Early explanations of the ‘Great Divergence’ focused on energy supplies and prices, on access to colonial resources, and on factor prices. More recently, interest has turned to institutions and technology. Joel Mokyr and Larry (S. R.) Epstein, from very different frameworks, argued a case for European technological leadership. In the view of both, adaptable skills and technological innovation were ‘what Europe had and Asia did not’. Mokyr grounded his claims in Europe’s experience of enlightenment, a public culture of economic improvement; his notion of ‘useful knowledge’ combined codified and theoretical knowledge. Meanwhile, Epstein placed much greater emphasis on the role of skilled labour, formal and informal training, and technologies transmitted across spaces in the mobility of artisans. Epstein’s well-known argument that Europe’s advantage lay in its guild system, one with low barriers to entrance and recruitment on a non-ascriptive basis that stimulated an expanding and flexible skilled workforce, generated much debate among European historians. His research coincided with a turn in the history of science away from a formerly theoretical focus to the history of knowledge formation, which included artisan skills, crafts, and work culture. Larry Epstein died early in 2007, at the age of forty-six, his work unfinished. Several of his major papers were published after his death and one of his classic papers, ‘Transferring technical knowledge and innovating in Europe, c.1200–c.1800’, has remained on the LSE website until now. It is published in the volume under review.
Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden’s Technology, skills and the pre-modern economy in the East and the West brings together papers presented at a conference dedicated to Epstein. It focuses on the big questions raised by Epstein on skills, training, and guilds, and includes a number of individual studies of Asian regions, and comparative industrial studies, to provide us with some of the detailed historical research, especially on Asian societies, that thus far we have lacked for addressing the role of technology in the Great Divergence. Prak and van Zanden’s particular aim for this volume is to investigate craftsmen across Eurasia. Epstein made the case that massive changes in European technology were achieved in the early modern period up to 1700 by small incremental improvements made by anonymous craftsmen. This volume provides a comparative investigation of topics ranging from collective invention and the clustering of human capital, to the circulation of knowledge and the organization of labour. The industries it covers include shipbuilding, porcelain production, brickmaking, and book production. Its discussion of Asia is mainly of China and India. The contributors are those who knew and worked with Larry Epstein during the early period of the development of global history in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
Epstein’s chapter, though focused on Europe, provides the theory and historical framework for discussion of experiential and collective knowledge, and discussion of experimentation and the spatial transfer of technical knowledge through texts and patents as well as skilled technicians. Guilds experimented. New technologies in cotton weaving and papermaking spread with their artisans from northern Italy to northern Germany and central Europe. Pre-modern non-scientific technical knowledge included significant abstraction and experimentation, but codification was always incomplete without tacit knowledge. Thus, Epstein concluded that Europe’s rapid technical innovation in the eighteenth century was caused more by its highly mobile and better-informed artisans and technicians than by any intellectually driven ‘industrial Enlightenment’ (p. 67).
Three of the chapters focus on Asia’s guilds: those of Kenneth Pomeranz on China, Christine Moll-Murata on Chinese and European porcelain production, and Tirthankar Roy on India. Pomeranz, in discussing differences across urban guilds formed in both very small-scale and large-scale firms, shows these to have been relatively weak organizations and concludes that China’s institutions were probably less conducive to technical change than Europe’s. Moll-Murata, comparing the kilns and workshops of Jingdezhen and Delft, finds a highly divided and hierarchical workforce in China, which included a great deal of unskilled labour drafted in from the surrounding regions. Most of the branches of production there were reserved for peoples from particular home regions, especially the Duchang district, and guilds mainly played a civic role, providing security for the mobility of craftspeople. India’s craft traditions were closely bound by caste and family until the nineteenth century. This entailed exceptionally long periods of training and high levels of dexterity, but Roy concludes that the system tended to conservatism. However, Indo-European trade and mechanization in the nineteenth century turned craft production, which still employed very large numbers, away from the family. Workers in the new factories came from the peasantry and were recruited through community headmen.
Gijs Kessler and Jan Lucassen’s detailed discussion of the labour process in brickmaking across western Europe, Russia, and India discovers no substantial differences between the regions, though the organization of gang labour, the division of labour, and systems of subcontracting all differed. They found ‘modern production relations’ in the early modern brickmakers of the Dutch Rijnland, who were paid according to the hours worked and were closely supervised.
More general comparative accounts by Prak on the architecture and construction of religious buildings, by Richard W. Unger on shipbuilding, by Karel Davids on machine-building, and by van Zanden on book production provide material on different practices and their contexts, but no easy solutions. Unger’s elegant account of shipbuilding from Europe to China, Malaysia, and India concludes that even in 1700 no single approach was overwhelmingly superior. But by 1800 Europe led the way. Unger argues that the key incentives for technological advance were guilds, profits, and training, and that private yards and independent entrepreneurs in all these parts of the world learned techniques of both European and Asian shipbuilders and adapted them to their local circumstances. Comparative studies on machine-building and book production reveal problems with the comparative method as deployed by Davids and van Zanden. Davids attempts to compare guild structures and apprenticeship in machine-building between Europe and China so as to conclude that there was little specialist literature and codified knowledge on machine-building in China until the nineteenth century, and that European engineering craftsmen were much more highly mobile than those in China. Where do these very simplistic conclusions leave us? Likewise, van Zanden’s broad survey of book production and printing takes us through Europe, China, and the Arab world looking for differences in the use of woodblock printing and moveable type. He seeks out the standard economic explanations for these differences in terms of markets, factor prices, and economic institutions. Comparisons of market sizes and factor prices in two or even three such disproportionately sized populations lead to unconvincing explanations of larger markets for books and higher factor costs in Europe.
Methodologies of comparison are no less significant for global histories of technology and skill than they are for wider frameworks of the ‘Great Divergence’. What do these comparisons give us? On the one hand, as many of the chapters in this volume convey, we gain a great deal of empirical information. On the other, as also conveyed in some of the chapters, the broad sweep leaves us with findings we assumed anyway. Reciprocal comparison, viewing Europe from the context of Asia, raises questions over what we are comparing, over what meanings and functions we can attach to guilds and apprenticeship in large-scale comparisons of such distant and different parts of the world. Are they, in Jan de Vries’s words, ‘just two different things’?
I suggest that we need to go back to Epstein’s crucial findings that the force behind Europe’s technological momentum came from new combinations of foreign and domestic knowledge. Mobile skilled labour forces dispersed across Europe’s borders and regions through the impetus of warfare, and court and luxury consumption transferred technological leadership. Epstein’s comparisons across a range of different technologies and skills, and across different parts of Europe, also provide a method for investigating the skills and regions of India, China, and the Ottoman empire. Such comparative histories ‘from within’ the large regions of the world would provide us with detailed and nuanced knowledge of local skills. From those local skills, we could then see the responses to foreign knowledge transmitted through craftspeople and merchants. This would be a history of ‘global connections’, rather than large-scale structuralist comparisons at a very general level that give us little of the underpinnings Epstein revealed in the history of technological innovation.
Technology, skills and the pre-modern economy provides us both with some fine detail of technological practice and with some very broad-brush comparisons. In its potential and pitfalls, this volume gives a real stimulus to new thinking on how to take a global historical approach to writing about technology and skill.
