One of the longest debates and most fascinating debates on the Industrial Revolution is about the roles of “tinkerers” and uneducated craftsmen in bringing about technological progress, relative to the small elite who were then known as savants and would be called scientists or natural philosophers today. On both sides of this debate, scholars have often taken fundamentalist positions: one side maintains that science was essential and the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century was a necessary condition for the Industrial Revolution; the other that formal science was useless until deep into the nineteenth century and that until then technological progress was due to artisans and their intuition, dexterity, perseverance, and luck. The debate matters a great deal to those trying to understand why the Industrial Revolution originated in Europe and not in Asia. After all, in 1500 Chinese, Indian, and Middle Eastern artisans were in many ways the equals or the superiors of their European counterparts, and hence the almost insatiable demand by Europeans for Indian textiles and Chinese porcelain. If highly skilled artisans were all that drove innovation and growth, how do we explain Europe’s technological advantage in the Industrial Revolution? The same is true for the “smaller” question of why the Industrial Revolution originated first in Britain, and not in France. If formal science was crucial, how do we explain the precocity of Britain relative to the land of Lavoisier, Laplace, Ampère, and Gay-Lussac?

The two books under discussion here both cast important light on these questions, and I shall use my review of them as a vehicle to suggest a resolution of the debate. Gillian Cookson is an industrial historian at the University of Leeds, who has written important papers in such journals as Textile History and contributions to the Dictionary of National Biography on some well-known figures in the Industrial Revolution. Her new book focuses on a relatively small but critical sector in the heart of the central region of the Industrial Revolution, namely the textile-machine makers in West Riding of Yorkshire. She has amassed a large amount of information about the high-skill artisans who provided the machinery for such major textile producers as John Marshall and Richard Arkwright. Cookson is less interested in the textiles manufacturers themselves and more in the equipment used by textile producers and especially the engineers and mechanics who made and maintained this equipment. While the book is confined to a single industry in a relatively small region (it has much less to say about the booming machine industry in neighboring Lancashire), it provides a level of detail that will be hard to improve on.

The compelling story she is telling, based on a lifetime of research in the archival sources in Keighley and Leeds in Yorkshire, is a critical part of the Industrial Revolution that has never been told at this level of detail. Although the importance of the mechanization of cotton and worsted production has been a central part of the story of the Industrial Revolution, we have known little about those who produced the capital goods that embodied the new technology. A recurring theme in her book is a hymn of praise to the competence and creativity of Yorkshire’s ingenious mechanics. Trained in such skilled occupations as clockmakers, millwrights, or whitesmiths, many of these artisans worked in small workshops, often family affairs, aided by apprentices, journeymen, and a few skilled assistants. It is striking how agile these artisans were. As she notes repeatedly, not only were they dexterous and well-trained, but their skills were sufficiently flexible to help them adapt to a changing economic and technological environment. What counted, however, was not only the ability to scale up models and to produce reliable machinery, but also to solve problems and tweak the equipment to make series of minor improvements that cumulatively made the machinery more productive, more durable, more reliable, and more user-friendly to the textile workers using it.

The case that Cookson makes for the prominence of the British artisan in the Industrial Revolution has been made before, but never at this level of historical detail. While she does not explicitly make the argument, there can be little question that the higher skills of the British artisan were an important factor in British precocity. This case is made in detail in Kelly, Mokyr, and Ó Gráda’s “Precocious Albion” (Annual Review of Economics, 2014) and in subsequent papers. Skills may have mattered a lot more to Britain’s leadership than geography, politics, or factor prices. Contemporaries knew this: for instance, J.L. Bradbury, a Manchester calico printer, testified in 1824 that French equipment was less productive than British, leading to far lower labor productivity (Parliamentary Papers, 1824, Vol. V, p. 546). However, it was not the British equipment itself that was decisive, but the craftsmen who constructed, installed, and maintained it. Superior and innovative workmanship was itself produced in a system of apprenticeship and within a culture of progress and improvement. Jean-Baptiste Say, France leading student of Adam Smith, wrote in 1803 that Britain’s wealth was due to “the wonderful practical skills of her adventurers in the useful application of knowledge and the superiority of her workmen.”

