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Settlement is that right which a parishioner becoming impotent or poor has of claiming relief from the funds raised by means of the poor's rate, by virtue of the social relationship or connection which subsists between him and the other members of the parish. This right is always acquired in that parish or place in which parishioners have acquired their last legal settlement. The whole experience of the poor law shows, with what a degree of selfishness parishes deal with those upon whom they look as strangers to themselves; they have never hesitated to condemn a man to the worst evils if he was a charge to them and they could remove him. There has been no want of vigour on the part of parishes in dealing with those classes of poor whom they did not recognise as their own. ‘Anybody can have roots if they want them’, I said. ‘Human beings are like strawberry plants.’ INTRODUCTION The Revd Anthony Huxtable was rector of Sutton Waldron, near Shaftesbury in Dorset. He was a poor law guardian, one of the more regular attendants at board meetings. He was also a farmer, with a farm of about 100 acres on the high chalk downland, bordering upon the Vale of Blackmore. In May 1847 he was called before the Select Committee on Settlement and Poor Removal. His evidence underlined the importance of the laws of settlement to the poor, and also discussed people's local attachments in Dorset. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction The period between 1914 and 1951 was highly disturbed, with only a short interlude between World War I and the Great Depression, and an even shorter interlude before World War II. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify trends in the comparative performance of the major market service sectors. Although productivity growth was faster in the United States than in Britain, the British market service sectors kept pace with their German counterparts. Since the United States had largely caught up with Britain by World War I in services, faster US productivity growth in these sectors after 1914 led to the United States forging ahead, although it was only in parts of the transport and communications sector that the US productivity lead became large, as can be seen from the benchmark estimates in table 9.1. Although Germany also had a substantial labour productivity lead over Britain on the railways in 1935, Britain had substantially higher labour productivity in communications and also in distribution and finance. The US forging ahead in transport and communications, together with the absence of large Anglo-American productivity gaps in distribution and finance, is most easily explained by the increasing ‘industrialisation’ of much of the transport and communications sector in the United States, together with the continued suitability of large parts of the distribution and finance sectors for organisation on the basis of flexible networks, a traditional British strength. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The debates of the time In the century stretching between William Petty's writings and Adam Smith's, economic thinking proceeded in many directions. It is impossible here to consider them all with the attention they deserve: some authors and research currents will simply be ignored, others will receive only brief mention, while only a few will be treated in more detail. It is important to stress just how rich the debate on economic phenomena was during this period, moving forward on various planes, linking up with ethical or philosophical aspects in general or more immediate issues of political choices, and constituting the background from which certain personalities emerged to prominence from the point of view of our account. The contributions of the most important authors would be difficult if not impossible to understand if wholly isolated from the cultural context in which they took shape, and which they helped to enrich. This holds true for the period here considered in a measure that may be difficult to appreciate for those accustomed to the extreme specialisation in research characterising our times. Actually, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the figure of the economist was still far from clearly defined: reflections on economic phenomena were part of general reflections on society and man, and the same authors would in the course of time range over a vast field of issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disaggregated analyses of the industrial revolution in Britain are currently out of fashion. The influence of the ‘New Economic History’ on the growing macro-economics school has resulted in new calculations of the movement of aggregate variables: national income, industrial output, the rate of capital formation, the growth and composition of the labour force, living standards and demographic trends. Aggregate estimates, incorporating wide margins of error, have been accompanied by cross-national comparisons and by the formation of hypotheses about the causal relationships between different elements of change. Valuable though this work has been in suggesting a macro-framework and in speculating about national characteristics of cause and effect its perspective on industrial change and economic development is limited. Thus, aspects of economy and society which were innovative or unique to the period have been neglected. And the industrial revolution remains as inscrutable as ever. This chapter aims to highlight the importance of the regional perspective in understanding the extent of fundamental economic and social change occurring between the mid-eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. First, the limitations of the current aggregative, national income estimation approach are discussed followed by an assessment of causal analysis of demographic change at the national level. The regional approach is then outlined and justified as uniquely important for comprehending the economic and social history of the industrial revolution period. An agenda of issues ripe for study at the regional level is established which centres around the identification of regional dynamics and includes discussion of external economies, proto-industrialisation and critical mass. