Technology and Economy

Technology, especially when combined with the workings of the market, has been one of the most powerful engines of social change in the modern period. The clearest illustration is the Industrial Revolution and, within it, the steam engine: for the first time, industry had access to a source of power that was far stronger than human or animal labour and that did not need to rest. Fitted to ships and railways, steam power reorganised entire economies and societies -- railways drove the westward expansion of industry and trade in the Americas and parts of Asia, and in India the railway network, introduced from 1853 onward, played a decisive role in shaping the economy over the following century. Steamships, in turn, made ocean travel faster and more reliable, altering the patterns of global trade and migration.

Not every technological change produces its effects immediately, however. Some inventions lie dormant for a long time before a change in economic or political context suddenly makes them historically significant. Gunpowder and paper, both discovered in China centuries before they had major social consequences there, only became transformative once they entered the context of an industrialising Western Europe -- gunpowder reshaping warfare, and paper enabling the print revolution. A related, more sobering example is the case of textile machinery in Britain: combined with market power and colonial rule, new spinning and weaving technology destroyed what had been the largest and most advanced handloom textile industry in the world, in the Indian subcontinent. …