Cookson is surely right in arguing that to make things actually work, the Industrial Revolution needed the ingenious mechanics who are her heroes. She cites the widely-quoted statement by the great engineer Marc Isambard Brunel (via Samuel Smiles) that “it was one thing to invent, another thing to make the invention work.” Smiles also cited a revealing letter by James Watt who wrote that “what is the principal hindrance to erecting engines? It is always the smith work.” The competence and culture of British skilled craftsmen and engineers were decisive. Industrialists on the Continent knew this all too well and hired British mechanics to set up and maintain the machinery embodying the new technology.

If this learned and informed book has any flaws, it is that Cookson is squarely in the camp of those who dismiss the role of formal propositional knowledge in the Industrial Revolution and chooses to take a fundamentalist position in the debate. While she quotes the classic study by Musson and Robinson Science and Technology in the Industrial Revolution (1969), she seems unconvinced by their argument or for that made more recently by David Wootton in his The Invention of Science (2015, not cited). Both these works make a case that in some industries the interaction between savants and fabricants was far more intense and significant than the “pro-artisan camp” gives it credit for. She writes of the alleged “chasm” that hopelessly separated scientist and practical craftsman (p. 178), but here the argument is unconvincing and the evidence weak. Even if she is largely right for the case of the textile-machine industry, the argument is surely not true in this strong form for the British Industrial Revolution as a whole. Indeed, she illustrates the chasm with an especially poor example namely the great engineer Jean T. Desaguliers’s putative “ignorance” because he “could not fully understand the workings of the Newcomen engine” (p. 178). Cookson cites this second hand, but the original source in all likelihood was H.W. Dickinson, A Short History of the Steam Engine, first published in 1938, who had a low opinion of Desaguliers. But A.E. Musson in his preface to the second edition of Dickinson’s book (1963) emphasizes—as do many others—that Desaguliers was a much more trustworthy source than Dickinson suggested. Indeed, Desaguliers in many ways embodied the Industrial Enlightenment, bridging the shrinking gap between science and engineering. He was, by all accounts, one of the leading Newtonians of his age, but unlike his master, he was fascinated by practical problems. James Watt famously stated that his knowledge of steam engines was “principally derived from Desaguliers.”

The industry Cookson describes would look in some ways unusual to economists. It was highly dynamic, but the incentives that drove innovators were quite different than what an economist would imagine: intellectual property rights seem to have mattered little. Patents were almost never taken out, and secrecy, while attempted, was ineffectual in an industry in which reverse engineering was relatively easy. Indeed, she notes that in many ways this industry was an example of collective invention, a culture in which ideas circulated freely (p. 212). Much of the progress was of course through cumulative microinventions, relatively small tweaks to existing technology suggested by clever and experienced mechanics who showed their employers how a technique in use could be modified to work better. Loyalty, pride, and reputation may have been as important as standard material incentives.

Cookson explains that “skill is a nebulous concept” but then spends a chapter entitled “Ingenious Mechanics” describing it and analyzing it. While competence, the ability to actually build machinery from blueprints and then scale it up and produce it in large series were crucial to the British Industrial Revolution, there was more to it. As noted, British apprenticeship was capable of producing enough workers who were not just competent but sufficiently open-minded and nimble in their abilities to adapt to changing needs. At the same time, the nature of skills in the production function changed: as she writes, one element of skills was the ability to front-load the ingenuity in the design of the machines, making them more user-friendly so that they could be operated by workers who themselves were much less skilled (p. 148). This led, in some industries, to a kind of technological polarization in which the skilled engineers and mechanics supervised unskilled workers, often women and children, performing more and more routinized tasks. Either way, eighteenth-century Britain produced a class of artisans who possessed skills that no other country could possess; not necessarily the glittering automata and spectacular electrical machines that French high-society wanted, but the kind of machinery that made for an Industrial Revolution.

While Cookson rejects the concept of an Industrial Enlightenment, others have actually added to it. We now have a Medical Enlightenment and an Agricultural Enlightenment, and to those Paola Bertucci has added an Artisanal Enlightenment in a fascinating and well-researched book. At first blush, her book has little in common with Cookson’s. It is about ancien régime France (Paris, really) and it describes a world very different from the grimy workshops of Leeds. But here, too, the heroes are people who were primarily good with their hands, making things that worked even if they were expected to be things of beauty. She focuses on what she calls artistes, a category which might or might not be defined as artisans (she seems to be unsure). They were a small elite of skilled, creative, and well-trained workmen, the crème de la crème of French workmen: watchmakers, enamelers, instrument makers, high-end furniture makers, and other high-skill occupations. An artiste was an artisan with esprit—and these artisans built machines “designed with esprit, which would contribute to humanity’s moral and material improvement” (p. 177). They were a middle category, wedged between uneducated artisans and intellectuals. More than most of the top echelons of Britain’s mechanics, these people were literate who read Bacon and Descartes and often wrote books and articles on their crafts. They were driven by a belief that their abilities were instrumental in bringing about the economic progress that was the cornerstone of the Industrial Enlightenment.

