Tutor: Professor Maxine Berg

Technology played a major role in economic and industrial growth. In this seminar, we explore how historians of science, historians of technology, and economic historians have conceptualised the relationship between knowledge, skill, and the economy.

Seminar Readings

Joel Mokyr, ‘The Holy Land of Industrialism: Rethinking the Industrial Revolution’, Journal of the British Academy, vol. 9, 2021. https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/journal-british-academy/9/the-holy-land-of-industrialism-rethinking-the-industrial-revolution/

Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, ‘Slavery, Atlantic Trade and Skills: a Response to Joel Mokyr’, Journal of the British Academy, vol. 9, 2021 https://www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/publishing/journal-british-academy/9/slavery-atlantic-trade-skills/

Prasannan Parthasarathi, Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia did Not (Cambridge, 2011), chap. 7.

Additional Readings

Adas, Michael. Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance. Cornell University Press, 1990.

Berg, Maxine. ‘Useful Knowledge, “Industrial Enlightenment”, and the Place of India’. Journal of Global History 8 (2013)

Berg, Maxine. “The Genesis of “Useful Knowledge”’, History of Science 45 (2007)

Bruland, Kristine. ‘Technology Selection and Useful Knowledge: A Comment’. History of Science 45 (2007)

Epstein, Stephan. “Transferring Technical Knowledge and Innovating in Europe, c.1200 – c.1800”, in Technology, Skills and the Pre-Modern Economy in the East and the West, ed. Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden. Brill, 2013.

Edgerton, David. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. Oxford University Press, 2011.

———. Science, Technology and the British Industrial 'Decline', 1870-1970. Cambridge University Press, 1996..

Hahn, Barbara. Technology in the Industrial Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Headrick, Daniel R. The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940. Oxford University Press, 1988.

Headrick, Daniel R. The Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford University Press, 1981.

Hilaire-Pérez, Liliane. ‘Technology as a Public Culture in the Eighteenth Century: The Artisans’ Legacy’. History of Science 45 (2007)

Jacob, Margaret C. ‘Mechanical Science on the Factory Floor: The Early Industrial Revolution in Leeds’. History of Science 45 (2007)

———. Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West. Oxford University Press, 1997.

Joyce, Patrick. The Historical Meanings of Work. Cambridge University Press, 1989.

Landes, David S. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Mokyr, Joel. A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.

———. ‘Knowledge, Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution: Reflections on The Gifts of Athena’. History of Science, 2007.

———. “The Intellectual Origins of Modern Economic Growth,” Journal of Economic History 65 (2005)

———. The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy. Princeton University Press, 2002.

Parthasarathi, Prasannan. Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence, 1600–1850. Cambridge University Press, 2011, chapter 7 ‘Science and Technology in India, 1600–1800’

Samuel, Raphael. ‘Workshop of the World: Steam Power and Hand Technology in Mid-Victorian Britain’. History Workshop Journal 3 (1977)

Stewart, Larry. ‘Experimental Spaces and the Knowledge Economy’. History of Science 45 (2007)