Until the later nineteenth century the great landlords and the gentry were the central element in the social and political life of the country, and even as late as 1940, in the supreme crisis of Briti
This essay is a foray into the debatable borderland between history, technology and economics. On the history of technical processes there exist several works, pre-eminent among them the great five-volumed History of Technology. But few historians of technology have shown interest in the models of the economists; and the theorists have concentrated on analysis or on problems of contemporary technology. The present work is an attempt to re-examine some of the more familiar nineteenth-century developments in technology. It originated in lectures given at Columbia University in the autumn of 1958.
