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The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present
In this new edition of his classic history on revolution and economic development in Europe, David Landes reasserts his original arguments in the light of current debates about globalization and comparative economic growth. Questions about why Europe was the first to industrialize and the viability of the post-war economic boom are as controversial as ever and Landes concludes that only by continuous industrial revolution can Europe and the world sustain itself in the years ahead. First Edition Hb (1969): 0-521-07200-X First Edition Pb (1969): 0-521-09418-6
590 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1969
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About the author
David S. Landes
25 books101 followersDavid S. Landes was a professor emeritus of economics at Harvard University and retired professor of history at George Washington University. He is the author of Revolution in Time, The Unbound Prometheus, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, and Dynasties. Such works have received both praise for detailed retelling of economic history, as well as scorn on charges of blatant Eurocentrism, a charge he embraces explicitly, arguing that an explanation for an economic miracle that happened originally only in Europe must of necessity be a Eurocentric analysis.
Landes earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1953 and an A.B. from City College of New York in 1942.
-Wikipedia
Landes earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1953 and an A.B. from City College of New York in 1942.
-Wikipedia
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June 17, 2014
The Unbound Prometheus by David S. Landes is a work of such remarkable erudition and insight, not to mention detail that it demands of its reader concentration, stamina and perhaps pre-existing interest in its subject matter. The rewards, however, for anyone bold enough to see its project through are both immense and extensive, scattered, as they are, across almost every page of this quite monumental text.
The book’s subtitle, Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, may sound like it prepares a broad canvas, but it does not do justice to either the breadth or the depth of this work. In this case, the present is the mid-1960s, since the book was published in 1968 and, despite the stated European focus, Professor Landes continually offers context whenever events in North America or anywhere else on the planet, for that matter, provide consequences for his argument.
Histories, even economic ones, often concentrate on politics and power. Books on development and change tend to oscillate between the statement of macro-economic data, the social context and consequence, and the policy landscape in which everything seems to be located. Trade, usually, forms the focus and charting its origins and volumes can be both informative and insightful. But, after reading The Unbound Prometheus anew, one begins to realise that there is no observable trend in any of these spheres of human activity unless technological change, scientific innovation and invention are included in the mix of our permanently partial understanding.
Landes places scientific discovery and its application at the very centre of his exploration of the history of the Industrial Revolution. It is one thing, for example, to see tables listing tonnage of steel production by country and by date: it is quite another thing to read the same data alongside detailed descriptions of the innovations that practitioners and researchers alike brought to the processes that manufactured the product. Then, having appreciated these new possibilities that innovation created, macro summaries of production and use quite suddenly become both more understandable and interpretable.
And so, by country, by era and by major industrial sector, David S. Landes examines scientific discovery and its application via technology through two centuries of change, alongside those other aspects of economic history that are always present. We thus begin to appreciate the role of certain individuals, men, usually, of science, engineering, finance and politics who conspired, competed or cooperated to institute industrial change, change that bore consequences for an ever larger proportion of the human population, for it was ordinary people who became the consumers of the products that drove industrial development. Nowhere, however, does Professor Landes fall into the trap of overstating his case. Indeed, his enduring quest for balance often understates the role of science in particular in the overall picture.
What also seems to become clear is that the United Kingdom’s initial and successful foray into industrialisation was more the result of technical innovation, rather than the application of science, married to fortuitous availability of resources. These, of course, were circumstances that could not be repeated and it appears that later developers were more, though far from predominantly, reliant upon science and research as stimuli for change, and, as a result, generated a process that was both more sustained and more successful. Put another way, later developers displayed a greater reliance on the development and use of human capital than was the case in the United Kingdom, which perhaps never learned from its competitors’ practice.
The real joy of The Unbound Prometheus for the general reader, however, is its wealth of context and insight that is woven seamlessly into the detail of its history. An example close to our own times relates to post World War II Europe. It is remarkable that in 1968 Professor Landes wrote the following in relation to the potential offered by the new landscape of cooperation that opened up in the later 1940s. “Once the war was won, efforts toward international co-operation and integration multiplied. The Americans kept pushing in this direction, partly because they were convinced that they would be the principal victims of a return to autarky, partly because they were convinced that this was the only way to put Europe back on its on feet. And there was a whole school of internationalist Europeans, led by men like Jean Monnet, who sought to achieve economic integration not only for itself, but as a means to political unification and a guarantee of peace.”
If the conclusion at the end of the passage was obvious to such a prominent and informed author at the end of the 1960s, before Britain’s accession to the European Union, or Common Market as we used to call it, one wonders why it might be that in 2014 the very notion of political integration in Europe has so suddenly become such a new idea for British politicians and people alike. On the very next page Landes offers a possible reason. “The record of British negotiations in the forties and fifties is a litany of timorous clichés covering the rejection of promising but hazardous opportunities. This sin of anachronism – for a nation, there is none more deadly – and the penance is far more painful than the options originally rejected.” Thus Professor Landes illustrates that there may even be some things in the relationship that might be enduring.
These two small quotations from the book indicate how rewarding it can be to approach again a book like The Unbound Prometheus. Fifty years on, a history of economic and technological change in the industrial revolution, by virtue of the dedication, humility and percipience of its author still has much to say about the contemporary world and the forces that drive it. It’s up to us, the readers, to appreciate the connections.
The book’s subtitle, Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present, may sound like it prepares a broad canvas, but it does not do justice to either the breadth or the depth of this work. In this case, the present is the mid-1960s, since the book was published in 1968 and, despite the stated European focus, Professor Landes continually offers context whenever events in North America or anywhere else on the planet, for that matter, provide consequences for his argument.
Histories, even economic ones, often concentrate on politics and power. Books on development and change tend to oscillate between the statement of macro-economic data, the social context and consequence, and the policy landscape in which everything seems to be located. Trade, usually, forms the focus and charting its origins and volumes can be both informative and insightful. But, after reading The Unbound Prometheus anew, one begins to realise that there is no observable trend in any of these spheres of human activity unless technological change, scientific innovation and invention are included in the mix of our permanently partial understanding.
