Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- List of figures
- Preface
- Map showing location of firms
- 1 Technology and European growth
- 2 The historiography of European industrialization
- 3 Britain and Norway, 1800–1845: two transitions
- 4 Acquisition of technologies by the Norwegian textile firms
- 5 Flows of technological information
- 6 British textile engineering and the Norwegian textile industry
- 7 British agents of Norwegian enterprises
- 8 British workers and the transfer of technology to Norway
- 9 Interrelations among Norwegian firms
- 10 The European dimension
- Appendices
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - Interrelations among Norwegian firms
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of tables
- List of figures
- Preface
- Map showing location of firms
- 1 Technology and European growth
- 2 The historiography of European industrialization
- 3 Britain and Norway, 1800–1845: two transitions
- 4 Acquisition of technologies by the Norwegian textile firms
- 5 Flows of technological information
- 6 British textile engineering and the Norwegian textile industry
- 7 British agents of Norwegian enterprises
- 8 British workers and the transfer of technology to Norway
- 9 Interrelations among Norwegian firms
- 10 The European dimension
- Appendices
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter discusses interactions between Norwegian firms in the diffusion of British textile technologies within Norway. I have suggested that this technology consisted of three main elements: flows of technical information at various levels, the acquisition of equipment, and a range of managerial and operative skills. Thus far I have dealt with the process by which this technology was transferred in terms of direct international relations between Norwegian firms on the one hand and firms and workers from the originating country, Britain, on the other. But, once a technology is implanted in a host economy, it may begin to spread of its own accord. In the United States skilled workers brought the new technology from Britain, becoming entrepreneurs in the process; Samuel Slater, for example, set up plants first on Rhode Island and then in southern Massachusetts, training many workers and managers in the process. His contribution to internal diffusion in the USA lay in these workers and managers, as David Jeremy has pointed out: ‘Slater's business operations formed the single most fruitful node of technology diffusion in American cotton manufacturing before 1812’. Subsequently independent machine makers became the primary vehicle of the internal diffusion of new technology in the American textile industry. Pollard has argued that it was the ability to generate internal diffusion, the successful adoption of the new technology on a wide enough basis, which was at the heart of the industrialization process as such.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- British Technology and European IndustrializationThe Norwegian Textile Industry in the Mid-Nineteenth Century, pp. 137 - 146Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989