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Reassessing Technological Backwardness: Absolving The “Silly Little Bobtailed” Coal Car

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 March 2009

Va Nee L. Van Vleck
Va Nee L. Van Vleck
Affiliation:
Grinnell College
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Extract

Rarely are judgements of entrepreneurial failure and technological backwardness rendered as harshly as when they are rendered upon Britain in the early 1900s.1 The use of old technologies in manufacturing and transportation are claimed to have locked Britain onto a lower growth path than would have followed if new technologies had been used instead. Technological backwardness, it has been said, was a shackle and Britain lagged behind because of it.2Thorstein Veblen made this argument and marshalled a specific example: “silly little bobtailed carriages [railway wagons].”3In my dissertation I argue that the small coal wagons were not technologically backward, as Veblen and others since have claimed.

Type
Summaries of Doctoral Dissertations
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 55 , Issue 2 , June 1995 , pp. 383 - 385
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1995

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References

1 This dissertation was completed in 1993 in the Department of Economics, University of Iowa, under the supervision of Donald N. McCloskey.

2 The metaphor of the “shackle” is owed to Mokyr, Joel, The Lever of Riches (New York, 1990), p. 285.Google Scholar

3 Veblen, Thorstein, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (New York, [1915] 1964), p. 130.Google Scholar

4 The small coal wagon appears in Frankel, Marvin, “Obsolescence and Technological Change in a Maturing Economy,” American Economic Review, 45 (06 1955), pp. 296–319Google Scholar; Kindleberger, Charles, “Obsolescence and Technical Change,” Bulletin of the Oxford University Institute of Economics and Statistics, 23 (08 1961), pp. 281–97Google Scholar; and David, Paul, “The Landscape and the Machine,” in McCloskey, Donald N., ed., Essays on a Mature Economy: Britain After 1840 (Princeton, 1971), pp. 145–205.Google Scholar

5 Armstrong, John, “The Role of Coastal Shipping in UK Transport,” Journal of Transport History, 8 (09. 1987), pp. 164–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Hexter, J. H., “The Historian and His Day,” in Hexter, J. H., Reappraisals in History (New York, [1954] 1961), pp. 1–13.Google Scholar