This volume, the result of a 2005 conference, presents essays by leading scholars about industrialization in a dozen countries. The editors and conference organizers, Jeff Horn, Leonard N. Rosenband, and Merritt Roe Smith, brought together economic, technological, political, and social historians, and the multiplicity of approaches of the resulting essays adds to the comprehensiveness of the research. After the editors' able introduction identifying the themes of the book and situating them in the literature, the volume includes three essays largely on Britain, five on the Continent, two on the United States, and four on leading latecomers.

In spite of the diversity of place and approach, several themes give the book coherence. First, industrialization was not a simple break from existing economic structures; it had substantial continuity with earlier practices and institutions. The continuity was partly geopolitical. Patrick K. O'Brien argues that Britain first industrialized not because of its greater entrepreneurship or unique inventiveness. Rather, its resource base, especially its cheap coal, proved advantageous, and its navy provided internal and external security, protected markets, and supported metallurgical, shipbuilding, and other innovations. These factors do not explain the generation of new techniques, but they help to understand how techniques formed internally and abroad found a profitable home. Geopolitics could also limit development. According to Peter C. Perdue, the expansion of the Chinese empire in the eighteenth century led to Smithian growth that made China the economic and technological equal of Europe, but decisions to protect the land empire in the nineteenth century rather than developing a navy and investing in infrastructure limited industrialization. This geopolitical focus is nicely complemented by the important research of Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and R. Bin Wong, Before and Beyond Divergence: The Politics of Economic Change in China and Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). Continuity extended to labor markets, input markets, and family structures. Marta V. Vicente demonstrates how the flourishing, mechanizing calico industry around Barcelona from the 1770s through the 1830s rested on families for labor, capital, and management, and how large firms relied on outsourcing to ascending smaller firms.

Second, paths were diverse, and not only because latecomers benefitted from diffusion from early starters. In Jeff Horn‘s interpretation, French industrialization was shaped by the persistent need to avoid further revolution. After trying to emulate Britain before 1789, France built on the policies of Jean-Antoine Chaptal, Napoleon's interior minister, to use the state to spread industrial knowledge, apply science to the economy, regulate labor mobility, add tariffs, and moderate inequality. Kristine Bruland shows how Scandanavian countries achieved a remarkably broad industrialization through technology importation; government policy that sent workers abroad, workers returning from other countries, and a strong civil society all affected the transfer. The Meiji state played a more fundamental role in Japanese industrialization, as Ian Inkster argues. At low cost, Japan built on existing institutions to import technology, establish pilot projects and technical schools, and educate to form skills and inculcate values.

Third, countries that developed effective means to generate and distribute useful knowledge succeeded earlier. Joel Mokyr associates such success in Europe with two features of the Enlightenment: civil society generated and spread useful techniques and modes of experimentation, and some governments overcame institutional resistance to such knowledge development. The fragmentation of political authority enabled the Enlightenment to solidify. Mokyr's The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009) richly details his arguments. Maxine Berg adds an important dimension to this knowledge base—the technical and aesthetic knowledge of new, fashionable products, which were sold domestically but especially to British colonies and ex-colonies. In a comprehensive historiographical study, Smith and Robert Martello portray the U.S. Industrial Revolution as evolving along many incremental paths, drawing on imported and domestic knowledge, organized in large, managerial firms but more often in smaller, artisan-based firms, and resting on the government for finance, knowledge, and organization. They call for studies of “the individuals, groups, and institutions that initiated the great transformation” (p. 188), and Rosenband answers the call in a nuanced essay about a Kentucky papermaker who began as a hand worker and rose to become a mechanized manufacturer before being bankrupted. For a wider effort to identify the agents and process of this transformation, see Ross Thomson, Structures of Change in the Mechanical Age: Technological Innovation in the United States, 1790–1865 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

Fourth, government policy contributed greatly to industrialization positively and negatively. Eric Dorn Brose shows how various German states took different and internally changing positions regarding licensing factories, forming a custom union, and state-supported railroads. Until the 1840s guilds, revolution-fearing conservatives, tariff-protecting monopolies, canal and river interests, and national security concerns led various states to oppose these innovations. As Peter Gatrell details, powerful government involvement characterized Russia‘s fast industrialization in the 1885–1913 and 1928–1941 periods; state ownership, financing, and knowledge provision fostered growth in both Czarist and Stalinist periods, but poor planning, bureaucratic intervention, weak incentives, and forced labor limited the growth. Empires can limit development in its colonies. Anne G. Hanley notes how, after sustained Portuguese limitations of Brazilian manufacturing, industry took off after independence; the booming coffee industry induced immigration and transportation improvements that formed a domestic market, and limited liability laws greatly relaxed capital constraints for industrial expansion. Prasannan Parthasarathi maintains that India's notable eighteenth century manufacturing development and efforts to gain and diffuse technical information were reversed in the nineteenth century, when British rule gave preference to British-made goods over Indian manufactures and failed to invest in technology transfer or to protect Indian manufactures. The studies of Brazil and India illustrate a final theme common to many papers, that industrialization was a cross-national process in which flows of knowledge, commodities, and capital, along with political power, shaped the relative pace of industrial development.

Reconceiving the Industrial Revolution, in short, brings together experts to provide readers with up-to-date interpretations of a fundamental part of modern economic growth on a world scale.