Les Chemins de la nouveauté: Innover, inventer au regard de l'histoire (review)

This collection is poised to dethrone Joseph Schumpeter's old narrative of the Industrial Revolution and replace it with a more nuanced analysis. In Schumpeter's paradigm, the steam engine, the factory, and the identifiable inventor took pride of place, and the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain became the archetype. There was said to be a gulf between the handicraft of the preindustrial years and the industrial "takeoff" which came to permeate all sectors of the economy, speeding up production and the transformation of national life. On the contrary, as the essays in Les Chemins de la nouveauté make clear, the Industrial Revolution was actually the result of many small artisanal innovations.

The book is divided into three sections: invention and its institutions, collective and individual methods, and the art of invention. Christine MacLeod shows how nineteenth-century English inventors were turned into heroic figures, thereby not only helping to perpetuate the "great man" theory of economic history but also reinforcing the notion that the Industrial Revolution in Britain was the standard by which to judge other countries. Of the authors seeking to discredit the great-man theory, Patrice Bret is among the most assertive. Bret discusses a nineteenth-century French inventor, Henri-Joseph Paixhans, whose development of cannon with explosive projectiles gave the French navy parity with the British. Paixhans refused to take credit for the innovation, explicitly documenting the contributions made earlier by others. By insisting that the development be judged by several learned academic groups, however, he captured the interest of the public and successfully overrode bureaucratic inertia.

Other authors address the theme of joint responsibility for invention by focusing on the innovative climate that coeditor Liliane Hilaire-Pérez calls "open technique." Coeditor Anne-Françoise Garçon suggests that this competitor to the "vulgate schumpétérienne" has multiple roots, including the research of Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin into flexible and small-scale enterprise, Thomas Hughes's concept of systems, and H. Verrin's analysis of the ties between enterprise and workshop from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth. Examples come from diverse settings. Italian silk workers learned new techniques from the particular specialties of various cities, and urban councils permitted glassmakers to circulate freely. In Switzerland, as Bernice Veyrassat shows, the sheer numbers of individual watchmakers gave rise to extraordinary innovation in response to the mass production of American competitors.

John Snail shows that the supposed hostility of artisans to technical change is much exaggerated. Rather, they themselves were responsible for innumerable changes that cumulatively resulted in better production and distribution of goods. Arguing for a new historiographical perspective, he writes that "examining artisanal innovation . . . clearly shows how the responses to market conditions affected both the development of particular technologies AND [sic] a broad cultural emphasis on innovation which . . . was crucial to the long term growth of the economy" (p. 315). Snail points to the notebook of the eighteenth-century Yorkshire wool-frizzing miller John Brearley, with its numerous diagrams of machine improvements and new schemes to satisfy market demands.

Examining technological transfer, Marco Belfanti writes that artisan migration was a key to the preindustrial diffusion of techniques. Only with the spread of literacy and the opportunity to set the "mysteries" of the crafts into print did workers' actual tours of other workshops decline in importance. Belfanti emphasizes the "vast network of competence and complimentary technical progress" that accumulated in urban centers, even lending a market-oriented cooperation to peasants. S. R. Larry Epstein concurs in the importance of artisan migration, whether temporary or permanent. Though full-scale compagnonnage tours started only in the eighteenth century, masters had long understood that journeymen could acquire new technology and perfect their skills by working under different conditions and in other markets.

While industry developed through technological transfer, encountering a new invention did not inevitably lead to change. A novelty not only had to...