Economic History Seminar

Du 27/10/2021 de 12:00 à 13:30

Salle R2.01, Campus Jourdan

O SULLIVAN Mary (Université de Genève)

Power & profit: copper mines & steam engines in late 18th century Cornwall

There is a long-standing tendency in economic history, exemplified recently in Robert Allen’s The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, to analyse the economics of machine adoption based on a calculus of cost-saving. No one has proven more articulate in challenging this approach than Eric Hobsbawm, who cautioned us against the assumption that a capitalist economy has any inherent tendency to cost-saving or technological innovation, emphasising that “[i]t has a bias only towards profit”. He suggested the potential of a history of profit to understand the motivations for introducing machines and the consequences of their adoption. This article grapples with Hobsbawm’s “profit puzzle” to understand the implications of the adoption and use of the Boulton & Watt (B&W) steam engine for capitalists and workers in Cornish copper mines between 1777 and 1791. It shows that the engine’s economic implications for the people who invested in, and worked, the Cornish copper mines were conditioned by a complex and evolving relationship between profit and power: steam power, which was crucial to the mining of copper and the costs of its production; imperial power, which was important given fluctuating demand for copper from different parts of the British Empire; and market power since control over price setting on the British copper market had decisive implications for Cornish mining profits. An analysis of the relationship between power and profit helps explain the enthusiasm for the B&W engine in Cornwall and the subsequent hostility that Cornish miners and mining adventurers displayed towards Matthew Boulton and James Watt. More generally, it suggests the potential of studying the economic and social history of new machines through the lens of profit to understand the motivations for introducing machines and the consequences of their adoption.