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.