Technology and Technical Knowledge in the Great Divergence

Applied Science or Technical Knowledge?

Interestingly, "science" is only rarely discussed as a relevant factor in the debate over the "great divergence". By now, there seems to be an agreement that major achievements in the natural sciences in Europe, even those by such outstanding characters as Galileo and Newton, did not directly influence technological achievements in the early stages of the industrial revolution and are thus not of relevance to Europe's "special course".

This aspect is connected to the insight that technology in the early modern period and, as many researchers now argue, even far into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, was definitely not some kind of "applied science". Therefore it cannot be said that scientific reasoning was in some way "adapted" to technological needs and thus helped to realize artefacts, procedures or machines that artisanship alone would not have succeeded in producing.

To be sure, many technical experts in early modern Europe increasingly attempted to analyse pressing technical problems with mathematical and geometrical tools, in particular in civil and military engineering. In the overwhelming majority of cases, however, they succeeded in describing in mathematical language what they had perceived before, rather than developing new technical solutions on the basis of scientific reasoning. For the debate on the "great divergence", it is quite clear that it was definitely not scientific reasoning that put early modern Britain on the path toward industrialization.

This, however, does not mean that far-reaching transformations of technical expertise during the early modern period were irrelevant to technological change right from the start. Much better than describing these transformations in terms of (applied) science, they might be described as a whole set of interrelated developments that resulted in the fact that technical knowledge was no longer nearly exclusively embodied in an artisan, in the form of personal expertise accumulated over the course of years or decades. Since the late Middle Ages, in addition to that common form of expertise, representational media such as technical drawings and treatises had become part of standard practice. Towards the end of the early modern period, such formalized technical knowledge was collected, discussed, and taught in institutions such as scientific academies, economic societies, and engineering schools¹⁸.

To what extent this development which indeed influenced technical practice in early industrialization is still a matter of debate. However, it seems evident that, it was related to practices like the usage of scaled-down models and measuring instruments in engineering, to field trials in agriculture, to learned correspondence, and to privileges for inventions, patents, and prize contests.

Authors including Joel Mokyr and Margret Jacob have recently identified this cluster of media, institutions and practices, with regard to the eighteenth century, as part of an "industrial enlightenment", to which they attach considerable relevance to the onset of British industrialization¹⁹; Other authors have questioned the top-down approach inherent in this argument and have opted for a broader analysis of technical knowledge that does more justice to a broad array of various forms of artisanal knowledge that undoubtedly produced viable economic effects in early modern Europe²⁰.