“Extremely Apt at Doing Things by All Sorts of Tools”
In 1549, a member of the future king Philip II of Spain’s entourage on tour in the Netherlands observed that the inhabitants of the Lowlands ate and drank vast amounts, kept their houses very clean, had a high degree of literacy, and appeared very prosperous. Moreover, “like the Germans,” they “were extremely apt at doing things by all sorts of tools rather than by mere muscular force.” Such observations would become increasingly common— and would increasingly center on the northern Netherlands and the Dutch Republic—throughout the early modern period. This perception of Dutch “technological leadership” would only cease at the end of the Napoleonic period. In The Rise and Decline of Dutch Technological Leadership: Technology, Economy, and Culture in the Netherlands, 1350–1800 (2 vols., Leiden: Brill, 2008, pp. xx+633, i149), Karel Davids sets himself the task of examining first whether this perception corresponded to reality (it did, but only from about 1580 to about 1680, though the perception itself lasted much longer); second, what caused this burst of technological innovation; and, finally, why it petered out in the eighteenth century.
Davids spends his first three chapters tracing economic expansion in the Netherlands between 1350 and 1680 and examining its relationship to technological innovation. For the rest of the book he wrestles with the causes of this innovation, building on his own extensive previous work on navigational and seagoing technology and at the same time surveying an enormous amount of recent economic history. He draws from the important work of many economic historians and theorists, most extensively from Joel Mokyr, but provides numerous corrections and refinements to their work. His volumes thus form contributions not just to economic history and the history of technology in the Dutch Republic, but also to recent debates about the causes of technological innovation, the relative roles of science and technology in industrial and economic expansion, and the rise of the “first modern economy.”
Davids brings to light many fascinating pieces of information. Who would have thought that the pipes smoked by the Dutch were mostly made by immigrant English pipe makers, some of them soldiers who had served in the English army that assisted the Dutch against Spain after 1585, or that the first calico printing enterprise in the Netherlands was made possible by an Armenian transmitting skills from India? Davids’s work is based on extensive research in Dutch archives, and his book is full of such telling examples. One of its signal contributions is the sheer volume of detailed and specific information on Dutch economic and technological development in the early modern period.
The author begins with an overview of the emergence of the Dutch Republic, making clear the unique combination of circumstances—sinking land due to peat harvesting, the need for new land as population grew rapidly, high urbanization, intensive husbandry, the herring and shipping trades—that created a kind of “perfect storm” of environmental and economic conditions for the rise to prominence of Dutch technology. For the bulk of the first volume Davids then turns to the relationship between technological change and economic expansion. One standard explanation for the development of technology in the Dutch Republic has been the high wages commanded in Holland in comparison to other parts of Europe. Davids shows that this played only a small part in technological advance, pointing out that in many industries laborsaving devices were only introduced after economic downturn set in and wages were falling. He is careful not to make generalizations based on a single industry, making clear the different economic cycles and speeds of technological innovation in different areas of production. Moreover, he is averse to explanations based on single causal factors. Indeed, he emphasizes repeatedly and correctly the interlocking nature of causal factors, for example, in emphasizing how often “technological change” was due not so much to technical innovation, but rather to organizational changes in employing already existing technologies.
Organization is something of a leitmotif throughout the book, and this appears particularly important in the case of the Dutch Republic, where the highly urbanized population, the relatively less hierarchical social structure, the early growth of the putting-out system, and the need for coordinated water management that involved a diverse group of people—engineers, scholars, townspeople, central government—all conspired to make rapid organizational changes more possible than in other parts of Europe. Davids concludes in this section that various types of technological change and innovation were largely but not exclusively responsible for the economic expansion in many but not all industries. Two important areas of innovation stand out: hydraulic technology, which continued to be a powerhouse of innovation until the nineteenth century, and the shift to windpower in new processing industries. In his analysis, Davids stresses the complexity of the meaning of technological innovation, pointing out that improvement in quality or in quality control, rather than simple mechanical innovation, was often a factor in the growth of an industry.
At this point Davids turns to technology transfer, as the influx of skilled workers from the southern Netherlands after the collapse of the revolt in the south has been another standard explanation for the rapid rise of the Dutch Republic to economic dominance. This invaluable section of the book demonstrates that the transfer of technology was going on continuously around Europe and into the northern Netherlands long before the 1570s. Although the continuous process of incremental technological innovation was of central importance, the influx of skilled workers at various times could be crucial in the starting phase of new economic activities.
After a chapter on the export of technology from the Dutch Republic to other parts of the world, a process which took place continuously from the 1580s through the Napoleonic period but increased exponentially after 1650, Davids finally turns to the causes of Dutch technological leadership. Along with the third chapter on technological change and economic expansion, this is the most valuable part of the book. Davids builds on the information provided in the previous chapters to present a synthetic and nuanced analysis of the interlocking factors that contributed to Dutch leadership, including the diversity of public and semipublic political entities (guilds, water boards, city governments, merchant companies, and the States General), the remarkable openness in the flow of information, skill, and mechanical innovations in and out of the Republic, the patenting system that worked to spread innovation more than to conceal it, the opportunities for risk sharing, and the infrastructure for knowledge-creation in the Republic that involved extensive interaction between scholars and practitioners and led to new patterns of knowledge production. If only policy-makers read history, for this section makes an excellent case for open access to information and relatively minimalist, short-term protection of intellectual property.
The final chapter on the decline of Dutch technological leadership in the eighteenth century highlights some important trends—increased technological and economic protectionism, a decrease in technological innovation to counter economic downturn, and weak demand for “useful knowledge” in industry—but this chapter is less persuasive than the rest of the book. Davids concludes that the decoupling of science and industry in the Dutch Republic led to decline, but this raises a major question: How could a system in which the infrastructure for knowledge-creation was so powerful up through the seventeenth century and in which the universities continued to emphasize practical knowledge well into the eighteenth century then falter? Clearly Davids has more work ahead of him if he is to give the same nuanced account of this later period that he has provided here for the previous three centuries of economic and technological growth.
©2010 by the Society for the History of Technology.
Filed under: Vol. 51 No. 2 (April 2010)
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