Landes places scientific discovery and its application at the very centre of his exploration of the history of the Industrial Revolution. It is one thing, for example, to see tables listing tonnage of steel production by country and by date: it is quite another thing to read the same data alongside detailed descriptions of the innovations that practitioners and researchers alike brought to the processes that manufactured the product. Then, having appreciated these new possibilities that innovation created, macro summaries of production and use quite suddenly become both more understandable and interpretable.
And so, by country, by era and by major industrial sector, David S. Landes examines scientific discovery and its application via technology through two centuries of change, alongside those other aspects of economic history that are always present. We thus begin to appreciate the role of certain individuals, men, usually, of science, engineering, finance and politics who conspired, competed or cooperated to institute industrial change, change that bore consequences for an ever larger proportion of the human population, for it was ordinary people who became the consumers of the products that drove industrial development. Nowhere, however, does Professor Landes fall into the trap of overstating his case. Indeed, his enduring quest for balance often understates the role of science in particular in the overall picture.
What also seems to become clear is that the United Kingdom’s initial and successful foray into industrialisation was more the result of technical innovation, rather than the application of science, married to fortuitous availability of resources. These, of course, were circumstances that could not be repeated and it appears that later developers were more, though far from predominantly, reliant upon science and research as stimuli for change, and, as a result, generated a process that was both more sustained and more successful. Put another way, later developers displayed a greater reliance on the development and use of human capital than was the case in the United Kingdom, which perhaps never learned from its competitors’ practice.
The real joy of The Unbound Prometheus for the general reader, however, is its wealth of context and insight that is woven seamlessly into the detail of its history. An example close to our own times relates to post World War II Europe. It is remarkable that in 1968 Professor Landes wrote the following in relation to the potential offered by the new landscape of cooperation that opened up in the later 1940s. “Once the war was won, efforts toward international co-operation and integration multiplied. The Americans kept pushing in this direction, partly because they were convinced that they would be the principal victims of a return to autarky, partly because they were convinced that this was the only way to put Europe back on its on feet. And there was a whole school of internationalist Europeans, led by men like Jean Monnet, who sought to achieve economic integration not only for itself, but as a means to political unification and a guarantee of peace.”
If the conclusion at the end of the passage was obvious to such a prominent and informed author at the end of the 1960s, before Britain’s accession to the European Union, or Common Market as we used to call it, one wonders why it might be that in 2014 the very notion of political integration in Europe has so suddenly become such a new idea for British politicians and people alike. On the very next page Landes offers a possible reason. “The record of British negotiations in the forties and fifties is a litany of timorous clichés covering the rejection of promising but hazardous opportunities. This sin of anachronism – for a nation, there is none more deadly – and the penance is far more painful than the options originally rejected.” Thus Professor Landes illustrates that there may even be some things in the relationship that might be enduring.
These two small quotations from the book indicate how rewarding it can be to approach again a book like The Unbound Prometheus. Fifty years on, a history of economic and technological change in the industrial revolution, by virtue of the dedication, humility and percipience of its author still has much to say about the contemporary world and the forces that drive it. It’s up to us, the readers, to appreciate the connections.
April 17, 2019
The Unbound Prometheus is David Landes’ unequalled history of The Industrial Revolution—capitalized, as in what happened starting in England in the 18th century where human and animal power was replaced with steam power, the expertise of the craftsman was broken down into parts that could be performed by machine or low-skill workers being carefully managed in a factory, and the extraction and processing of ores and chemicals became the basis of production; in fact, improvement of technology, change itself, became the most notable constant of daily life. Landes attempts to describe what happened, and when and where, as well as answer the larger questions such as why England? And why then? He follows the process of industrialization right through to the early 1960s when the book was written, comparing and contrasting how different nations and societies transformed themselves, or failed to do so. In this latter quest he is not nearly as polemical as in his more recent book, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, but neither does he restrain his opinions to avoid giving offence.
The book begins by laying out just what the industrial revolution refers to. Landes is quite emphatic in noting that it began long before steam power was harnessed; that, in fact, steam power was a result of the industrial revolution. But like the hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of other technological innovations that were a result of the industrial revolution, it was also a cause. That is to say that every meaningful invention spurred on the changes that were occurring by creating bottlenecks in the chain of processes that took raw materials and turned them into finished, marketable products. This massive parallelism and reinforcement between innovations and the methods of production makes it difficult to identify the essential elements of English society at that point in time that created the spark that became the industrial revolution. Landes is most circumspect on this point and pirouettes like a dancing master while telling us of the gradual accumulation of small improvements in the manufacture of textiles that while telling us of the gradual accumulation of small improvements in the manufacture of textiles that eventually became a self-sustaining impetus to continue making improvements. Without ever explicitly stating it as a hypothesis, he nevertheless implies that the putting-out system of textile production was the innovation (though it was neither intended nor recognized as an innovation at the time) that was most responsible for starting the chain reaction.
Putting out was the process by which merchants with raw materials, who might not need the high quality output of the guilds, would take advantage of rural farm workers who had spare time in the off season to produce goods from those raw materials. In the urban environment, the guilds held the power of both law and outlaw force to prevent anyone from engaging in their trade. They were not able to have the same influence in the rural environment. In textiles, especially, did the merchant who supplied the raw material and sold the finished product, gain the upper hand on the levers of production. Throughout the medieval period, the English textile industry became more and more a cottage industry, so that it was mostly rural by the 1600s.
It is within this English textile cottage industry that we first see the emergence of the phenomenon of mutual escalation that is the engine of industrial change. Mutual escalation refers to a process where two groups try to outsmart each other to gain an advantage. There is competition between the groups and cooperation within. When one group gains the upper hand, then they are free to enjoy their advantage until such time as the other group finds a way to counter their advantage. The onus is then passed back to the first group to find a way to once again gain the advantage. The group that currently has the advantage will not keep seeking a further advantage because the whole point of gaining the advantage is to realize a profit from that advantage; if they spend on seeking a further advantage, then they are unable to gain from their advantage. Both sides feel cheated when they don't have the advantage.
