Leonard
Dudley publicó Mothers of Innovation: How Expanding Social Networks Gave Birth to the Industrial Revolution. La obra fue recientemente reseñada para EH.Net por
Eric Jones, de La Trobe University, autor de Locating the Industrial Revolution: Inducement and Response/ (World
Scientific, 2010), /The Fabric of Society
and How It Creates Wealth/ (Arley Hall Press, 2013) (with Charles Foster), y /Revealed Biodiversity: An
Economic History of the Human Impact/ (World
Scientific, in press). En su crítica leemos: “ The author, professor of
economics at the University of Montreal, is a
creative synthesizer with an adamantine belief in the importance of
literacy and linguistic
standardization. In his latest book,
Leonard Dudley enlists this interest in
trying to explain why innovation accelerated sharply between 1700 and 1850, doing so in certain regions of
Britain, France and the United States
but not in other conceivable candidates such as the German states or the Netherlands. In the course of his argument he denies or
restricts the force of currently
influential interpretations such as factor proportions or the appositeness of British institutions
coupled with the Enlightenment. He points out that neither can account for the
timing of innovation nor cope
with the strangely neglected fact that change was regional rather than national.
Either may have been necessary – or may not, since innovation was not confined to nor especially rapid in
Britain – but neither can have been
sufficient. .....
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.......Emphasis on the region is one of the tools in Dudley’s kit. His model
concentrates, though, on the new opportunities for cooperative
innovation once language was
standardized and networks of inventors who could trust one another arose; their conjunction fostered
collisions of unrelated schema, the way
Arthur Koestler said jokes are generated.
The book is intricate, filled
with computations, and ultimately draws in other factors. Typologies of
discovery are elaborated, networks are modeled, informative biographies
of inventors appear, tips are offered to
policy-makers, and personal experiences enliven
much of the text. (Any exception comes
with the testing of the model, which no
one could turn into a barrel of laughs.)
There is some
repetition and a little seeming self-contradiction but /Mothers of Innovation/ is more pleasurable to read than
the bulk of the industrial revolution
genre.
Some findings may surprise. Dudley is thoroughly unimpressed by the standard view that British institutions were somehow programmed for growth: individual rights and empiricism were on the rise throughout north-western Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Before the industrial revolution the prices of factors of production had been high for a century. Among British regions the correlation between coal production and innovation was negative from 1700 to 1850 except in what he calls the center – negative in the north-east, in Scotland, in Yorkshire and throughout the remainder of England. And in the “center” (which he calls the Midlands though meaning the West Midlands, Lancashire and Wales) the presence of coal may just happen to have coincided with an appropriate type of society. This would seem, therefore, to let attitudes and institutions return via preternatural enterprise in Birmingham and the lack of borough rigidities. One can also see that he comes back to half-approving the factor proportions argument, getting over the fact that relative prices never guarantee a response by finding that Brummagem zest was putting cheap factors to work.
Problems come with the explicandum, where Dudley is partly a prisoner of conventional wisdoms. His is a work that treats invention rather than innovation, with purely market explanations figuring as little as they do in so many industrial revolution studies. The assumption is that inventions will be used, which is akin to thinking that adjustments to factor proportions must be automatic. There is no point, in any case, in saying of resources that a substitute for charcoal was needed because Europe’s forests had been destroyed. Charcoal comes from trees and trees are a crop. Similarly, Dudley accepts the nostrum that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 “marked a major change from custom toward /contract/.” If so, which I do not believe, it was agonizingly slow.
The case that cooperation could take place among disparate inventors because language had become standardized is surely a red herring, and dated too late. Language cohesion is too far in the background to explain much. Differences were overcome. Consider the paper in /Semiotica/ (1975) called, “On the Non-Fatal Nature of Trouble: Sense-Making and Trouble-Making in /lingua franca/ Talk.” Even Defoe and the “dexterous dunce” with the Somerset accent could get by. But Dudley also makes much of the Baptists and Quakers. Their circles, he ultimately implies, may be where the emphasis should lie. The non-conformist sects aided cooperation; contact within them was a given and trust was assured.
The sample of inventions seems limited and arbitrary, as the author also eventually admits, and their distributions are sometimes inexact, as when Cort’s puddling of iron near Portsmouth is assigned to London. Geography is a difficulty on several counts. For example, Dudley insists on the inventive vacuum of the Netherlands. Dutch institutions did not cut it, he says. Yet why should people with high incomes from trade bother to invent? They could not be expected to predict what the future might hold and in the meantime allocated their talent rationally.
