The primary purpose of this chapter is to provide a detailed quantitative account of the scale of technology transfer, in terms of machinery and equipment supply, from Britain to the Norwegian textile firms studied here. Subsequent chapters will be concerned with how this transfer occurred, and with how technological problems within the diffusion process were solved.

The scale of technology transfer is established here in the following way. Using fire insurance records, I have assembled data which gives a detailed quantitative description of the evolving capital stock and complement of techniques accumulated by various firms within the Norwegian textile industry between 1845 and 1870, concentrating on machine stocks. That is, I use the fire insurance records first to establish the changing fixed capital of a number of firms. Then these fixed capital stocks are disaggregated into plant, power equipment, machines and so on. The machinery component of fixed capital is then further disaggregated into particular machine types – that is, preparatory and finishing, spinning and weaving equipment – for each firm. Finally, by referring to extant invoices and firms' purchase records, I establish the degree to which, for two of the bigger firms, these machine stocks consisted of imports from Britain. I show that, within a rapidly growing fixed capital stock, the growth of what I call ‘direct production equipment’ formed the predominant part, and that, with only extremely minor exceptions, this equipment originated in Britain.