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STS.025

Making the Modern World: The Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective

Undergraduate · Historical course

Fall 2009

This class is a global survey of the great transformation in history known as the "Industrial Revolution." Topics include origins of mechanized production, the factory system, steam propulsion, electrification, mass communications, mass production and automation. Emphasis on the transfer of technology and its many adaptations around the world. Countries treated include Great Britain, France, Germany, the US, Sweden, Russia, Japan, China, and India. Includes brief reflection papers and a final paper.

Readings

  • [Horn] = Buy at MIT Press Horn, Jeff., Leonard N. Rosenband, and Merritt Roe Smith, eds. Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution . Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780262515627. ↗
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  • Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism . Original German publication 1904; English translation by Talcott Parsons first published in 1930. New York, NY: Routledge, 2001. ISBN: 9780415254069. [Download a public domain copy in various formats from the Internet Archive ] ↗
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  • Mokyr, Joel. The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002. ISBN: 9780691094830.
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  • Mayr, Otto. Authority, Liberty, and Automatic Machinery in Early Modern Europe . Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. ISBN: 9780801839399.
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  • Heaton, Herbert. “The Industrial Revolution.” Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, Vol. VIII . Edited by E. R. A. Seligman and A. S. Johnson. New York, NY: MacMillan Company, 1932, pp. 3-13.
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  • DeVries, Jan. “The Industrial Revolution and the Industrious Revolution.” Journal of Economic History 54, no. 2 (1994): 249-270.
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  • DeVries, Jan. The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN: 9780521719254.
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  • Hindle, Brooke and Steven Lubar. “The Industrial Revolution and Technological Change.” In Engines of Change: the American Industrial Revolution 1790-1860 . Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986. ISBN: 9780874745399.
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  • Toynbee, Arnold. Lectures on the Industrial Revolution of the 18th Century in England . Reprint, Gloucester, UK: Dodo Press, 2009. ISBN: 9781409982289.
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  • Ashton, T. S. The Industrial Revolution, 1760-1830 . Contributions from Pat Hudson. Reprint, New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1998. ISBN: 9780192892898.
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  • Thompson, E. P. “Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism.” Past and Present 38, no. 1 (1967): 56-97.
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  • Pollard, Sydney. The Genesis of Modern Management . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. ISBN: 9780674345003. (especially chapter 5)
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  • Landes, David S. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1969. IBSN: 9780521094184. (especially pp. 1-192)
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  • Mokyr, Joel. The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1992. ISBN: 9780195074772.
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  • Mokyr, Joel, ed. The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective . Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998. ISBN: 9780813333892.
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  • Landes, David S. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor . New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1999. ISBN: 9780393318883.
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  • Mathias, Peter. The Transformation of England . New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1980. ISBN: 9780231050463.
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  • Allen, Robert C. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780521687850.
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  • Cohen, H. Floris. “Inside Newcomen’s Fire Engine, or: The Scientific Revolution and the Rise of the Modern World.” History of Technology 25 (2004): 111-32.
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  • Thompson, E. P. Making of the English Working Class . New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1966. ISBN: 9780394703220.
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  • Hobsbawm, Eric. Industry and Empire: The Birth of the Industrial Revolution . New York, NY: The New Press, 1999. ISBN: 9781565845619.
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  • Headrick, Daniel. Tools of Empire: Technology and European Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1981. ISBN: 9780195028324.
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  • Alder, Ken. “Innovation and Amnesia: Engineering Rationality and the Fate of Interchangeable Parts Manufacturing in France.” Technology and Culture 38, no. 2 (1997): 273-311.
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  • Buy at MIT Press Horn, Jeff. The Path Not Taken: French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1830 . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006. ISBN: 9780262083522. ↗
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  • Alder, Ken. Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763-1815 . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. ISBN: 9780691026718. (Adler’s essay, “Innovation and Amnesia,” provides an overview of his book)
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  • Adler, Ken. “Making Things the Same: Representation, Tolerance and the End of the Ancien Régime in France.” Social Studies of Science 28, no. 4 (1998): 499-545.