In an idealized model of the putting out process, merchants contract out piece-work to workers and supply raw materials. The merchants then come back some time later to collect the finished products which they sell at the market (local, urban, or for export). Their profit is the sale price minus the cost of raw materials and the cost of labour. The workers’ profit is their hourly wage plus any skim they are able to take (if they can make the finished product from less than the expected quantity of raw material, then they can skim off the unused raw material and make something else from it). The merchant would like to know how long it really takes to make the finished product so that the worker isn't getting paid too much, in addition, the merchant would like to know how much of the raw material goes into the finished product so he can supply that much and no more. If the worker can find a way to make the finished product faster or with less effort or with less material, then he can gain an advantage over the merchant (but not other workers, so there is no barrier to sharing the innovation). If the merchant can find a way to learn more about how the work is done, then he can use that information to gain an advantage over the workers (but not other merchants, so they share their techniques). When the workers come up with a new innovation, it spreads throughout the region. Until the merchants catch on, the workers profit from their advantage. Once the merchants figure out what is going on and reduce the workers' wages, then the merchants profit from the innovation used by the workers. There is no natural end to this process as the incentive to innovate simply gets passed back and forth. As long as the innovations are gradual, then the rest of the system can continually adapt (e.g. the production of raw material must meet the demand, likewise the demand for finished products must increase with supply).
Much as the introduction of mechanical clocks trained the population to keep regular working hours, thereby coordinating the division of labour, so too did the mutual escalation between merchants and the workers they were putting out to, train the population in the habit of seeking innovation in the methods of production. This habit included the rapid communication of new methods and a willingness to put such methods into practice. Once the factory system was introduced, the habit was well engrained, which was a good thing because the presence of continual oversight by management would never have allowed the practice to arise in the first place. However, the long process of gradual innovation ensured that English society was already full of tinkerers who were willing to share their methods, so new ways of making things kept being invented and then implemented in the factories.
This is, of course, just a fanciful story to illustrate the principle. Landes does not stoop to such blatant invention and, as mentioned earlier, is not willing to hedge his bets on any one development. But he has 600 pages to develop his theme and I only have a couple, so this crude but illuminating bit of fantasy has to stand in for a more nuanced view. It must be remembered, though, that both the workers who were improving the methods of production and the merchants who were improving the management of production workers were just trying to put one over on the opposing side; there was no conscious effort to increase economic production throughout the land. But any improvement in one aspect of production necessarily led to bottlenecks at the next stage of the process, so once the cycle began there were constant incentives to innovate created by the most recently adopted innovations.
The logistical problems of production bottlenecks gave rise to the increasing use of manufactories for textile production. These were buildings where many or all of the stages of production were combined under one roof, but without a central power source (once central power was added, they became “factories”). Although there was improved supervision of the workers, this was initially carried out by senior people who also performed work, along the lines of the craft houses that were run by a single master. Capital was far less important during this early phase of the industrial revolution than is usually thought as the cost of fitting a small workshop of a dozen, or so, workers with a jenny or a mule and a carding machine was well within the reach of many individuals.
The condition of mutual escalation that existed between workers and merchants was not the only condition that primed England for the industrial revolution. The transportation network, with canals, decent roads (at least by continental standards), and every part of the country being close to the coast for shipping, allowed not just goods to move freely, but also information about improved methods and products. On the continent, the roads were plagued with tolls based on ancient rights from medieval times. The aristos, too, were different in England. There they took an active interest in new methods of farming and increasing the productivity of their holdings while the continentals left all that to their stewards while they pursued the genteel life of the useless rich. The social world of the working class played an enormous role as well; the dissenters of Northern Europe had paid a tremendous price to break from Rome and allow freedom of thought, they weren’t about to set it aside and return to serfdom. The spirit of inquiry spread throughout society and led to the birth of science, the Royal Society in England being one of the most active centers of this new method for discovering reliable knowledge about the world.
Although scientific inquiry had to mature a while before it could lead the industrial revolution, it did give rise to Newcomen’s steam engine (despite some claims to the contrary, Newcomen was tutored by Robert Boyle and was fully aware of Denys Papin’s work, the atmospheric steam engine was invented entirely within the scientific tradition). Nothing is more closely identified with the industrial revolution than the steam engine, though it took about a hundred years before it swept the field. Newcomen’s engine remained in its original form, used only for pumping out mines, for about 50 years before people started to think about improving it (but as with everything in the industrial revolution, other innovations were necessary, especially in metallurgy and machining, before steam power could start expanding to other areas of production. Watt’s improvements were especially significant, but there was a continuous drive to more efficient and reliable engines and using them to drive machines. Along with machines came the need to repair and maintain machines, driving the move to standardization of basic parts and tools (e.g. bolt threads, wrench sizes, etc.). Factories built around machines were much more expensive than the small scale textile factories of the early industrial revolution, so new methods of financing such as joint stock companies and limited liability corporations had to be invented to fuel the rise of capitalism.
Landes takes us through the various industries and the continuous cycle of challenge and response that new inventions produced in these industries. Chemistry was one of the primary industries, being intimately tied to dyeing and processing of textiles as well as being the foundation of metallurgy. In chemistry we see another repeating motif of industrialization whereby waste products are transformed from a nuisance to an opportunity. What to do with the noxious wastes of chemical byproducts was answered by treating them like another bottleneck in production and using innovation to turn waste into the raw materials of further processing.
All of this was happening in England while Europe slept. They tried to protect their hopelessly outclassed industries by tariffs and trade barriers but eventually they had no choice but to start to industrialize or become utterly dependent on England. They bought and stole technology from England as best they could (while England fought an inevitably losing war to prevent the export of technology) but they kept running into the same problems that would plague so many of the industrializing nations of the 20th century: industry based on technology requires massively parallel systems that support each other. You can’t just take a method for smelting steel and put it to work in a factory without a thousand supporting technologies from trained workers to chemical analysis of ore. Most of the supporting technologies and knowledge bases were not even understood at the time, let alone codified in books and manuals. There was a great deal of intangible knowledge, as there still is, with industrial production. Despite the fact that the basic principle of mechanization is to take the specialized knowledge of a craftsman and break his procedures down into small chunks that any labourer can be taught to do, and then run an assembly line to replicate the overall procedure, the industrial revolution was always a gradual process, with the whole society learning how to do things without ever knowing that this knowledge base was accumulating. It’s akin to an apprenticeship where there is a body of formal knowledge that must be learned, but mostly you have to hang around those who know how to do the thing until you know it too. This is the body of intangible knowledge that you pick up along the way without really knowing that it is happening.
