The Industrial Revolution in Iron: The Impact of British Coal Technology in Nineteenth-Century Europe (review)

For decades, economic historians and historians of technology have asserted that the Industrial Revolution was, at base, the substitution of mineral for organic fuel and of machine for human labor. In this interpretation, the British model of iron production was the epitome of coal-based modern industry. The key components of the model were smelting iron in large coke-fired blast furnaces and refining and finishing iron at rolling mills with coal-fired puddling furnaces. Each stage of the process was driven by steam engines, required massive machinery and capital investment, and created a new division of labor that lessened workers' control over production. The total package produced much more iron than was possible under the previous regime of water- and charcoal-powered ironworks.

In eight essays, the contributors to The Industrial Revolution in Iron collectively argue for a different interpretation of European industrial development. Remarkably consistent findings emerge in their studies of the transfer of British ironmaking technologies to Belgium, France, Germany, the Hapsburg Empire, Sweden, Russia, and Spain. Some parts of the British model were adopted everywhere, but not the entire system. Each country—and on closer examination each sub-national region—faced localized problems that prevented the implementation of one or more parts of the model. A region's iron ore contained too many impurities, or its coal coked badly, or good ore and good coal were located far apart, or the cost of transporting pig iron from mineral-rich localities to urban markets was prohibitively high. These factors have long been understood as impediments. What the contributors to this volume argue, however, is that we should not interpret such difficulties as signs of backward economies or the superiority of British ironmaking technologies, but as problems that continental Europeans solved rationally and creatively, making the best of limitations that the British did not face.

The solutions typically involved borrowing the bits of British technology that worked well in new circumstances while retaining older methods and materials that worked well enough. Iron companies in wood-rich, coal-poor Sweden, for example, continued to produce high-grade iron with charcoal while refining it at rolling mills that also burned charcoal. French ironworks used waterpower far into the nineteenth century, yet in most other respects the country's ironworks rapidly incorporated British methods. In short, British techniques were, as one author puts it, selectively grafted onto native industry. The crux of the argument is that industry need not have replicated all aspects of the British model to qualify as modern. What mattered was the scale of output and what was produced.

The broad picture of iron technology transfer from Britain to the rest of Europe bears a striking resemblance to the transfer of ironmaking to the United States during the early nineteenth century. New England works puddled iron with wood or charcoal. The majority of U.S. ironworks used waterpower, sometimes in combination with steam, until after the Civil War. Where local coal was unsuited for making iron, furnaces combined charcoal with the latest hot-blast technology. As in Europe, smelting iron with coke was the last piece of the British model to prove technically feasible and economically sensible for American ironmakers. And in most places where "partial modernization" succeeded, both European and American ironmasters had recruited skilled British workers to implement imported technologies.

This book makes an invaluable contribution to our understanding of technology transfer and the global modernization of the iron industry. It gives Anglophone readers access to literatures that have until now been unknown to many of us. Chris Evans's introductory chapter is a masterful summary of British technology and the historiography of nineteenth-century iron. However, while the authors' shared perspective as economic historians gives the volume coherence, it also seems to prevent them from seeing the profoundly geographical nature of their conclusions. Culture and even economy had...