Assessing the role of steam power in the first industrial revolution: The early work of Nick von Tunzelmann

This article considers the historiographical and theoretical significance of Nicholas von Tunzelmann's first book, Steam Power and British Industrialization to 1860. Von Tunzelmann assessed the quantitative impact of the Watt steam engine and its pirate copies on the British economy using the social savings method pioneered by R.W. Fogel, showing that the impact was smaller and later than many historians had supposed. These results are of more than quantitative significance because they call into question a dominant line in the history of industrialization that focuses on the steam engine as a key determinant of the dynamics of industrial growth in Britain from the late eighteenth century. This article discusses the origin of this line in the work of Arnold Toynbee and outlines its long-term influence on economic history, including contemporary debates on the question of why Europe outpaced China and India from the seventeenth century. These issues are important also for innovation studies, which often describes the relation between innovation and growth in terms of such ‘critical technologies’ as steam power; these accounts are subject to the same weaknesses as technicist histories of industrialization. Von Tunzelmann's early work is therefore of continuing theoretical and empirical significance as we seek an adequate theory of the links between innovation and growth.