The Process of Change: an Empirical Examination of the Uptake and Impact of Technology

Abstract

Political historians tend to be much given to an examination of terms when describing events, and none more so than the term ‘revolution’. Were, for example, the events in Austria in the closing months of 1918 on the collapse of the Habsburg Monarchy and the founding of the First Republic a political revolution? The change in the political structure was fundamental, sudden and drastic enough to probably warrant such a title, but despite the far-reaching social reforms the private capitalistic ordering of the economy emerged from this tumultuous period unscathed: the established order was not fundamentally transformed (Leser 1966). We can learn from the political historian. To categorize Austria between the wars, to understand the unfolding of events, it is necessary to construct a language, especially for summary descriptive purposes, that adequately fits the detail of the situation. Once that is accomplished, and the descriptive category agreed upon by scholars working in the area, one has a working language with which to discuss and analyze events without always having to go back to first principles. The economic historian similarly tends to have a fine regard for the precision of language, and much dispute has taken place over the propriety of referring to the erstwhile industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth century as truly a revolution in the sense of sudden transformation of production. Was it no more than the continuation, albeit with considerable momentum, of patterns of production released by the earlier industrial ‘revolution’ of the sixteenth century (Braudel 1985: ch. 6)?