Europe finally caught up to England in the period just past the halfway point of the 19th century. Their transportation networks had been overhauled and modernized; they had found the ores, minerals, and natural resources necessary for industrial production; joint stock companies, investment banks and limited liability corporations were all present; and mechanization and technological innovation was accepted as the new normal. As in England, it was a long process, moving through textiles, then steam power, and then metallurgy, before every industry was subject to modernization. There is a persistent line of thought that those coming to an industry later have an enormous advantage because they are able to tool up with the most recent technology and leapfrog ahead of the entrenched competition. This is rarely the case, however, in part because of the unseen support systems that lie behind the technology, both social and resource based, but also because of the inertia of human institutions. On one front, though, the Europeans were able to vault over the English and here inertia worked in the other direction.
In their efforts to catch up to the English, many nations on the continent, the Germans in the lead, set up government instituted educational systems to prepare their citizens for the new, industrialized world. The English, however, had found their success through the tinkerers and innovators and had gone to full-on laissez-faire capitalism, disastrously trusting in “market forces” to lead the country to continued economic dominance. By the late 1800s, the leading technology was just too advanced for self-taught inventors to have an impact; electrical engineering, organic chemistry, internal combustion engines, and more were all complex undertakings that required a strong foundation in scientific knowledge and research to make headway. This period is known as the second industrial revolution because the introduction of science as the foundation for technology represented a change almost as significant as the initial period of mutual escalation between workers and merchants that started industrialization.
The second industrial revolution relied on another episode of mutual escalation, although it was between groups, in which the processes of innovating and exploiting those innovations was distributed among individuals. We still look to brilliant individuals to credit with significant inventions but starting in the later 1800s, it was really a web of connections that resulted in change rather than any lone genius. However, by putting this collective cognition to work on the problem of technological innovation the pace of improvements took off dramatically. The escalation process is a bit more difficult to see in this period because the process of discovery had been institutionalized with the invention of science. The scientists were interested in understanding the world, in the production and verification of new knowledge. The industrialists, by this time, realized that there was no better path to finding better ways of making things than using scientific knowledge to improve their processes. Thus the industrialists were willing to spend money on scientific research but wanted the scientists to concentrate on their particular industrial process. The scientists, on the other hand, could only look for new knowledge at the cutting edge of science; they couldn’t arbitrarily decide where breakthroughs might be made. Both scientific work and industrial production were carried out by large groups of people, all doing small parts of the overall body of work. Corporate CEOs could direct their employees but they still had to be responsive to their customers and their potential investors. Individual scientists had to build on the foundations laid down by other scientists. No individuals could direct the path taken by either science or industry; neither the future needs of society nor the time and place of future discoveries could be predicted. Still, the industrialists would try to direct science while the scientists would try to get funding from the industrialists for pure research, the mutual escalation leading to both scientific discovery and technological innovation.
Landes carries the reader through the First World War, the interwar years and the ruinous reparations imposed on Germany (though he is quite firm in his belief that this was a new situation in the world and had Germany been the victor, they would have been equally hard on their enemies, and so Europe was in a kind of trap). He takes us through the depression and the Nazi re-armament, World War II and the rebuilding of Europe (With the Americans, at least, having learned the lesson of the first go around). The story he tells of the 20th century is really one of economics rather than innovation and at one point, he even goes so far as to make the ludicrous argument that all 20th century inventions (up to the mid 60s when this was written) were merely incremental improvements on technology that existed at the turn of the century. But the strength of the book is really the marvellously detailed history of the industrial revolution, first in England, then in Europe (with a bit about North America and Australia; the rise of Asia being a bit too recent for much discussion). The reader often wishes for photographs and illustrations, for many of the inventions are now so deep in history that very few people will know what they are (thankfully, and despite Landes’ cheap shot at 20th century technology, there is the internet). With only 600 pages, though, he cannot give more than an overview of many of the technologies that required hundreds of innovations to get to their ultimate form (steam engines as just one example of many) but the main thrust of the book is to show how industrialization became a self-sustaining activity with no end in sight. For that story, this book succeeds mightily. Highly recommended to anyone who is even slightly interested in technology.
The book begins by laying out just what the industrial revolution refers to. Landes is quite emphatic in noting that it began long before steam power was harnessed; that, in fact, steam power was a result of the industrial revolution. But like the hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of other technological innovations that were a result of the industrial revolution, it was also a cause. That is to say that every meaningful invention spurred on the changes that were occurring by creating bottlenecks in the chain of processes that took raw materials and turned them into finished, marketable products. This massive parallelism and reinforcement between innovations and the methods of production makes it difficult to identify the essential elements of English society at that point in time that created the spark that became the industrial revolution. Landes is most circumspect on this point and pirouettes like a dancing master while telling us of the gradual accumulation of small improvements in the manufacture of textiles that while telling us of the gradual accumulation of small improvements in the manufacture of textiles that eventually became a self-sustaining impetus to continue making improvements. Without ever explicitly stating it as a hypothesis, he nevertheless implies that the putting-out system of textile production was the innovation (though it was neither intended nor recognized as an innovation at the time) that was most responsible for starting the chain reaction.
Putting out was the process by which merchants with raw materials, who might not need the high quality output of the guilds, would take advantage of rural farm workers who had spare time in the off season to produce goods from those raw materials. In the urban environment, the guilds held the power of both law and outlaw force to prevent anyone from engaging in their trade. They were not able to have the same influence in the rural environment. In textiles, especially, did the merchant who supplied the raw material and sold the finished product, gain the upper hand on the levers of production. Throughout the medieval period, the English textile industry became more and more a cottage industry, so that it was mostly rural by the 1600s.
It is within this English textile cottage industry that we first see the emergence of the phenomenon of mutual escalation that is the engine of industrial change. Mutual escalation refers to a process where two groups try to outsmart each other to gain an advantage. There is competition between the groups and cooperation within. When one group gains the upper hand, then they are free to enjoy their advantage until such time as the other group finds a way to counter their advantage. The onus is then passed back to the first group to find a way to once again gain the advantage. The group that currently has the advantage will not keep seeking a further advantage because the whole point of gaining the advantage is to realize a profit from that advantage; if they spend on seeking a further advantage, then they are unable to gain from their advantage. Both sides feel cheated when they don't have the advantage.
