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Between the 1860s and the 1960s there was an extraordinary quantum leap in humanity’s capacity to transform raw metal into highly complex machines. Together with contemporary developments in chemistry and electrical technology, this revolution in metalworking formed the industrial backbone of the modern world. Though it is no longer as visible at the heart of the world economy, it nevertheless continues to support virtually every aspect of the material standard of living, which we take for granted today. The ever lower cost of long-distance air travel and satellite-based communication, the revolutionary innovations of information technology and the life-saving feats of modern medical technology, all these achievements of the “weightless”, “service” economy, in fact rely on a massive physical infrastructure, an extraordinary throughput of material goods, whether domestically produced or not, and a variety of black boxed machines of vast complexity. In a world in which even space flight no longer makes headlines, the technological capacity to produce and reproduce this material backdrop, is nevertheless essential to the functioning of our dematerialized economy. Tracing the development of these productive forces and the discourses that surrounded and impelled their development is the subject of our conference, which seeks to explore and map the development of machine-tool technology from the late 19th century up to the 1960s. We focus on machine tools because they are the ubiquitous instruments of modern manufacturing and because right up to the 1980s they occupied an iconic position in debates about industrial modernization.

Viewed across space and time the development of this technology is remarkable in two senses. Viewed across time what clearly dominates is the incredible dynamism of a process of change, taking in all the major centres of industrial production. In the late nineteenth century it was still a considerable technological challenge to mass-produce pedal-operated sewing machines and bicycles. By the 1940s, factories in Japan, Australia, the Soviet Union, France, Britain, Germany, Italy, Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Canada and the United States were all turning out high-performance aero engines and combat aircraft, by the thousand. Across the industrial world, workshops had emerged that were capable of machining multi-ton turbines so finely balanced that they would revolve perfectly smoothly at barely credible speeds and turbines so light and strong that they could drive aircraft at speeds faster than the speed of sound. Heavy engineering shops learned how to construct structures of enormous proportions and pressure vessels, gun barrels and nuclear reactor components capable of withstanding unimaginable pressures and withering heat.


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Any history of production therefore needs to be a general history, not of particular nations, but of industrialism as such. However, no less inescapable is the geopolitical and geographic unevenness of this story. The vast majority of people and states in the world, until the latter half of the twentieth century, had only second-hand access to this new technology. We can measure underdevelopment in terms of GDP per capita. We can also measure it in terms of technological incapacity. In a very real sense, economic development for most of the twentieth century meant the attempt to acquire self-sufficiency in these fundamental technologies of material transformation. The models of successful development were on the one hand Japan and on the other hand, Russia/Soviet Union. Both of which were remarkable precisely for the speed with which they took to sophisticated metalworking. For the traditional heartlands of engineering in industrial Western Europe, by contrast, the story is one of organic development, perhaps above all for Britain, the mother country of the industrial machine tool in the 18th century and a world leader in super heavy machine tools and aeronautics, still in the 1950s. But the same could be said for the early modern metalworking centres of Northern Italy, Bohemia, Switzerland, Saxony and Württemberg. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, the basic divide between the “haves” and the “have nots” was complicated by a further division: between the United States and the rest. In the late 1940s, the United States accounted for roughly 70 percent of the world’s production of machinery and transportation equipment. Even allowing for the temporary debility of the German economy, US dominance was clear and inescapable. This more than any other area of economic activity was the true field of US dominance. It was on this advantage above all others that America based both its new military prowess and the alluring standard of living of its citizens. Monetary measurement does not do justice to America’s extraordinary mid twentieth century dominance in the manufacture of machinery, a dominance which, in certain key areas, continues to this day and which continues to form a rarely acknowledged precondition of US military hegemony. Jostled by oil majors and software giants, General Electric, a purveyor both of outstanding metalworking and credit cards remains the world’s largest corporation.

To date, the historical literature has focused very heavily on the second aspect of the changes just described, i.e. the divide between the US and the rest. It has sought to understand this divide in terms of a distinction between “special purpose” and “general purpose” machine tools. A fundamental premise of our conference is that this has been over-hasty. We simply do not know enough about the development of this key technology and its geography for it to be useful to adopt such stark dichotomies. What we do know is not encouraging to the dichotomous view. Philip Scranton's work on the United States suggests that special purpose machinery was far from dominant in American industry even in the 1950s and 1960s. A variety of work on German metalworking technologies suggests that they were far from simply “general purpose”. The closely matched inventories compiled by Cristiano Ristuccia and Adam Tooze for the United States and Germany, show that the dichotomy fails to capture the most important trans-Atlantic differences in the 1930s and 1940s.

The basic starting point for our conference, therefore, is that the dichotomy between special purpose and general purpose tools, which was widely used from the late nineteenth century onwards to describe the “revolution” marked by the emergence of American industry, should be treated not as a framework for analysis, but as an object of analysis in itself. Ralf Richter's long-run comparison of Cincinnati and Chemnitz as centres of machine-tool manufacture has revealed the networks of connection between these two crucial manufacturing hubs, but also the intellectual frameworks within which contemporaries organized their interaction. Instead of a divide between the US and Germany an intensive technology and knowledge transfer leading to a process of convergence was found.

Therefor the following questions will be addressed at the conference:

How did industrial producers across the world achieve the spectacular increases in metalworking capacity?
What kind of metalworking machinery was applied in different countries?
How did contemporaries interpret these products and processes?
What were the channels of communication, imitation and appropriation that kept the development of the major industrial economies on such a fundamentally similar path?
How did the use of different types of machine tools influence industrial relations?
How did ideas about industrial modernity and the iconic status of machine tools, in particular, impact on the process of industrialisation itself?


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The conference aim therefore is double-edged. It addresses itself both to discourses about technology and to the objects to which this talk was directed. It is also symmetrical in the sense that it keeps in mind both the complex pattern of similarity and difference between “the United States and the rest” and the more general process of manufacturing development across the industrialized world. In this sense we hope to mark a departure from recent debates in comparative industrial history, which have been overshadowed by the European-American productivity gap and by questions of catch-up. If it is true that the productivity gap in manufacturing between the United States and Europe was constant for most of the twentieth century this is remarkable. But the fact that the gap neither narrowed, nor widened significantly implies that manufacturing capacity broadly speaking developed in parallel and what is more, it did so at an utterly unprecedented rate. This enormous general development in industrial capacity is in danger of being obscured by the narrow focus on the productivity gap.

Most importantly, however, whilst economic historians do at least remain focused on the key questions of economic growth and productivity improvement, in large parts of the humanities scholarship the extraordinary history of modern production is in danger of being obscured altogether by the dramatic turn away from the study of labour and production towards the history of consumption. There were many complex and good reasons for this shift - the crisis of Marxism, “the cultural turn”, the well-justified insistence by feminist-inspired scholarship on the importance of the “non-productive sphere”. But the primacy of the “consumption junction” derived at least some of its plausibility from two far less convincing claims: firstly, the sense that we were moving into a “post-industrial society” in which “consumption dominated”; secondly, the kind of academic ennui which started from the assumption that production was simply “old hat” and that everything that needed to be said had in fact been said. Both claims are to say the least problematic. Indeed, as David Edgerton has strikingly observed, the ironic truth is that the history of production was abandoned well before it was written. And one might add that the history of production was abandoned in the 1980s precisely at the point when the industrial revolution in fact for the first time took on truly global dimensions. Furthermore, it was abandoned precisely at the point at which the global environmental problematic made the study of production processes in their material reality seem more pressing than ever before. The most basic aim of this conference therefore is to use the history of the machine-tools as a way of restarting a more general discussion of the history of production from the ground up.