Bertucci’s book points out a number of notable themes about the Industrial Enlightenment. One is that at least the artisanal elite was capable of “collaborations among artistes, savants, potential patrons and the world of entrepreneurship” (p. 117) that were institutionalized by organizations such as the Societé des Arts (which thrived in the 1730s), which is at the heart of her book. She writes that “The Societé des Arts constituted itself as an arena where artistes collaborated with savants, entrepreneurs and aristocrats toward the common goal of improving the arts” (p. 118). This society, much like any other similar organization in the eighteenth century, reflected the spirit of the Industrial Enlightenment, but also the contingent and fragile nature of such organizations. Collaboration or not, the Societé fell apart in the early 1740s because of rivalries and antipathies among its members.

Yet the spirit of the time was not confined to top artisans. Savants played the game too. Bertucci devotes an entire chapter to René Réaumur, one of the giants of the French Industrial Enlightenment. Trained as a mathematician and for many years the dominant scholar in the French Academy of Science, he is described by Bertucci as a “practicing mechanical philosopher with a background in mathematics.” He wrote about steelmaking, entomology, papermaking, and other practical topics. Réaumur initiated an encyclopedic project on the history of arts, believing that an encyclopedic work describing arts and crafts could be critical to the kind of improvement that enlightenment philosophes hoped for and believed in (p. 52). His counterpart in the world of artisans was the brilliant instrument and toymaker, Jacques de Vaucanson, to whom Bertucci devotes an especially thoughtful and informed section. France was teeming with brilliant representatives of the Industrial Enlightenment. Yet it was missing something that Britain had in large quantities, namely the very skilled down-to-earth practical mechanics that Cookson describes in detail. France thus needed to import them, and Bertucci’s book provides notable examples of such expatriates, especially the clockmaker Henry Sully, the founder of the Societé des Arts and his colleague William Blakey, another horologist with deep knowledge of metallurgy who was a brilliant mechanic and understood steelmaking “as well as any in Europe” (John R. Harris, Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer, 1998, p. 30).

The economic drivers of the Industrial Enlightenment were rarely lucre alone. Bertucci describes her artistes as moral people, driven by a belief that by sharing their knowledge with colleagues, their personal interest coincided with the public good (p. 156). There was a self-serving element in this ideology, yet the sharing of knowledge is reminiscent of the open-source collective invention Cookson describes in Yorkshire. Profits were essential, but never enough. Being part of a project, perhaps even a movement, was very much on the mind of the artisanal elite in both cases, and while there remained differences and even antipathies between those who knew things and those who made things, in the end they shared a vision of economic progress driven by technological improvement. The differences between the members of the Académie des Sciences and the Societé des Arts were well understood, and as she notes, without practical knowledge of “how,” a good theory might be useless (p. 126). Progress depended on the synergies between the two, and synergies could only occur through communication and collaboration.

Reading these two books inevitably raises the question of why the Industrial Revolution took place first in Great Britain, despite the Industrial Enlightenment in France. Neither of the two books raises that question directly, but both suggest in different ways that a large part of the answer to it must have to do with artisans and the superiority of British mechanics and craftsmen, much as Say believed. In the eighteenth century, both governments knew this well and acted upon it, the French authorities by their attempts to entice highly skilled British workers to work in France and the British by their attempt to keep them at home. The sources of the difference in the supply of high-competence craftsmen would explain an important part of the leadership of precocious Albion. Another answer has to do with politics: the French artisans and savants struggled with each other for position, prestige, and status, much of it bestowed by the court and the aristocracy. While Bertucci’s book described the artistes as spending a lot of time on politics and power, the Yorkshire artisans worried about rollers and spindles. In Britain, success was largely determined by markets, capricious and arbitrary as they could be. In France, the politics of class and status got often in the way of progress. Bertucci rightly points out the differences between the French and British Societies of Arts: the British one (founded in 1754) encouraged artisanal creativity and did not seek state support. The difference was symbolic and underlines the different national styles of Enlightenment.

