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To what extent were the technological diffusion processes, which have been described in the above chapters, typical of other firms and other countries in the nineteenth century? In focussing on the technological, rather than the economic or commercial bases of Norwegian textile development, this study has concentrated – in terms both of sources and treatment – on the recipients of technology, and on the technological problems which British suppliers solved for them. The central theme has been the importance of active, expansionary market-seeking by the British textile engineering industry, and by the specialized agencies which sold its products. The existence of this industry, and its readiness to supply a complex array of information, equipment and labour, seems to have been a primary condition for the rapidity with which a modern, mechanized textile industry was constructed in Norway from the mid 1840s. What might have been a major bottleneck in the diffusion process, namely the engineering inexperience and relative lack of technical expertise among Norwegian textile entrepreneurs and workers, was overcome through the willingness of British machinery makers and suppliers to provide not only equipment but, in effect, technological packages comprising a wide range of technical services. These ‘packages’ included: basic information on the technical requirements of new enterprises and on the availability of techniques, the evaluation and assessment of innovations, help with choice of technique, the supply of drawings and blueprints, provision of cost and output projections, the supply of machinery and all ancillary equipment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emergence of a mechanized textile industry in Norway was a component of wider industrial growth in that country. But this in turn was, of course, part of a general spread of industrialization throughout Europe from the late eighteenth century. This process was, arguably, the decisive historical event of the modern period, for it involved far more than changes in production methods and levels of output, important though these were. The industrialization process also involved, perhaps was ultimately caused by, major changes in social and economic organization, and it led to significant shifts in regional structures, patterns and levels of trade, and the distribution of both inter- and intra-national political power. Moreover, this process was not a once and for all affair. On the contrary, it installed, throughout Europe and North America, a new economic regime within which the emergence and spread of new technologies have been pervasive. This large-scale historical process has given rise to two broad areas of inquiry relevant to this study. One is historical: the economic history of the industrialization of nations and regions. The other is analytic: the economics of technological change. Broadly speaking, the literature relevant to early industrialization and the international diffusion of new technologies falls into three categories: Economic histories of the spread of industrialization, or reflections on the problem of industrialization from an historical standpoint. Such works are typically wide in scope, examining all of Western Europe, and frequently including discussion of Russia and Eastern Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Underlying this study is the idea that we still know relatively little about the technological basis of European economic growth in the mid nineteenth century. The technologies employed within continental Europe changed sharply as it industrialized, but how did this happen? The following chapters are concerned with this aspect of European industrialization; they are in large part an empirical study of a pattern of technological diffusion, describing the acquisition and adaptation of British textile technologies by a peripheral European economy, Norway, from the early 1840s to around 1870. However, the focus of the study is not as narrow as this summary might suggest, for the empirical study is intended to throw some light on a wider, and to my mind very important, issue in the economic history of Europe. Explaining the process of industrialization which occurred throughout much of Europe from around the middle of the nineteenth century has long been a key problem for economic history, yet its treatment remains unsatis factory; for, although the literature on the topic is already very large, important questions remain unresolved. Continental industrialization involved new forms of enterprise in the creation of new industries or the transformation of existing ones, and a broad yet profound process of technological change. But what mechanisms generated, diffused and adapted these technologies? How did continental entrepreneurs and managers acquire the technological capacities first to operate the new technologies and secondly to do so at levels of efficiency sufficient to withstand competition from the world's technological leader, Britain? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Norwegian textile industrialization occurred within the context of change and transition in both the British and Norwegian economies. In Norway the growth and development of a market economy, and in Britain an important structural change within the world's leading market economy, established conditions for a transfer of technology between the two. These changes produced, on the one hand, the capacity to generate a process of outward technology transfer and, on the other, a fertile environment for the reception and use of foreign techniques. This chapter deals with the contours of these changes, necessarily in outline, for a full treatment of the changes in economic activity in Norway, let alone in Britain, at that time would be a substantial task. The aim here is more modest; it is simply to describe some of the preconditions for technology transfer. If, in the previous chapter, I have been critical of the Gerschenkronian approach to the ‘prerequisites’ of industrialization, that is because of the incompleteness of such approaches. It is not because there are no prerequisites. We are concerned here, therefore, with some of the conditions which made technological diffusion possible between these two economies; later chapters will describe in detail how it actually occurred. Norway in the Early Nineteenth Century In considering Norwegian economic development it should be borne in mind first and foremost that we are dealing with a country which is large in size, yet very small in population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is impossible in Machiavelli's writings not to feel the pressure of the events of his time. His reflections and his political proposals refer directly to those events. Hence scholars, although using very different criteria for their interpretations, have often considered Machiavelli's major writings to be a direct and passionate response to the crisis of the republics or, on a wider plane, to that of the small Italian states – a crisis which he lived through without being able to witness its final outcome. This is the dominant theme in Federico Chabod's classic work on The Prince. But this same general conception already underlies Pasquale Villari's and Oreste Tommasini's massive nineteenth-century biographies, in which the Florentine secretary's life, his writings and his ‘times’ are tightly interwoven. This basic interpretation has recently been used, for instance, by Corrado Vivanti, who considers the Discourses to be not a theoretical work, but rather a concrete political proposal, a sort of manifesto for refounding the Italian republics in a political situation in which it was not yet clear what the final outcome would be. ‘Machiavelli and the crisis of the Italian republics’ is hence much too broad and much too widely debated a problem for me to be able to discuss it without restricting it somewhat and without making some preliminary remarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]