The Rise And Decline Of England S Watchmaking Industry 1550 1930

This survey of the rise and decline of English watchmaking fills a gap in the historiography of British industry. Clerkenwell in London was supplied with 'rough movements' from Prescot, 200 miles away in Lancashire. Smaller watchmaking hubs later emerged in Coventry, Liverpool, and Birmingham. The English industry led European watchmaking in the late eighteenth century in output, and its lucrative export markets extended to the Ottoman Empire and China. It also made marine chronometers, the most complex of hand-crafted pre-industrial mechanisms, crucially important to the later hegemony of Britain’s navy and merchant marine. Although Britain was the 'workshop of the world', its watchmaking industry declined. Why? First, because cheap Swiss watches were smuggled into British markets. Later, in the era of Free Trade, they were joined by machine-made watches from factories in America, enabled by the successful application to watch production of the 'American system' in Waltham, Massachusetts after 1858. The Swiss watch industry adapted itself appropriately, expanded, and reasserted its lead in the world’s markets. English watchmaking did not: its trajectory foreshadowed and was later followed by other once-prominent British industries. Clerkenwell retained its pre-industrial production methods. Other modernization attempts in Britain had limited success or failed.

This book surveys the rise and decline of English watchmaking in Clerkenwell, Prescot, Coventry, Liverpool, and Birmingham, filling a gap in the historiography of British industry. Its trajectory foreshadowed other once-prominent British industries.

The Industrial Revolution remains a defining moment in the economic history of the modern world. But what kind and how much of a revolution was it? And what kind of ?moment? could it have been? These are just some of the larger questions among the many that economic historians continue to debate. Addressing the various interpretations and assumptions that have been attached to the concept of the Industrial Revolution, Joel Mokyr and his four distinguished contributors present and defend their views on essential aspects of the Industrial Revolution. In this revised edition, all chapters?including Mokyr's extensive introductory survey and evaluation of research in this field?are updated to consider arguments and findings advanced since the volume's initial 1993 publication. Like its predecessor, the revised edition of The British Industrial Revolution is an essential book for economic historians and, indeed, for any historian of Great Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Recoge: 1. What is European about vocational education and training in Europe?

China has reemerged as a powerhouse in the global economy, reviving a classic question in economic history: why did sustained economic growth arise in Europe rather than in China? Many favor cultural and environmental explanations of the nineteenth-century economic divergence between Europe and the rest of the world. This book, the product of over twenty years of research, takes a sharply different tack. It argues that political differences which crystallized well before 1800 were responsible both for China’s early and more recent prosperity and for Europe’s difficulties after the fall of the Roman Empire and during early industrialization. Rosenthal and Wong show that relative prices matter to how economies evolve; institutions can have a large effect on relative prices; and the spatial scale of polities can affect the choices of institutions in the long run. Their historical perspective on institutional change has surprising implications for understanding modern transformations in China and Europe and for future expectations. It also yields insights in comparative economic history, essential to any larger social science account of modern world history.

Szostak develops a model that establishes causal links between transportation and industrialization and shows how improvements in transportation could have a beneficial effect on an economy such as that of eighteenth-century England. This model shows the Industrial Revolution to involve four primary phenomena: increased regional specialization, the emergence of new industries, an expanding scale of production, and an accelerated rate of technological innovation. Through detailed analysis, Szostak explicates the effects of the different systems of transportation in France and England on the four components of the Industrial Revolution. He outlines the development in late eighteenth-century England of a reliable system of all-weather transportation, made up of turnpike roads and canals, that was far superior to the system in France at the same period. He goes on to examine in detail the iron, textile, and pottery industries in each country, focusing on the effect of the quality of available transportation on the decisions of individual entrepreneurs and innovators. Szostak shows that in every case these industries were more highly developed in England than in France.