Ships, shipping, technological change and global economic growth, 1400–1800
From Firenze University Press Book: The knowledge economy: innovation, productivity and economic growth, 13th to 18th century
Richard W. Unger, University of British Columbia
- General purpose technologies
Not all technical changes are created equal. Some have greater impact on the economy than others. Some have more influence on the pace, character and extent of other technical changes. Some, though very few, have shaped entire periods in history of not just the economy but the shape and character of society, politics and thought even globally. Paolo Malanima, Paul Warde and Astrid Kander, in their 2013 book Power to the people: energy in Europe over the last five centuries, talk about technical blocks, that is a group of innovations which defined long periods in the historical sources and uses of energy. Coal, steam and iron was a development block of the First Industrial Revolution. The internal combustion engine and petroleum formed a block in the late nineteenth century and electricity formed another in the twentieth (Kander, Malanima and Warde 2013, 159–60; 287–88; 303–05). Within each of those blocks they isolate what they call macro innovations which created the blocks dominated by the use of specific sets of energy carriers, Joel Mokyr, in his economic history of technology Lever of Riches, also identifies a small number of significant macroinventions (Mokyr 1990, 24–25). The identification of certain innovations that had extensive and lasting effects on productivity and, therefore, economic growth, at least in English, may well have started with Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum of 1620. The context was his programme for thinking about knowledge, how it could and should be created as part of a genuine and rigorous reformation of the study of natural history which he called the The Great Instauration. His work encapsulated an interest in and a growing enthusiasm for technology which concentrated on the virtues of advances. In praise of technical change, he talked of:
[…]the force, effect, and consequences of inventions, which are nowhere more conspicuous than in those three which were unknown to the ancients; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the compass. For these three have changed the appearance and state of the whole world. No empire, sect, or star, appears to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs than these mechanical discoveries (Bacon 2014 [1620], 105). The compass he used as a symbol of a complex of innovations in navigation, ship design and shipping.
In the same spirit and part of an effort to formalize thinking about such macro inventions Dick Lipsey and Kenneth Carlaw discuss what they call «General Purpose Technologies». They followed Timothy Trajtenberg and Manuel Bresnahan who coined the term, discussing the concept in a 1995 article, and Elhanan Helpman who edited a 1998 volume that explored the effects of GPTs on economic growth (Lipsey, Carlaw and Bekar 2005: Carlaw and Lipsey 2006: Bresnahan and Trajtenberg 1995: Helpman 1998). Lipsey and Carlaw try to offer an abstract model that describes how GPTs work and what their findings might imply for research and development expenditure (Carlaw and Lipsey 2006; Lipsey, Carlaw and Bekar 2005, 371). They define the GPT as:
A single technology, recognizable as such over its whole lifetime, that initially has much scope for improvement and eventually comes to be widely used, to have many uses, and to have many spillover effects (Lipsey, Carlaw and Bekar 2005, 98).
The examples they offer include recognizable technologies like the automobile, the railroad and electricity. The frequency of appearance of GPTs has been increasing over time. While the nineteenth and, even more, the twentieth centuries offer a number, the period from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century offers few cases. The only two they find which qualify are printing and the three-masted sailing ship (Lipsey, Carlaw, Becker, 168–75; Mokyr 1990, 68). The latter, a product of a complex of advances in shipbuilding, qualified as a GPT because it continued to have widespread effects and had extensive spillovers and encouraged further endogenous change in newly emerging practices and improvements or adaptations of existing practices. GPTs offer opportunities for the greater use of other technologies and can even force changes in those interrelated methods of production. They also create new fields for profitable investment in varied technologies, possibly even in different fields entirely. The impact of the GPT can continue, in some cases over centuries (Lipsey, Carlaw and Bekar 2005, 98). One of the facts if not the most important one that set a technical change apart and placed it in the exclusive category of GPT was that it generated economic growth. Any improvement in the efficiency of moving people and goods promotes trade, exchange of information and specialization in production. In short cheaper transportation generates what has come to be called, perhaps unjustly, Smithian growth (Kelly 1997, 939–52). Adam Smith gets the credit since he argued emphatically at the beginning of his …the Wealth of Nations that the division of labour generates economic growth and that the extent of the division of labour depends on the extent of the market. For him, writing at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, «water carriage» was the greatest source of that division of labour and so improvement of skills and specialization in production (Smith 1937 [1776], 3–21). The three-masted sailing ship, through the mechanism Smith described, offered a wide range of new opportunities for economic growth.
DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0092–9.22
Read Full Text: https://books.fupress.it/chapter/ships-shipping-technological-change-and-global-economic-growth-1400-1800/13618
