Skill and Technical Change in the Swedish Iron Industry, 1750-1860

For centuries the iron industry was the most important sector of the Swedish economy after agriculture. The export of bar iron to Great Britain and other countries often made up more than 75 percent of total Swedish exports during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ¹ In the second half of the nineteenth century, the expanding lumber industry gradually supplanted the iron industry’s position, but iron and steel have remained important to the Swedish economy.

Because of its importance, the Swedish iron industry has attracted the attention of Swedish economic historians and other historians. In the early days of economic history, the 1940s and 1950s, no self-respecting researcher could avoid studying the iron industry. Those two decades represented prosperous business cycles for the iron and steel companies, many of which commissioned several scholarly histories. The resulting historiography was strongly biased toward business history. While our knowledge of Swedish ironworks companies increased substantially during those years, other aspects of the industry remained unexplored.

The zenith of this phase of Swedish iron historiography was the publication of the five-volume Fagerstabrukens Historia (History of the ironworks of Fagersta). This collective work by some of the most distinguished Swedish economic historians studies several ironworks that merged in the 1920s and the general development of the industry from the seventeenth century onward. ²

Then for a long period, from the mid-1960s to the late 1980s, very little research was undertaken. ³ Today, however, a revival of interest is clearly visible, one focused on new aspects of the industry. Scholars write less about the ironworks and concentrate on the people involved in the industry and on the social organization of production. Much of this new history participates in the current debates about European industrialization. ⁴

Technological change has always been at the core of any discussion of the industrial revolution. Arnold Toynbee’s view of an old order “suddenly broken to pieces by the mighty blows of the steam engine” has been the persistent framework of much research. ⁵ David Landes echoed Toynbee two decades ago in his Unbound Prometheus. More recently E. A. Wrigley elaborated the same point of view, emphasizing a technological explanation for economic growth, especially in Great Britain, during the last two centuries. According to Wrigley the industrial revolution centered on coal-using technology. ⁶

The iron industry is important to the traditional view because coal and coal-using technology so dramatically transformed that industry toward the end of the eighteenth century. In a classic statement of that view, T. S. Ashton asserted in 1924 that the “application of coke to the series of processes and the widespread use of the steam-engine” meant that the British iron industry could expand rapidly. Britain, Ashton claimed, could change with startling speed from an iron-importing country to one that dominated the world market for wrought iron. ⁷

In 1977 Charles Hyde reexamined the transformation of the iron industry as described in Ashton’s work. Hyde concluded that the diffusion of new techniques was much slower than Ashton had thought, but he did not fundamentally abandon the old view. Like Ashton, Hyde maintained that the introduction of coal-using techniques promoted the economic development that propelled Britain to the forefront of iron production for most of the nineteenth century. ⁸

Recently, some historians have made ambitious attempts to critique these technologically deterministic explanations of economic growth. Maxine Berg, for instance, has sometimes argued that the idea of technological change used in these macro-oriented studies is too narrow. Machines and factories are not the only ways to increase productivity. In Berg’s view, “tools, skills and dexterity, and the knacks and work practices of manufacture[,] . . . product innovation, market creativity and organization change” are all important factors. ⁹

Joel Mokyr sees technological change in terms of technological creativity and thus deploys a much broader framework than in earlier works. In his words, technological creativity is “not the same as inventiveness; it also includes the willingness and ability to recognize and then adopt inventions made elsewhere.” He distinguishes between macro-inventions...