In an idealized model of the putting out process, merchants contract out piece-work to workers and supply raw materials. The merchants then come back some time later to collect the finished products which they sell at the market (local, urban, or for export). Their profit is the sale price minus the cost of raw materials and the cost of labour. The workers’ profit is their hourly wage plus any skim they are able to take (if they can make the finished product from less than the expected quantity of raw material, then they can skim off the unused raw material and make something else from it). The merchant would like to know how long it really takes to make the finished product so that the worker isn't getting paid too much, in addition, the merchant would like to know how much of the raw material goes into the finished product so he can supply that much and no more. If the worker can find a way to make the finished product faster or with less effort or with less material, then he can gain an advantage over the merchant (but not other workers, so there is no barrier to sharing the innovation). If the merchant can find a way to learn more about how the work is done, then he can use that information to gain an advantage over the workers (but not other merchants, so they share their techniques). When the workers come up with a new innovation, it spreads throughout the region. Until the merchants catch on, the workers profit from their advantage. Once the merchants figure out what is going on and reduce the workers' wages, then the merchants profit from the innovation used by the workers. There is no natural end to this process as the incentive to innovate simply gets passed back and forth. As long as the innovations are gradual, then the rest of the system can continually adapt (e.g. the production of raw material must meet the demand, likewise the demand for finished products must increase with supply).
Much as the introduction of mechanical clocks trained the population to keep regular working hours, thereby coordinating the division of labour, so too did the mutual escalation between merchants and the workers they were putting out to, train the population in the habit of seeking innovation in the methods of production. This habit included the rapid communication of new methods and a willingness to put such methods into practice. Once the factory system was introduced, the habit was well engrained, which was a good thing because the presence of continual oversight by management would never have allowed the practice to arise in the first place. However, the long process of gradual innovation ensured that English society was already full of tinkerers who were willing to share their methods, so new ways of making things kept being invented and then implemented in the factories.
This is, of course, just a fanciful story to illustrate the principle. Landes does not stoop to such blatant invention and, as mentioned earlier, is not willing to hedge his bets on any one development. But he has 600 pages to develop his theme and I only have a couple, so this crude but illuminating bit of fantasy has to stand in for a more nuanced view. It must be remembered, though, that both the workers who were improving the methods of production and the merchants who were improving the management of production workers were just trying to put one over on the opposing side; there was no conscious effort to increase economic production throughout the land. But any improvement in one aspect of production necessarily led to bottlenecks at the next stage of the process, so once the cycle began there were constant incentives to innovate created by the most recently adopted innovations.
The logistical problems of production bottlenecks gave rise to the increasing use of manufactories for textile production. These were buildings where many or all of the stages of production were combined under one roof, but without a central power source (once central power was added, they became “factories”). Although there was improved supervision of the workers, this was initially carried out by senior people who also performed work, along the lines of the craft houses that were run by a single master. Capital was far less important during this early phase of the industrial revolution than is usually thought as the cost of fitting a small workshop of a dozen, or so, workers with a jenny or a mule and a carding machine was well within the reach of many individuals.
The condition of mutual escalation that existed between workers and merchants was not the only condition that primed England for the industrial revolution. The transportation network, with canals, decent roads (at least by continental standards), and every part of the country being close to the coast for shipping, allowed not just goods to move freely, but also information about improved methods and products. On the continent, the roads were plagued with tolls based on ancient rights from medieval times. The aristos, too, were different in England. There they took an active interest in new methods of farming and increasing the productivity of their holdings while the continentals left all that to their stewards while they pursued the genteel life of the useless rich. The social world of the working class played an enormous role as well; the dissenters of Northern Europe had paid a tremendous price to break from Rome and allow freedom of thought, they weren’t about to set it aside and return to serfdom. The spirit of inquiry spread throughout society and led to the birth of science, the Royal Society in England being one of the most active centers of this new method for discovering reliable knowledge about the world.
Although scientific inquiry had to mature a while before it could lead the industrial revolution, it did give rise to Newcomen’s steam engine (despite some claims to the contrary, Newcomen was tutored by Robert Boyle and was fully aware of Denys Papin’s work, the atmospheric steam engine was invented entirely within the scientific tradition). Nothing is more closely identified with the industrial revolution than the steam engine, though it took about a hundred years before it swept the field. Newcomen’s engine remained in its original form, used only for pumping out mines, for about 50 years before people started to think about improving it (but as with everything in the industrial revolution, other innovations were necessary, especially in metallurgy and machining, before steam power could start expanding to other areas of production. Watt’s improvements were especially significant, but there was a continuous drive to more efficient and reliable engines and using them to drive machines. Along with machines came the need to repair and maintain machines, driving the move to standardization of basic parts and tools (e.g. bolt threads, wrench sizes, etc.). Factories built around machines were much more expensive than the small scale textile factories of the early industrial revolution, so new methods of financing such as joint stock companies and limited liability corporations had to be invented to fuel the rise of capitalism.
Landes takes us through the various industries and the continuous cycle of challenge and response that new inventions produced in these industries. Chemistry was one of the primary industries, being intimately tied to dyeing and processing of textiles as well as being the foundation of metallurgy. In chemistry we see another repeating motif of industrialization whereby waste products are transformed from a nuisance to an opportunity. What to do with the noxious wastes of chemical byproducts was answered by treating them like another bottleneck in production and using innovation to turn waste into the raw materials of further processing.
All of this was happening in England while Europe slept. They tried to protect their hopelessly outclassed industries by tariffs and trade barriers but eventually they had no choice but to start to industrialize or become utterly dependent on England. They bought and stole technology from England as best they could (while England fought an inevitably losing war to prevent the export of technology) but they kept running into the same problems that would plague so many of the industrializing nations of the 20th century: industry based on technology requires massively parallel systems that support each other. You can’t just take a method for smelting steel and put it to work in a factory without a thousand supporting technologies from trained workers to chemical analysis of ore. Most of the supporting technologies and knowledge bases were not even understood at the time, let alone codified in books and manuals. There was a great deal of intangible knowledge, as there still is, with industrial production. Despite the fact that the basic principle of mechanization is to take the specialized knowledge of a craftsman and break his procedures down into small chunks that any labourer can be taught to do, and then run an assembly line to replicate the overall procedure, the industrial revolution was always a gradual process, with the whole society learning how to do things without ever knowing that this knowledge base was accumulating. It’s akin to an apprenticeship where there is a body of formal knowledge that must be learned, but mostly you have to hang around those who know how to do the thing until you know it too. This is the body of intangible knowledge that you pick up along the way without really knowing that it is happening.