The politics of the Artisanal Enlightenment is especially well illustrated in Bertucci’s analysis of two of the most interesting figures of eighteenth century French Industrial Enlightenment, Abbé Nollet and Jacques de Vaucanson. Nollet was an instrument-maker, educator, and public lecturer, who built expensive toys and artifact for the rich and the noble, and had the high-society of Paris flock to his fashionable lectures. Vaucanson, famous for his automata and fancy toys, also was involved with modernizing the French silk industry, but without much success. The reason, she explains, was that he, too, was hopelessly elitist, believing that his ideas and inventions could replace workers whom he thought were incompetent and unreliable with machinery. Neither Nollet and Vaucanson were savants comparable in the eyes of contemporaries to such scientific superstars as Maupertuis, Clairaut, d’Alembert, Lavoisier, and other big names from the French scientific enlightenment. But they were keen on being thought of in similar terms. Diderot pointed out in the encyclopédie that the term artiste was a compliment for a mere artisan but a reprimand for a savant, because it associated someone with manual labor. The skills they excelled in, catering to the fashions and whims of the rich and glamorous rather than the needs of the masses, were very different than the sober and practical ability of Cookson’s Yorkshire mechanics. The French Enlightenment—including the Industrial Enlightenment—was first and foremost a social elite project, and its top artisans reflected this. Even the great Encyclopédie, Bertucci points out, catered primarily to the elite (p. 212) and worried about elegance and taste more than price and cost. Yorkshire engineers (unlike their French colleagues) had few political ambitions or intellectual pretensions, did not write books and chose to solve problems that would make money rather than earn them the approval of their social superiors. There was no need for them to justify their status and work; it was self-evident.

Could artisans alone have created something like an Industrial Revolution by themselves without any progress in science? In some industries, considerable progress was possible without much input from formal knowledge. Most advances in the textile machinery sector required no physical insight that would have surprised Archimedes, as Donald Cardwell once remarked (Donald Cardwell, The Fontana History of Technology, 1994, p. 186). The skills that were brought to bear by the mechanics of Yorkshire were the result of centuries of slow evolution, not only in textiles but in a variety of industries. What was true for spinning, carding, and weaving, however, was not true for water mills, gas lighting, coal viewing, and steam power. The acceleration of technological change and its widening range required the infusion of a new element. Without the “Newtonians on the shopfloor” that Margaret C. Jacob has written about, technological progress driven by artisans alone would have fizzled out, as it had so often in the past. Moreover, a view of the Industrial Revolution that focuses on the “glamor” industries such as cotton and iron, misses the wide front at which production advanced. In some ways, cotton may have been unrepresentative.

The interaction of practice and science created a positive feedback loop that vastly speeded up the rate of progress, and in the process created the modern economy. Moreover, science—if based on a partial understanding—helped bring about the bleaching of the textiles with chlorine, light the factories, and provided them with more efficient water and steam power. The Industrial Enlightenment believed in progress, but was not committed to a particular mechanism to bring it about. That said, scientific methods and culture increasingly crept into experimentation and technical practice, and here and there insights from formal knowledge began to inform engineers. Science alone would not have triggered an Industrial Revolution, but neither would artisans unassisted by the insights of the savants. The formal knowledge and the scientific methodology used by experimentally-inclined engineers were complementary with the technical competence of the carpenters and the smiths. It was the realization that their knowledge was complementary and thus required close collaboration that was the key to success. Many leading British industrialists were interested in science—especially experimental and inductive research and scientific method—and if they themselves were short on formal education, they employed better-informed consultants.

It might be said that on the eve of the Industrial Revolution the glass that measures how much science (all science, not just abstract and theoretical propositional knowledge) contributed was one-quarter full and three-quarters empty (with the textile industry’s glass being especially empty, always excepting bleaching). But by 1830, these proportions had already changed and the glass kept filling up over the nineteenth century. While the “chasm” between practice and theory was not altogether eliminated, it was becoming easier to bridge it and information flowed in both directions. Conceding a role for science and an enlightenment-inspired commitment to the Baconian program does not distract from the glory of high-skill artisans in the Industrial Revolution.