallmark of this approach has been its emphasis on the salience of alternative possibilities, contingency, and strategic choice in the development of modern industry over the past three centuries. Historiographically, this approach represents an alternative to mainstream currents in economic, technological, and business history: an alternative, in particular, to Chandlerian business history, which is focused on the economic and technological efficiency of administrative coordination and learning within large, hierarchically managed enterprises. From its origins in joint work by Charles Sabel and myself in the early 1980s, a substantial body of empirical work on European, American, and Japanese industrial history has since appeared that draws on and extends the historical alternatives approach.

At a more substantive level, the historical alternatives approach allows for the identification of flexibly specialized forms of production in the industrial past. This theoretical possibility, however, should not be confused with empirical claims about the role and importance in particular times and places of flexible specialization as an ideal-typical model of productive efficiency, based on the manufacture of a wide and changing array of customized products in short runs by skilled, adaptable workers using versatile general-purpose machinery.

Few cases are more difficult to categorize as either flexible or mass production than that of the British engineering industry between 1830 and 1914. Through most of the nineteenth century, Britain's continental competitors saw her dominance of world trade in machinery– like that in cotton textiles – as the result of mass production in the contemporary sense of the term: the use of powered machinery and the subdivision of labor to manufacture significant quantities of relatively standardized products at low prices. So great was Britain's advantage in textile machinery, for example, that emergent manufacturers in Germany were forced from the outset to concentrate on “specialized products which complemented British spinning equipment or looms or produced yarn or cloth that could not be made with standard machines.” Yet in the 1850s, when British engineers inspected American techniques for manufacturing products such as locks and small arms, the latter's use of jigs, fixtures, gauges and special machines to produce interchangeable parts seemed distinctive enough from British methods to be termed “the American system of manufactures.” By the end of the nineteenth century, when American firms manufacturing large volumes of standardized equipment had begun to penetrate world markets, the contrast with their British counterparts' use of craft methods to manufacture customized products in small batches had become a commonplace of engineering comment on both sides of the Atlantic. These conflicting perceptions of British engineering reflected real ambiguities in domestic practice, whose significance would only become apparent as new competitive pressures from both mass and flexible producers forced the industry to redefine its identity through a process of strategic debate and selective adaptation.

This book grows out of an effort to rethink the history of industry and the writing of history more generally in the light of the vast transformation of the advanced economies that began nearly twenty years ago and may continue for at least as long into the future. Its proximate cause was a Parisian seminar in which economic historians and sociologists, predominantly from Western Europe, responded in studies of their own to our earlier work on artisanal, flexible alternatives to mass production, and we responded in many joint discussions and now in this Introduction to them.

There is nothing novel in such an undertaking, for the most common of historical commonplaces is that every epoch rewrites history according to its own preoccupations. Yet predictable as they are, such efforts often produce results that disconcert by calling into question connections to the past that were among the few fixed points left in a turbulent age.

The essays in this volume may well disconcert in a narrower intellectual sense as well. Most current economic history is meant to show that methods and models for understanding the economy in the present can illuminate the rationality of previously obscure realms of business activity in the past. But our aim is to show that the strategic reflections and deliberate institutional innovations of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century economies are no less instructive than any analysis based on current theory.