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter discusses interactions between Norwegian firms in the diffusion of British textile technologies within Norway. I have suggested that this technology consisted of three main elements: flows of technical information at various levels, the acquisition of equipment, and a range of managerial and operative skills. Thus far I have dealt with the process by which this technology was transferred in terms of direct international relations between Norwegian firms on the one hand and firms and workers from the originating country, Britain, on the other. But, once a technology is implanted in a host economy, it may begin to spread of its own accord. In the United States skilled workers brought the new technology from Britain, becoming entrepreneurs in the process; Samuel Slater, for example, set up plants first on Rhode Island and then in southern Massachusetts, training many workers and managers in the process. His contribution to internal diffusion in the USA lay in these workers and managers, as David Jeremy has pointed out: ‘Slater's business operations formed the single most fruitful node of technology diffusion in American cotton manufacturing before 1812’. Subsequently independent machine makers became the primary vehicle of the internal diffusion of new technology in the American textile industry. Pollard has argued that it was the ability to generate internal diffusion, the successful adoption of the new technology on a wide enough basis, which was at the heart of the industrialization process as such. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To what extent were the technological diffusion processes, which have been described in the above chapters, typical of other firms and other countries in the nineteenth century? In focussing on the technological, rather than the economic or commercial bases of Norwegian textile development, this study has concentrated – in terms both of sources and treatment – on the recipients of technology, and on the technological problems which British suppliers solved for them. The central theme has been the importance of active, expansionary market-seeking by the British textile engineering industry, and by the specialized agencies which sold its products. The existence of this industry, and its readiness to supply a complex array of information, equipment and labour, seems to have been a primary condition for the rapidity with which a modern, mechanized textile industry was constructed in Norway from the mid 1840s. What might have been a major bottleneck in the diffusion process, namely the engineering inexperience and relative lack of technical expertise among Norwegian textile entrepreneurs and workers, was overcome through the willingness of British machinery makers and suppliers to provide not only equipment but, in effect, technological packages comprising a wide range of technical services. These ‘packages’ included: basic information on the technical requirements of new enterprises and on the availability of techniques, the evaluation and assessment of innovations, help with choice of technique, the supply of drawings and blueprints, provision of cost and output projections, the supply of machinery and all ancillary equipment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction A ‘technologyr’ is a complex amalgam of knowledge, skills and devices. Even where technology is defined in terms of information or knowledge, this knowledge resides, to some extent, in people and the skills they possess. Both the definition and the role of a skill pose difficulties for economic and historical writing, where the notion of skill is frequently used in ad hoc ways. While this is not the place for a full discussion of the concept of skill, some points should be made about it since the focus of this chapter is on the problem of skilled labour supply and its role in the technological development of the Norwegian textile industry. Skills have a number of characteristics. The most important for our purposes here have been described by Nelson and Winter as follows: In the first place skills are programmatic, in that they involve a sequence of steps with each successive step triggered by and following closely on the completion of the preceding one. Second, the knowledge that underlies a skilful performance is in large measure tacit knowledge, in the sense that the performer is not fully aware of the details of the performance and finds it difficult or impossible to articulate a full account of those details. Third, the exercise of a skill often involves the making of numerous ‘choices’ – but to a considerable extent the options are selected automatically and without awareness that a choice is being made. