Mid Sweden University

An earlier generation of Swedish industrial historians had difficulties in analysing the development of Swedish iron making during the first half of the nineteenth century in the absence of the adoption of any of the coal-using methods. This chapter aims to discuss how information on British developments reached Sweden. Britain was the most important market for Swedish iron in the eighteenth century, so the chapter concentrates on signals transmitted through the market, and how the loss of market share in Britain after 1800 was perceived. The chapter deals with the more delicate matter of information gathered by Swedish travellers to Britain. Gustaf Ekman wrote that the performance of British iron making should be seen as an index against which Swedish iron making could be compared, and during the first decades of the nineteenth century this comparison was not to the advantage of Swedish iron. 

In preindustrial Europe between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries iron was made by a variety of techniques and in the most diverse of social settings. At the risk of over-simplifying, direct reduction techniques were dominant in southern Europe. Coal technology made iron available in abundance. Pig iron output soared towards the end of the eighteenth century, from 61,000 tons in 1785 to 120,000 tons in 1795, then to 250,000 tons in 1805. By 1850 pig iron production in the United Kingdom stood at 2.25 million tons. The growth of bar iron output was every bit as spectacular. Seemingly limitless mineral energy and a profusion of cheap iron allowed Britain to play its pioneering role in the industrialisation of the globe. Hyde became the new orthodoxy about technological change in the iron industry, but did so at a time when the international debate over proto-industrialization theory steered scholarly interest away from questions of technology. 

The essays in this volume, each written by an acknowledged expert in the field, trace the fortunes of British coal technology as it spread across the European continent, from Sweden and Russia to the Alps and Spain, and supply an authoritative picture of industrial transformation in one of the key industries of the 19th century. In this period iron making in continental Europe was transformed by the take-up of technologies such as coke smelting and iron puddling that had already revolutionised the British iron industry. The transfer of British technologies was fundamental to European industrialisation, but that transfer was not straightforward. The techniques that had proved so successful in Britain had to be adapted to local circumstances elsewhere, for charcoal-fired techniques proved surprisingly durable. More often than not, as these studies show, coal-fired methods were incorporated into traditional production systems, making for the proliferation of technological hybrids. Overall, it is diversity that stands out. Some European regions (southern Belgium) came near to the British model; others (Spain) persisted with charcoal technology into the late 19th century. Some countries (Sweden) adopted British organisational principles but not the reliance on coal; others (Russia) maintained different iron making sectors - one coal-based, the other loyal to charcoal - in parallel. © Chris Evans and Göran Rydén 2005.