Europe finally caught up to England in the period just past the halfway point of the 19th century. Their transportation networks had been overhauled and modernized; they had found the ores, minerals, and natural resources necessary for industrial production; joint stock companies, investment banks and limited liability corporations were all present; and mechanization and technological innovation was accepted as the new normal. As in England, it was a long process, moving through textiles, then steam power, and then metallurgy, before every industry was subject to modernization. There is a persistent line of thought that those coming to an industry later have an enormous advantage because they are able to tool up with the most recent technology and leapfrog ahead of the entrenched competition. This is rarely the case, however, in part because of the unseen support systems that lie behind the technology, both social and resource based, but also because of the inertia of human institutions. On one front, though, the Europeans were able to vault over the English and here inertia worked in the other direction.
In their efforts to catch up to the English, many nations on the continent, the Germans in the lead, set up government instituted educational systems to prepare their citizens for the new, industrialized world. The English, however, had found their success through the tinkerers and innovators and had gone to full-on laissez-faire capitalism, disastrously trusting in “market forces” to lead the country to continued economic dominance. By the late 1800s, the leading technology was just too advanced for self-taught inventors to have an impact; electrical engineering, organic chemistry, internal combustion engines, and more were all complex undertakings that required a strong foundation in scientific knowledge and research to make headway. This period is known as the second industrial revolution because the introduction of science as the foundation for technology represented a change almost as significant as the initial period of mutual escalation between workers and merchants that started industrialization.
The second industrial revolution relied on another episode of mutual escalation, although it was between groups, in which the processes of innovating and exploiting those innovations was distributed among individuals. We still look to brilliant individuals to credit with significant inventions but starting in the later 1800s, it was really a web of connections that resulted in change rather than any lone genius. However, by putting this collective cognition to work on the problem of technological innovation the pace of improvements took off dramatically. The escalation process is a bit more difficult to see in this period because the process of discovery had been institutionalized with the invention of science. The scientists were interested in understanding the world, in the production and verification of new knowledge. The industrialists, by this time, realized that there was no better path to finding better ways of making things than using scientific knowledge to improve their processes. Thus the industrialists were willing to spend money on scientific research but wanted the scientists to concentrate on their particular industrial process. The scientists, on the other hand, could only look for new knowledge at the cutting edge of science; they couldn’t arbitrarily decide where breakthroughs might be made. Both scientific work and industrial production were carried out by large groups of people, all doing small parts of the overall body of work. Corporate CEOs could direct their employees but they still had to be responsive to their customers and their potential investors. Individual scientists had to build on the foundations laid down by other scientists. No individuals could direct the path taken by either science or industry; neither the future needs of society nor the time and place of future discoveries could be predicted. Still, the industrialists would try to direct science while the scientists would try to get funding from the industrialists for pure research, the mutual escalation leading to both scientific discovery and technological innovation.
Landes carries the reader through the First World War, the interwar years and the ruinous reparations imposed on Germany (though he is quite firm in his belief that this was a new situation in the world and had Germany been the victor, they would have been equally hard on their enemies, and so Europe was in a kind of trap). He takes us through the depression and the Nazi re-armament, World War II and the rebuilding of Europe (With the Americans, at least, having learned the lesson of the first go around). The story he tells of the 20th century is really one of economics rather than innovation and at one point, he even goes so far as to make the ludicrous argument that all 20th century inventions (up to the mid 60s when this was written) were merely incremental improvements on technology that existed at the turn of the century. But the strength of the book is really the marvellously detailed history of the industrial revolution, first in England, then in Europe (with a bit about North America and Australia; the rise of Asia being a bit too recent for much discussion). The reader often wishes for photographs and illustrations, for many of the inventions are now so deep in history that very few people will know what they are (thankfully, and despite Landes’ cheap shot at 20th century technology, there is the internet). With only 600 pages, though, he cannot give more than an overview of many of the technologies that required hundreds of innovations to get to their ultimate form (steam engines as just one example of many) but the main thrust of the book is to show how industrialization became a self-sustaining activity with no end in sight. For that story, this book succeeds mightily. Highly recommended to anyone who is even slightly interested in technology.
October 22, 2023
Un classico. Lungo, lento e pesante ma allo stesso tempo completo e imprescindibile. Pur portando pienamente i suoi anni allo stesso tempo mantiene una chiarezza, completezza e fruibilità incredibile
November 19, 2024
like kinda boring
November 7, 2018
A surprisingly clear-headed book in many ways about methodology, shortcomings of too little hindsight, and some depressingly relevant bits about ideology and economics that sound too prophetic to be real in late 2018. The epilogue chapter in this new edition was odd, however, and felt largely like the built-up irritation with shallow political buzzword inundation, and so read as rather too reactionary in an unpleasant and potentially largely false direction. I, however, am no expert, so I'm not much one to verify the truth, only the tone.
October 3, 2013
Very important, detailed book about the emergence of a Western industrial self-sustaining machine. In particular, I appreciated his decision to focus on particular industries, like textiles and metallurgy, down to the nitty-gritty. (I recall reading a piece somewhere a couple of years back where the author said that he never knew what a textile actually was in all of his years of history classes. You can't read this book without learning a fair bit about technology.)
April 15, 2025
> "History...is a sacrifice on the altar of hope - hope that man will one day know more about man and be able to master himself as he now masters nature"
David S. Landes provides a broad survey of how the Industrial Revolution was triggered within and how it changed those prominent Western European countries - Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland. The structure of the book is chronological; focus is first placed on Great Britain as it was ground zero for the Industrial Revolution, then as the timeline progresses more nations are introduced.
This is a technical read. Landes holds no punches in providing fine details on how specific technologies were developed and how they reoriented a given industry.