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter traces some key relationships between Norwegian textile enterprises and British suppliers of machinery and ancillary equipment who provided the technology on which the Norwegian industry was based; the objective here is to evaluate the interaction between these two industries in terms of its significance for Norwegian textile industrialization. The question asked, therefore, is what were the roles of, and the technological functions performed by British textile machinery makers in the development of the Norwegian textile industry? Showing the importance of British machine makers for Norwegian industrialization involves two things. First, I shall demonstrate that the extent of the relationship between the two industries was large. This is of interest in itself, for it suggests that the existence of the British industry, and its active foreign role, was a necessary condition for the development of the Norwegian industry. As I showed in Chapter 4, the textile technology flow was large in relation to the size of the capital stock of the Norwegian industry, but it is also of great importance that a very large number of British firms were involved in this technology flow. At the same time, the substitution possibilities were limited or non-existent. No non-British economy had a textile machinebuilding capacity to compare with Britain's, and it is difficult to see how Norwegian entrepreneurs could have looked elsewhere for technology supplies on the same scale. Without the transfer of technology through British machine makers, therefore, Norwegian firms would simply not have been able to enter the business. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary purpose of this chapter is to provide a detailed quantitative account of the scale of technology transfer, in terms of machinery and equipment supply, from Britain to the Norwegian textile firms studied here. Subsequent chapters will be concerned with how this transfer occurred, and with how technological problems within the diffusion process were solved. The scale of technology transfer is established here in the following way. Using fire insurance records, I have assembled data which gives a detailed quantitative description of the evolving capital stock and complement of techniques accumulated by various firms within the Norwegian textile industry between 1845 and 1870, concentrating on machine stocks. That is, I use the fire insurance records first to establish the changing fixed capital of a number of firms. Then these fixed capital stocks are disaggregated into plant, power equipment, machines and so on. The machinery component of fixed capital is then further disaggregated into particular machine types – that is, preparatory and finishing, spinning and weaving equipment – for each firm. Finally, by referring to extant invoices and firms' purchase records, I establish the degree to which, for two of the bigger firms, these machine stocks consisted of imports from Britain. I show that, within a rapidly growing fixed capital stock, the growth of what I call ‘direct production equipment’ formed the predominant part, and that, with only extremely minor exceptions, this equipment originated in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of a mechanized textile industry in Norway was a component of wider industrial growth in that country. But this in turn was, of course, part of a general spread of industrialization throughout Europe from the late eighteenth century. This process was, arguably, the decisive historical event of the modern period, for it involved far more than changes in production methods and levels of output, important though these were. The industrialization process also involved, perhaps was ultimately caused by, major changes in social and economic organization, and it led to significant shifts in regional structures, patterns and levels of trade, and the distribution of both inter- and intra-national political power. Moreover, this process was not a once and for all affair. On the contrary, it installed, throughout Europe and North America, a new economic regime within which the emergence and spread of new technologies have been pervasive. This large-scale historical process has given rise to two broad areas of inquiry relevant to this study. One is historical: the economic history of the industrialization of nations and regions. The other is analytic: the economics of technological change. Broadly speaking, the literature relevant to early industrialization and the international diffusion of new technologies falls into three categories: Economic histories of the spread of industrialization, or reflections on the problem of industrialization from an historical standpoint. Such works are typically wide in scope, examining all of Western Europe, and frequently including discussion of Russia and Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underlying this study is the idea that we still know relatively little about the technological basis of European economic growth in the mid nineteenth century. The technologies employed within continental Europe changed sharply as it industrialized, but how did this happen? The following chapters are concerned with this aspect of European industrialization; they are in large part an empirical study of a pattern of technological diffusion, describing the acquisition and adaptation of British textile technologies by a peripheral European economy, Norway, from the early 1840s to around 1870. However, the focus of the study is not as narrow as this summary might suggest, for the empirical study is intended to throw some light on a wider, and to my mind very important, issue in the economic history of Europe. Explaining the process of industrialization which occurred throughout much of Europe from around the middle of the nineteenth century has long been a key problem for economic history, yet its treatment remains unsatis factory; for, although the literature on the topic is already very large, important questions remain unresolved. Continental industrialization involved new forms of enterprise in the creation of new industries or the transformation of existing ones, and a broad yet profound process of technological change. But what mechanisms generated, diffused and adapted these technologies? How did continental entrepreneurs and managers acquire the technological capacities first to operate the new technologies and secondly to do so at levels of efficiency sufficient to withstand competition from the world's technological leader, Britain? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]