The industrial revolution was English, not British, and I have used “Britain” hitherto only because Dudley does. Indeed, the book is really about England, with little about France or the United States. Of innovations between 1800 and 1849 only two percent – a single invention – surfaced in Scotland. The Scots took the high road to England, while Wales did not figure. Moreover the author’s enthusiasm for Birmingham and relegation of Lancashire to a late phase of development leads him to miss the inspired, early watch-makers of south Lancashire, recruited to develop cotton machinery. Finally, we may be discussing an industrial revolution but it was one that grew from a broad base. Omitting agriculture means missing its close connections with other sectors and truncating the map of inventiveness. Leonard Dudley answers his own sharp questions about “where” and “when” in terms of cooperative networks, language standardization, the availability of resources, the absence of borough restrictions, the protection of property rights, and local path dependence. His is an engaging and challenging book that deserves to spark plenty of further research among the open-minded.”
Some findings may surprise. Dudley is thoroughly unimpressed by the standard view that British institutions were somehow programmed for growth: individual rights and empiricism were on the rise throughout north-western Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Before the industrial revolution the prices of factors of production had been high for a century. Among British regions the correlation between coal production and innovation was negative from 1700 to 1850 except in what he calls the center – negative in the north-east, in Scotland, in Yorkshire and throughout the remainder of England. And in the “center” (which he calls the Midlands though meaning the West Midlands, Lancashire and Wales) the presence of coal may just happen to have coincided with an appropriate type of society. This would seem, therefore, to let attitudes and institutions return via preternatural enterprise in Birmingham and the lack of borough rigidities. One can also see that he comes back to half-approving the factor proportions argument, getting over the fact that relative prices never guarantee a response by finding that Brummagem zest was putting cheap factors to work.
Problems come with the explicandum, where Dudley is partly a prisoner of conventional wisdoms. His is a work that treats invention rather than innovation, with purely market explanations figuring as little as they do in so many industrial revolution studies. The assumption is that inventions will be used, which is akin to thinking that adjustments to factor proportions must be automatic. There is no point, in any case, in saying of resources that a substitute for charcoal was needed because Europe’s forests had been destroyed. Charcoal comes from trees and trees are a crop. Similarly, Dudley accepts the nostrum that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 “marked a major change from custom toward /contract/.” If so, which I do not believe, it was agonizingly slow.
The case that cooperation could take place among disparate inventors because language had become standardized is surely a red herring, and dated too late. Language cohesion is too far in the background to explain much. Differences were overcome. Consider the paper in /Semiotica/ (1975) called, “On the Non-Fatal Nature of Trouble: Sense-Making and Trouble-Making in /lingua franca/ Talk.” Even Defoe and the “dexterous dunce” with the Somerset accent could get by. But Dudley also makes much of the Baptists and Quakers. Their circles, he ultimately implies, may be where the emphasis should lie. The non-conformist sects aided cooperation; contact within them was a given and trust was assured.
The sample of inventions seems limited and arbitrary, as the author also eventually admits, and their distributions are sometimes inexact, as when Cort’s puddling of iron near Portsmouth is assigned to London. Geography is a difficulty on several counts. For example, Dudley insists on the inventive vacuum of the Netherlands. Dutch institutions did not cut it, he says. Yet why should people with high incomes from trade bother to invent? They could not be expected to predict what the future might hold and in the meantime allocated their talent rationally.
The industrial revolution was English, not British, and I have used “Britain” hitherto only because Dudley does. Indeed, the book is really about England, with little about France or the United States. Of innovations between 1800 and 1849 only two percent – a single invention – surfaced in Scotland. The Scots took the high road to England, while Wales did not figure. Moreover the author’s enthusiasm for Birmingham and relegation of Lancashire to a late phase of development leads him to miss the inspired, early watch-makers of south Lancashire, recruited to develop cotton machinery. Finally, we may be discussing an industrial revolution but it was one that grew from a broad base. Omitting agriculture means missing its close connections with other sectors and truncating the map of inventiveness. Leonard Dudley answers his own sharp questions about “where” and “when” in terms of cooperative networks, language standardization, the availability of resources, the absence of borough restrictions, the protection of property rights, and local path dependence. His is an engaging and challenging book that deserves to spark plenty of further research among the open-minded.”
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