> "By this time, however, the definitive triumph of coal was assured by the invention of a quite different technique—Henry Cort’s combination of puddling and rolling (patents of 1784 and 1783). The former process made use of a reverberatory furnace to decarburize the pig in one step, alternately heating and cooling the metal until the wrought iron could be separated out by reason of its higher melting-point. After some preliminary hammering, the rolling mill—long used for such light work as slitting rods—"
Many pages are spent, sometimes excessively, like the above - going over how a particular refining technique was performed or how textiles might have been cleaned. Obviously, this offers an exceptional level of depth and shows just how closely Landes examined and interrogated the archives, but in my opinion it added little to my interpretation of how the technique actually effected change. I will admit that this makes me sound a bit unsophisticated, but some output statistics would've sufficed.
When these are provided, however, like in the case of steel's dramatic surge in output throughout the end of the 19th century, the story told by the numbers is breathtaking. David does an excellent job in really driving home how staggering the growth was over the period, from a macro and micro level.
One other nitpick I have is with the author's use of (untranslated) German and French company or organization names, as well as certain phrases. The Kindle app didn't have a built-in means of translating these so the process of looking them up or foregoing that and skipping over those unfamiliar foreign texts would have caused a break in my reading experience.
If the point hasn't been brought home yet, then I'll be explicit: this is not an easy read. The writing, though exceptional at times and treated with a lot of care, is often dense and hard to interpret. The content is also not accessible. The author assumes you have at least some background in Economics (he'll often refer to Keynes or Schumpeter to name a few notables), and your historical understanding of the period covered is assumed to be at least conversational.
To add to the struggle when reading this, Kindle version of this book at least has several typos or editing errors. It would be good for this to get a once-over because it felt slightly unpolished when I encountered these throughout all of the book.
Now, that's all of the bad. The good is that the writing is, again, exceptional. David is sharp, sometimes snarky, self-aware, and a gifted storyteller. The "pacing" of the story of Western Europe's development feels just right. Often I fond myself laughing out loud as I hit on one of his often-prescient pieces of commentary.
> "no one is more prolific of nomenclature than the historian, who cannot resist the opportunity to designate each chronological section of his subject by some pithy title—the Age of the Enlightenment, the Era of Good Feeling, the Age of Reform—partly for pedagogic or heuristic convenience, partly for proclamatory effect, partly as a surrogate for understanding...So we have the Age of Steel."
David also evades a common pitfall of many historians or economists who cover a given historical period or event, and makes a point to preserve the complexity of the subject without attempting to boil it down to certain simplistic takeaways. There are many lessons to learn from the development experience of the countries covered, as well as certain general bits of insight (I have over 100 bookmarks). However, David doesn't pretend to know the "single secret" to industrial development and he makes a point of showcasing how diverse the process can be in its pacing, shortcomings, and impact.
I read this book because I wanted a better framework to understand how we (the collective we) might respond in the coming decades in an age of major disruption through Artificial Intelligence. I think this book has given me a lot of tools and frameworks as well as a useful lens to contemplate how different countries might respond and industries might change.
I recommend giving this a read, given that you are willing to sit through those gritty bits of detail.
David S. Landes provides a broad survey of how the Industrial Revolution was triggered within and how it changed those prominent Western European countries - Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland. The structure of the book is chronological; focus is first placed on Great Britain as it was ground zero for the Industrial Revolution, then as the timeline progresses more nations are introduced.
This is a technical read. Landes holds no punches in providing fine details on how specific technologies were developed and how they reoriented a given industry.
> "By this time, however, the definitive triumph of coal was assured by the invention of a quite different technique—Henry Cort’s combination of puddling and rolling (patents of 1784 and 1783). The former process made use of a reverberatory furnace to decarburize the pig in one step, alternately heating and cooling the metal until the wrought iron could be separated out by reason of its higher melting-point. After some preliminary hammering, the rolling mill—long used for such light work as slitting rods—"
Many pages are spent, sometimes excessively, like the above - going over how a particular refining technique was performed or how textiles might have been cleaned. Obviously, this offers an exceptional level of depth and shows just how closely Landes examined and interrogated the archives, but in my opinion it added little to my interpretation of how the technique actually effected change. I will admit that this makes me sound a bit unsophisticated, but some output statistics would've sufficed.
When these are provided, however, like in the case of steel's dramatic surge in output throughout the end of the 19th century, the story told by the numbers is breathtaking. David does an excellent job in really driving home how staggering the growth was over the period, from a macro and micro level.
One other nitpick I have is with the author's use of (untranslated) German and French company or organization names, as well as certain phrases. The Kindle app didn't have a built-in means of translating these so the process of looking them up or foregoing that and skipping over those unfamiliar foreign texts would have caused a break in my reading experience.
If the point hasn't been brought home yet, then I'll be explicit: this is not an easy read. The writing, though exceptional at times and treated with a lot of care, is often dense and hard to interpret. The content is also not accessible. The author assumes you have at least some background in Economics (he'll often refer to Keynes or Schumpeter to name a few notables), and your historical understanding of the period covered is assumed to be at least conversational.
To add to the struggle when reading this, Kindle version of this book at least has several typos or editing errors. It would be good for this to get a once-over because it felt slightly unpolished when I encountered these throughout all of the book.
Now, that's all of the bad. The good is that the writing is, again, exceptional. David is sharp, sometimes snarky, self-aware, and a gifted storyteller. The "pacing" of the story of Western Europe's development feels just right. Often I fond myself laughing out loud as I hit on one of his often-prescient pieces of commentary.
> "no one is more prolific of nomenclature than the historian, who cannot resist the opportunity to designate each chronological section of his subject by some pithy title—the Age of the Enlightenment, the Era of Good Feeling, the Age of Reform—partly for pedagogic or heuristic convenience, partly for proclamatory effect, partly as a surrogate for understanding...So we have the Age of Steel."
David also evades a common pitfall of many historians or economists who cover a given historical period or event, and makes a point to preserve the complexity of the subject without attempting to boil it down to certain simplistic takeaways. There are many lessons to learn from the development experience of the countries covered, as well as certain general bits of insight (I have over 100 bookmarks). However, David doesn't pretend to know the "single secret" to industrial development and he makes a point of showcasing how diverse the process can be in its pacing, shortcomings, and impact.
