The instinct of workmanship, and the state of industrial arts

by Thorstein Veblen

It is accordingly in the commercial republics of Italy that the modern growth of material science takes its first start, about the point of time when industry and commerce had reached their most flourishing state on the Mediterranean seaboard and when the attention of these communities was already swinging off from these material interests to high-handed politics and religious reaction. The higher interests of church and state came to the front, and science, industry, and presently commerce dwindled and decayed in the land that had promised so handsomely to lead Western civilisation out of the underbrush of piety and princely intrigue.

Next followed the Low Countries, with the south German industrial centres, where again industry of the handicraft order grew great, gave rise to trade on a rapidly increasing scale, and presently to an era of business enterprise of unprecedented spirit and scope. But the age of the Fuggers closed in bankruptcy and industrial collapse when the princely wrangles of the era of statemaking had used up the resources of the industrial community and exhausted the credit of that generation of captains of industry. Here too religious contention came in for its share in the set-back of industry and commerce. In their economic outlines the two cases are very much of the same kind. Central Europe ran through much the same cycle of industrial growth, commercial enterprise, princely ambitions, dynastic wars, religious fanaticism, exhaustion and insecurity, and industrial collapse and decay,—substantially repeating, on an enlarged scale and with much added detail, the sequence that had brought South Europe into arrears. Meantime the material sciences had come forward again in the West, and flourished at the hands of the Netherlanders, South Germans and French scholars, who under the favouring discipline of this new advance in industry and commerce had slowly come abreast of the same matter-of-fact conceptions that had once made Italy the home of modern science. And here again, as before, princely politics, with the attendant war, exactions and insecurity, followed presently by religious controversies and persecutions, not only put an end to the advance of industry and business but also checked the attendant development of science nearly to a standstill.

So that when a further move of the kind is presently made it is the British community that takes the lead. Great Britain had been in arrears in all those respects that make up civilisation of the Occidental kind, and not least in the material respect; until the time when the peoples of the Continent by their own act fell into the rear in respect of those material interests—technology and business enterprise—which afford the material ground out of which the Occidental type of civilisation has grown. In Great Britain the sequence of these cultural phenomena has not been substantially different, taken by and large, from that which had previously been run through by the Continental communities; except that the same outcome was not reached, apparently because the sequence was not interrupted by collapse at the same critical point in the development.

The run of events under the handicraft system in England differs in certain consequential features from that among the Continental peoples,—consequential for the purposes of this inquiry, whether of similarly grave consequence from the point of view given by any other and larger interest. These peculiar traits of the British era of handicraft yield a side light on the methods and reach of the handicraft discipline as a factor in civilisation at large, at the same time that a consideration of them should go to show how slender an initial difference may come to be decisive of the outcome in case circumstances give this initial difference a cumulative effect.

As regards the ultimately substantial grounds of the British situation, in the way of racial make-up, natural resources, and cultural antecedents, the British community has no singular advantage or disadvantage as against its Continental competitors. What is true of England in respect of peculiarly favourable natural resources later on, about and after the close of the era of handicraft, does not hold for the beginnings or the best days of that era. Racially there is no appreciable difference between the English population of that time and the population of the Low Countries, of the Scandinavian peninsulas, or even of the nearer lying German territories; and no markedly characteristic national type of temperament had at that time been developed in Great Britain, as against the temperamental make-up of its Continental neighbours,—whatever may be conceived to have become the case in the nearer past.

The characteristic, and apparently decisive, peculiarities of the British situation may all confidently be traced to the insular position of the country. Owing to the isolation so given to the Island the British community was notably in arrears in early modern times, as contrasted with the more cultured, populous and wealthier peoples of the Continent; and this backward state of England in the earlier period of the era of handicraft is no less marked in respect of technology than in any other. As is well known, England borrowed extensively and persistently from its Continental neighbours throughout the era, and it was only by help of these borrowed elements that the English were able to overtake and finally to take the lead of their competitors. Similarly, the British commercial development also comes on late as compared with the Continent; so much so that the British had substantially no share in the great expansion of business enterprise that has been called the Age of the Fuggers. This late start of the English, coupled with their peculiar advantage in being able to borrow what their neighbours had worked out, conduced to a more rapid rate and shorter run of industrial advance and expansion in the Island, and so, among other consequences, hindered the rounded system of handicraft, industrial towns, and gild organisation from attaining the same degree of finality, and ultimately of obstructive inertia, that resulted in many of the Continental countries.

