Despite a few strident calls for its banishment from our textbooks a generation ago, the concept of the Industrial Revolution remains as central as ever in the economic history literature. The latest addition is Barbara Hahn’s well-written and nicely produced short text on the role of technology in the Industrial Revolution. The author is a historian of technology, not an economist, and clearly does not write for the same audience as, say, Nicholas Crafts. The book would be a good textbook for a course on the History of Capitalism taught to non-economists, provided it was suitably supplemented with other texts. The author strikes a successful balance between old-fashioned technological history in the Usher-Landes tradition, and more fashionable social-construction writing, skillfully combining intellectual debts to E.P. Thompson and Thomas P. Hughes. By and large, she pulls it off, and the result is readable, informative, and well-supported by the author’s immense reading in the voluminous literature cumulated over two centuries.

One of the attractive features of the book is that it makes a serious attempt to place the Industrial Revolution in a more global context. It relates developments in Britain effectively to the rise in world-wide trade in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution and the effect that the ever-greater effectiveness of the British cotton industry had on the rest of the world, specifically India, from where the early cotton goods that so appealed to British consumers came. In a beautiful turn of phrase (as one would expect from a trained historian), Hahn notes that “European fabric producers competed with Asian specialty textiles … until the substitute obliterated the industry it was designed to imitate” (p. 152).

That said, it is important to raise some issues that limit the reach of this book (quite by design). In his little book Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, John Stuart Mill famously wrote that “the great danger in the study of history is not so much mistaking falsehood for truth, as to mistake a part for the whole.” Its title notwithstanding, this is not a book that surveys the wide spectrum of technological progress during the Industrial Revolution; it is focused on textiles, and primarily on cotton. Even there it is limited: it discusses mechanical devices at length, but has little to say about other breakthroughs, such as chlorine bleaching. True, as Eric Hobsbawm once wrote, “whoever says Industrial Revolution says cotton.” Cotton was spectacular in many ways: in its rapid growth, its early and wide adoption of revolutionary devices, its effect on economic organization and the emergence of the factory system. It had colorful successful entrepreneurs, above all Arkwright, but many others such as Samuel Greg (to whom Hahn devotes some well-deserved space), Robert Owen, John Kennedy, and Samuel Oldknow. A warning against seeing the cotton industry as a synecdoche for the Industrial Revolution was eloquently summed up by Deirdre McCloskey’s widely quoted summary definition written 40 years ago: “the Industrial Revolution was neither the age of steam, nor the age of cotton, nor the age of iron. It was the age of progress.”

A book with this ambition and title might have discussed in depth some of the other breakthroughs that made the Industrial Revolution so much more than just cotton. Cotton was an outlier in some ways: it conformed most closely to the “tinkerer” narrative, in which untrained inventors and technicians built and improved new equipment on the basis of mechanical intuition and dexterity, with no need to resort to underlying science. This, however, was not true in many other areas of progress, from water mill design to gas lighting. More than any other industry, textiles experienced a long co-existence of the traditional industries and mechanized parts. The book fails to discuss mechanical engineering, iron-working and collieries, to cite some obvious examples. Significant figures in the technological advances during the Industrial Revolution such as John Smeaton, Henry Cort, and Henry Maudslay do not earn a mention. Her single-focus approach thus risks losing sight of the Industrial Revolution as a watershed event in economic history precisely because it was so much more than cotton. Had there been nothing else, it would have become one more installment of technological efflorescence that eventually petered out without transforming the economy at large.

The absence of economic analysis makes the book attractive for non-technical audiences. Interpreting the events, however, is a different matter. The questions of cause and effect has her at times a bit bewildered and her readers will not get a good notion of what was really driving the process beyond somewhat vague statements that the “causal relationships” between technological change and its local and global context “were complex” (p. 150). That is less than helpful. Ascribing change to machines, she writes, mistook effects for causes, a confusion that rested on “the belief that technology had transformed the world around it.” As her book shows abundantly, however, that is precisely what technology did. Hahn seems torn between her instinct to eschew technological determinism, and her deep knowledge of the nuts and bolts issues of spinning and weaving.

A reading of Deirdre McCloskey’s Bourgeois Dignity, in which much nonsense about the causes of the Industrial Revolution is dispelled, would have helped. “Mythical” versions of history that treat machines as the sole drivers of social change are dismissed, but she knows well that it is those machines that explain the factory system. Flashes of genius may not have changed the world by themselves, but solving technological bottlenecks through what Nathan Rosenberg called focusing devices did make a huge difference. Replacing the age-old methods of spinning yarn by means of the nimble female fingers by a machine that made a cheaper and better yarn was a macroinvention, much like the steam engine and smallpox vaccination. The new devices had cascading world-wide effects, as she shows abundantly.

Economics does not always provide the answers, but it sharpens the questions. What mattered, and what was really causal, was the growth of knowledge and skills and the institutions and culture that drove and enabled that growth. Hahn realizes this, but the causal links to the changing culture and institutions that drove the Industrial Revolution are not really given their due. Whether it conforms to their view of the world or not, the historians writing about the Industrial Revolution will have to overcome their distaste for “triumphalism” and deal squarely with the concept of progress. The “myth of progress” that Hahn writes about itself is a myth. She fully realizes that the machinery she describes was superior, and made better and cheaper products that reached more people. That it was a bumpy ride, and that there were always losers in the process and unintended consequences has never been denied even by the most ardent optimists, and she is correct in stressing them. But behind the mystery of the Industrial Revolution lurked a widespread belief that progress or “improvement” was possible, that it was desirable, and that there were concrete ways of bringing it about. From John Smeaton to Robert Owen, this belief was held by the people who brought it about.