The Reaper and the Robot: The Adoption of Labour-Saving Machinery in the Past and Future

Abstract

Abstract Sir John Habakkuk, perhaps more than any other single scholar, has been responsible for both the lively attention to and the productive fusion of economics and history that has come to distinguish the study of regional and national patterns in the introduction and diffusion of technological innovations. His seminal essay on the search for labour-saving innovations, American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century, was offered modestly in 1962 as ‘a foray into the debatable borderland between history, technology and economics’. Sir John believed that the parties exploring this wilderness would from the outset benefit by forming ‘a marriage of history and theory’. One ground for such a union was that the past posed problems that might well interest contemporary economists. This was brilliantly exemplified by his own chosen subject-matter: the sources of the post-Second World War gap between US and British levels of labour productivity in manufacturing was a phenomenon whose historical origins had previously intrigued the wartime Anglo-American Productivity Teams.