Again, owing to the same geographic isolation that long held England culturally in arrears, the English community lay, in great measure, outside of that political “concert of nations” that worked out the exhaustion and collapse of industry and business on the Continent. Not that the English took no interest in the grand whirl of politics and princely war that occupied the main body of Christendom in that time. The English crown, or to use a foreign expression, the English State, was deeply enough implicated in the political intrigues of late mediæval and early modern Europe; but as modern time has advanced the English community has visibly hung back with an ever growing reluctance. And whatever may be conceived to be the share of the English crown in the political complications of the Continent, it remains true that the English community at large, during the mature and concluding phases of the era of handicraft, stood mainly and habitually outside of these princely concerns.[127] In effect, after the handicraft era was well under way, England is never for long or primarily engaged in international war, nor, except for the civil war of the Commonwealth period, in destructive war of any kind. Hence the era runs to a different outcome in England from what it does elsewhere. It ends not in the exhaustion of politics, but in the industrial revolution. The close of the handicraft system in England comes by way of a technological revolution, not by collapse.

To this attempted explanation of the English case, as due to its geographic isolation, the objection may well suggest itself that other cases which parallel the British in this respect do not show like results. So, for instance, the Scandinavian countries enjoyed an isolation nearly if not quite as effective as that of Great Britain during this period of history; whereas the outcome in these countries is notoriously not the same. The Scandinavian case, however, differs in at least one essential respect, which seems decisive even apart from secondary circumstances. These countries were too small to make up a self-supporting community under the conditions required by the system of handicraft. They had neither the population nor the natural resources on such a scale as a passably full development of the handicraft system required. At any advanced stage of its growth the system can work out into a self-balanced technological organisation, with full specialisation of labour and local differentiation of industry, only in a community of a certain (considerable) size. This condition was not met by the Scandinavian countries. Hence they remained in a relatively backward state, on the whole, through the handicraft era, and never reached anything like an independent position in the industrial world of that time, either technologically or in point of commercial development; hence also they failed to achieve or maintain that degree of independence, or isolation, in their political relations that left England free to pursue a self-directed course of material development.

At an earlier period, as, for instance, from neolithic times down to the close of paganism, under the slighter, less differentiated, less complex technological conditions of a more primitive state of the industrial arts, the Scandinavian countries had, each and several, proved large enough for a very efficient industrial organisation; and, again, during the early historical period they had also proved to be of a sufficient and suitable size to make up national units of a thoroughly competent sort, autonomous politically as well as industrially and working out their own fortunes in severalty,—very much as the British community does later on, in the days of the later handicraft era and the early growth of the machine industry. But during the era of handicraft, and indeed somewhat in a progressive fashion as the technology of that era grew to a fuller development and required larger territorial dimensions, the Scandinavian countries lost ground, relatively to the larger communities of Great Britain and the Continent; in a degree they progressively lost autonomy both in the political and the industrial respect, and much the same is to be said for their position in point of general culture. This falling into arrears and dependence is least marked in the case of Sweden, the largest and still passably isolated community among them; and it is most marked in the case of Norway and Iceland, the most isolated but at the same time the least sizable units of the Scandinavian group. In material sciences, that most characteristic trait of the Western culture, the case of these peoples is much the same as in the matter of technology and cultural autonomy at large; the largest of them has the most to show.

Great Britain, on the other hand, fulfilled the conditions of size and isolation demanded in order to a free development of the industrial arts during this era, when the traffic in dynastic politics stood ready to absorb all accessible resources of industry and sentiment. And England accordingly takes the lead when the era of handicraft goes out and that of the new technology comes in.