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  • Gillispie, Charles C. “Exchange: Engineering the Revolution.” Technology and Culture 39 (October 1998): 733-54.
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  • Rostow, Walt W. The Stages of Economic Growth . 3rd ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN: 9780521400701. [Preview in Google Books ] ↗
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  • Smith, M. R. “The Military Roots of Mass Production (2008).” STS Working Paper. MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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  • ———. “1875 – Colonel William F. ‘Buffalo Bill’ Cody Proclaims the Winchester Rifle ‘The Boss’ for ‘General Hunting, or Indian Fighting.’” In A New Literary History of America . Edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009, pp. 353-58. ISBN: 9780674035942.
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  • Taylor, George R. The Transportation Revolution, 1815-1860 . Lanham, MD: Rinehart Publishing Inc., 1951.
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  • Hunter, Louis C. Steamboats on the Western Rivers: An Economic and Technological History . Reprint, New York, NY: Dover, 1994. ISBN: 9780486278636.
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  • Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1967. ISBN: 9780195007381.
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  • Miller, Douglas. The Birth of Modern America, 1820-1850 . New York, NY: Macmillan, 1970. ISBN: 9780672635090.
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  • Kasson, John S. Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 . Reprint, New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 1999. ISBN: 9780809016204.
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  • Chandler, Alfred D. “The United States: The Evolution of Enterprise.” In The Cambridge Economic History of Europe. Vol. 7, Part II: The Industrial Economies: Capital, Labour and Enterprise: The United States, Japan and Russia . Edited by Peter Mathias and M. M. Postan. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978, pp. 70-133. ISBN: 9780521215916.
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  • Dublin, Thomas L. Women at Work: The Transformation of Work and Community in Lowell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860 . New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1981. ISBN: 9780231041676.
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  • Cochran, Thomas C. Frontiers of Change: Early Industrialism in America . New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1983. ISBN: 9780195032840.
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  • Prude, Jonathan. The Coming of Industrial Order, 1810-1860 . Reprint, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. ISBN: 9781558492042. (Note: Prude provides an excellent synopsis of his book in his essay “The Social System of Early New England Textile Mills, 1812-1840.” Working-Class America . Edited by M. H. Frisch and D. J. Walkowitz. Champaign, IL: Univerisity of Illinois Press, 1983, pp. 1-36. ISBN: 9780252009549.
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  • Hindle, Brooke, and Steven Lubar. “The Industrial Revolution and Technological Change.” In Engines of Change: the American Industrial Revolution 1790-1860 . Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1986. ISBN: 9780874745399.
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  • Rivard, Paul E. A New Order of Things: How the Textile Industry Transformed New England . Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2002. ISBN: 9781584652182.
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  • Malone, Patrick M. Waterpower in Lowell: Engineering and Industry in 19th-Century America . Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780801893056.
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  • Wengenroth, Ulrich. “Industry and Warfare in Prussia.” In On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification . Edited by Stig Forster and Jorg Nagler. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 249-262. ISBN: 9780521560719.
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  • Brose, Eric D. The Politics of Technological Change in Prussia, 1809-1848 . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. ISBN: 9780691056852.
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  • Dunlavy, Colleen. Politics and Industrialization . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780691047690.
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  • Clapham, J. H. The Economic Development of France and Germany, 1815-1914 . 4th ed. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1966. ISBN: 9780521091503.
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  • Milward, Alan S., and S. B. Saul. The Economic Development of Continental Europe, 1780-1870 . 2nd ed. NSW, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 1973. ISBN: 9780043302293.
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  • Kemp, Tom. Industrialization in Nineteenth Century Europe . London, UK: Longmans, 1969. ISBN: 9780582480247.
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  • Lindqvist, Svante. Technology on Trial: The Introduction of Steam Technology into Sweden, 1715-1736 . Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell International, 1984. ISBN: 9789186836009.
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  • Bradley, Joseph. Guns for the Tsar: American Technology and the Small Arms Industry in the 19th Century . DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1990. ISBN: 9780875801544. (esp. pp. 2-11)
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  • Smith, Merritt Roe. “Becoming Engineers in Early Industrial America (1990).” STS Working Paper 13. MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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  • Landes, David S. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor . New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1999, pp. 231-69. ISBN: 9780393318883.
