Technological divergence in a continuous flow production industry: American and British paper making in the late Victorian and Edwardian era

For most of the nineteenth century Britain held an undisputed lead in the field of paper-machine technology. By the 1890s this lead had been lost to America. This article argues that Britain's loss of technological pre-eminence at this time had much more to do with the greater scale of the American market and the willingness of American manufacturers to embrace schemes that enhanced technological accumulation than it did to any protracted adherence to outdated and traditional practices that some British workers might have had. The article also outlines a general framework for the analysis of the rate of innovation achieved through learning.
The relative economic decline of Britain since the last quarter of the nineteenth century has often been attributed to its firms' continued predilection for small-scale batch production and highly skilled [...]