I read this book because I wanted a better framework to understand how we (the collective we) might respond in the coming decades in an age of major disruption through Artificial Intelligence. I think this book has given me a lot of tools and frameworks as well as a useful lens to contemplate how different countries might respond and industries might change.
I recommend giving this a read, given that you are willing to sit through those gritty bits of detail.
June 15, 2024
For those interested in the actual nuts and bolts of the Industrial Revolution, this is a fantastic work. Landes manages to give a complete but readable summary of the technological and industrial development of the major industries of the Industrial Revolution. Primarily he focuses on textiles, chemicals, and iron/steel. Automobiles, electricity, the radio, transistors, and banking are also discussed.
This is a work that is focused heavily on technology and the perspective of producers during the Industrial Revolution: factory managers, investors, bankers, entrepreneurs, scientists, industrialists, and inventors. It describes the numerous changes in what was produced, how things were produced, and, to a certain degree, why this was the case. It is not a history of workers or politics, although obviously both appear in the narrative when necessary.
The book also has excellent prose. Landes is a talented writer and can make the differences between phosphoric and non-phosphoric iron both fascinating and relevant.
My only critique of the book is that after WWI, the technological narrative flags. Landes instead focuses more on business cycles and international politics. Writing in 1969, Landes did not necessarily understand its importance, but it is still strange to see that the transistor barely gets a page while the Bessemer process and its results receive an entire section of the book. It would be better if Landes had continued describing specific modern technologies and their implications in the same manner as he did up until 1914.
This is a work that is focused heavily on technology and the perspective of producers during the Industrial Revolution: factory managers, investors, bankers, entrepreneurs, scientists, industrialists, and inventors. It describes the numerous changes in what was produced, how things were produced, and, to a certain degree, why this was the case. It is not a history of workers or politics, although obviously both appear in the narrative when necessary.
The book also has excellent prose. Landes is a talented writer and can make the differences between phosphoric and non-phosphoric iron both fascinating and relevant.
My only critique of the book is that after WWI, the technological narrative flags. Landes instead focuses more on business cycles and international politics. Writing in 1969, Landes did not necessarily understand its importance, but it is still strange to see that the transistor barely gets a page while the Bessemer process and its results receive an entire section of the book. It would be better if Landes had continued describing specific modern technologies and their implications in the same manner as he did up until 1914.
November 2, 2020
[found in the following list]
Books with the best decision theoretic and philosophical foundation
by Michael Emmett Brady
The following books will provide an optimal understanding of how one should study and organize the data and observations that comprise the social sciences. These books provide a broad foundation in logical, epistemological, and philosophical techniques that are sound and valid. A reader who masters these books will quickly grasp the complex, dynamic, nonlinear aspects of social science systems as they evolve through time.
1. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money - John Maynard Keynes
2. A Treatise on Probability - John Maynard Keynes
3. Risk, Uncertainty and Profit - Frank H. Knight
4. The Theory of Economic Development - Joseph A. Schumpter
5. The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith
6. Risk, Ambiguity and Decision - Daniel Ellsberg
7. The (Mis)behavior of Markets - Beniot Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson
8. Probability, Econometrics and Truth - Hugo A. Keuzenkamp
9. The Unbround Prometheus: Technological Change and the Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present - Second Edition - David S. Landes
10. The Laws of Thought - George Boole
11. The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
12. Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
13. J.M. Keynes Theory of Decision Making, Induction and Analogy - Michael Emmett Brady
Books with the best decision theoretic and philosophical foundation
by Michael Emmett Brady
The following books will provide an optimal understanding of how one should study and organize the data and observations that comprise the social sciences. These books provide a broad foundation in logical, epistemological, and philosophical techniques that are sound and valid. A reader who masters these books will quickly grasp the complex, dynamic, nonlinear aspects of social science systems as they evolve through time.
1. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money - John Maynard Keynes
2. A Treatise on Probability - John Maynard Keynes
3. Risk, Uncertainty and Profit - Frank H. Knight
4. The Theory of Economic Development - Joseph A. Schumpter
5. The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith
6. Risk, Ambiguity and Decision - Daniel Ellsberg
7. The (Mis)behavior of Markets - Beniot Mandelbrot and Richard L. Hudson
8. Probability, Econometrics and Truth - Hugo A. Keuzenkamp
9. The Unbround Prometheus: Technological Change and the Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present - Second Edition - David S. Landes
10. The Laws of Thought - George Boole
11. The Black Swan - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
12. Fooled by Randomness - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
13. J.M. Keynes Theory of Decision Making, Induction and Analogy - Michael Emmett Brady
August 24, 2024
Why did Industrialization and Capitalism appear in Europe, specifically in Britain, rather than any other place in the world?
To answer this, David Landes starts with examining the occasions and backgrounds accounted for industrialization and the birth of a capitalist economy in Europe on the whole scale.
Then, Landes turns his attention to Britain and deals with the reasons of the uniqueness that made Britain the “workshop of the world”.
His analysis continues as he compares British and continental economies’ possibility to end up capitalist economies.
To answer this, David Landes starts with examining the occasions and backgrounds accounted for industrialization and the birth of a capitalist economy in Europe on the whole scale.
Then, Landes turns his attention to Britain and deals with the reasons of the uniqueness that made Britain the “workshop of the world”.
His analysis continues as he compares British and continental economies’ possibility to end up capitalist economies.
February 2, 2021
A bit over-rated and a bit too much on the mythological side of the narrative, but certainly essential reading if one wants to know about detailed technological changes in the first periods of the Indust. Rev. in the UK.
That "technological change" sprung up all so suddenly due to a bunch of not well defined irrational motives is a fantasy of the author that removes (at least) the previous 500 years of European history but literary success has its prices :)
That "technological change" sprung up all so suddenly due to a bunch of not well defined irrational motives is a fantasy of the author that removes (at least) the previous 500 years of European history but literary success has its prices :)
June 30, 2020
Very good on the idustrial revolution.
January 2, 2021
Letto per sostenere un esame di Storia Economica ma si è rivelata una lettura piacevole e ricca di contenuti che ho trovato utili anche dopo l’esame.
November 28, 2024
A thoroughly detailed history of the industrial revolution and it's processes. A tough read, but enormously informative.
January 1, 2008
Landes' classic.
April 30, 2010
long, dated, and a little boring. The perfect straw-man.
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