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  • Mathias, Peter, and M. M. Postan, eds. The Cambridge Economic History of Europe. Vol. 7, Part II: The Industrial Economies: Capital, Labour and Enterprise: The United States, Japan and Russia . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978, pp. 265-493. ISBN: 9780521215916.
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  • Inkster, Ian. “Cultural Engineering and the Industrialization of Japan, circa 1868-1912.” [Horn], pp. 291-308.
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  • Smith, Thomas C. Native Sources of Japanese Industrialization, 1750-1920 . Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989. ISBN: 9780520062931. (Especially chapters 1, 7-10; compare Smith’s chapter 9 with Pollard’s chapter 5 and Thompson’s essay on “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism”)
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  • Gooday, Graeme, and Morris F. Low. “Technology Transfer and Cultural Exchange: Western Scientists and Engineers Encounter Late Tokugawa and Meiji Japan.” Osiris. Vol. 13: Beyond Joseph Needham: Science, Technology, and Medicine in East and Southeast Asia . Edited by Morris F. Low. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press Journals, 1998. ISBN: 9780226000916.
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  • Ericson, Steven J. “Importing Locomotives in Meiji Japan.” Osiris. Vol. 13: Beyond Joseph Needham: Science, Technology, and Medicine in East and Southeast Asia . Edited by Morris F. Low. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press Journals, 1998, pp. 129-153. ISBN: 9780226000916.
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  • Morris- Suzuki, Tessa. The Technological Transformation of Japan . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780521424929.
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  • Mathias, Peter, and M. M. Postan, eds. The Cambridge Economic History of Europe. Vol. 7, Part II: The Industrial Economies: Capital, Labour and Enterprise: The United States, Japan and Russia . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978, pp. 134-264. ISBN: 9780521215916.
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  • Tsurumi, E. Patricia. Factory Girls: Women in the Thread Mills of Meiji Japan . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992. ISBN: 9780691000350.
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  • Honig, Emily. Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1919-1949 . Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992. ISBN: 9780804720120.
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  • Ong, Aihwa. Spirits of Resistance . Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987. ISBN: 9780887063817.
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  • Inkster, Ian. Technology and Industrialization: Historical Case Studies and International Perspectives . Surrey, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 1998. ISBN: 9780860787716.
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  • Parthasarathi, Prasannan. “Trade and Industry in the Indian Subcontinent, 1750-1913.” [Horn], pp. 271-290.
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  • Buy at MIT Press Pacey, Arnold. Technology in World Civilization: A Thousand-Year History . Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991, pp. 108-130. ISBN: 9780262660723. (especially pp. 117-130) ↗
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  • Headrick, Daniel R. The Tentacles of Progress: Technology Transfer in the Age of Imperialism, 1850-1940 . New York: NY: Oxford University Press, 1988, pp. 49-91, 276-98. ISBN: 9780195051162.
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  • Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan. The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Bombay, 1900-1940 . New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1994. ISBN: 9780521414968.
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  • Mukherjee, Rudrangshu. Century of Trust: The Story of Tata Steel . New York, NY: Penguin, 2009. ISBN: 9780670081561.
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  • Johnson, William A. The Steel Industry of India . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966. ISBN: 9780674837157.
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  • Westwood, J. N. Railways of India . Devon, UK: David & Charles, 1975. ISBN: 9780715362952.
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  • Lehmann, Fritz. “Great Britain and the Supply of Railway Locomotives to India.” Indian Economic and Social History Review 2, no. 4 (1965): 279-306.
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  • Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World . Revised ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. ISBN: 9780691090108.
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  • Bray, Francesca. “Technics and Civilization in Late Imperial China.” Osiris. Vol. 13: Beyond Joseph Needham: Science, Technology, and Medicine in East and Southeast Asia . Edited by Morris F. Low. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press Journals, 1998, pp. 11-33. ISBN: 9780226000916.
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  • Pineda, Yovanna. Industrial Development in a Frontier Economy: The Industrialization of Argentina, 1890-1930 . Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009. ISBN: 9780804759830.
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  • Buy at MIT Press Horn, Jeff, Leonard N. Rosenband, and Merritt Roe Smith, eds. Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution . Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2010. ISBN: 9780262515627. ↗
    Listed reading
  • Rostow, Walt W. The Stages of Economic Growth . Original publication 1960. 3rd ed. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN: 9780521409285. [Preview in Google Books ] ↗
    Listed reading
Sources