Science, Technology, and the British Industrial "Decline," 1870-1970 (review)

This series of essays aims to summarize critically the “current interpretations” of British industrial decline for the benefit of students and their teachers. But as author David Edgerton knows, current interpretations and issues are not synonymous. He finds the literature “very frustrating” (p. 69), and his book is a better summary of the issues than the literature. Students will be grateful, but Edgerton will not be popular with many writers in the field.

Following an introduction, there are chapters on three key areas—technological change and training, innovation, and the role of the state—followed by a lengthier chapter that tries to put Britain’s technology into comparative perspective. The introductory chapter lists the main topics concisely and explains four styles of literature: technocratic, neo-Schumpeterian, neoclassical, and neo-Marxist. Edgerton sees the first as too cultural, devoid of a sense of economics, considers the second too reliant on comparisons with the United States, favors the third, and views the fourth as politically driven. More generally he sees the literature as prone to repetition, with little sense of its own history and, above all, rarely explicit about the standards against which to judge Britain. Rightly, he makes many appeals for more comparative work. Some of his condemnations seem overdone. The technocratic literature has yielded many useful case studies and much data. Likewise, neo-Schumpeterian authors’ emphasis on the comparative is praiseworthy, and Edgerton later agrees that technologically, “this has indeed been the American century” (p. 65).

Chapters 2–4 demonstrate that most of the declinist literature is based on incorrect inferences, on biased choices of industries, and on incorrect readings of the data. For example, noting that evening classes were not the only form of technical education, Edgerton argues that the “point is not that technical education was second class, rather . . . that second class education was technical education” (p. 23). His logic is similarly good in dealing with research associations, the role of military R&D, and the like. The literature is taken on its own terms and shown to be flawed. But this style of approach means that Edgerton’s criticisms of the literature apply to his own chapters. Examples are met with counterexamples, but too often evidence is given without context. For instance, the number of university scientists may have expanded rapidly, but we are given no yardstick against which to assess either the rate of change or the level achieved (p. 20). The same is true for the discussion of the rapid growth of R&D (p. 33). Likewise, his evidence is sometimes partial, such as with the proportion of Cambridge students doing engineering in 1903 (p. 21) and the destinations of Oxford men over the twentieth century (table 2.3, p. 24).

The international comparisons in chapter 5 are far more satisfactory. British education is compared with that of Germany, R&D levels with those of other European countries and the United States. This chapter is also the most economically literate, with intelligent summaries of the links between productivity and gross domestic production (GDP), between GDP and R&D, the role of catch-up in growth, and the role of growth in the average age of machinery. These summaries allow the reader to understand what can—and cannot—be expected of better science and technology.

The bibliography is good and contains some excellent, if damning, hundred-word book reviews. In contrast, the index is less successful: references to the cotton industry are incomplete, and those to shipbuilding and dyestuffs nonexistent. There are other minor omissions in the text. A few assertions demand citations: for instance, that British manufacturing labor productivity exceeded French into the 1970s (p. 50), or that British productivity in cotton exceeded that of the United States before 1914 (p. 52). The citation style—numbered works enclosed in square brackets—can yield unhelpful sentences such as the following: “Some international comparisons, unfavorable to British industry, are reported...