PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
History 398 - Fall 2005
Technologies and Their Societies: Historical Perspectives
Second Essay
Mid-Course Bearings
Write an essay of 1500 words on one of the following topics. Since
history is fundamentally an empirical disipline, your response should
set forth an argument supported by specific evidence drawn from the
lectures, readings, and precept discussions pertinent to the subject.
I
Compare the organization of production at Rockdale, Lowell, and Harpers
Ferry. To what extent can each be said to reflect, at least at
the
outset, the republican ideology of the new United States? How did
the later vicissitudes of these industrial centers similarly reflect
contradictions
or tensions in that ideology?
II
An archeological expedition has just excavated the above two
artifacts. Alongside the objects were buried the reading packet
and a student's rather full lecture notes for History 398 at
Princeton. Use those readings and notes, along with your newly
acquired skill in "reading" artifacts, to identify the objects,
explaining what they are, who used them and how, to what systems they
belong, and what historically significant developments in technology
they represent.
III
"In the final analysis, the Industrial
Revolution is about society, not technology. The new power
machinery and the factory system brought radical change to the
processes of production, raising both output and productivity to
unprecedented, even unimagined levels. But that is merely a
matter of quantity. What made the change revolutionary were the
social and economic transformations through which the new systems of
production affected the quality of people's lives. Whether or not
they had more in 1830 than in 1760, they lived differently." Do
you agree or disagree with this claim about the relation of technology
and social change in England during the Industrial Revolution?
What evidence from the readings and lectures best supports your
position? What evidence argues against it? How useful is
the American experience as a point of comparison?
IV
"The advantages which are derived from machinery and
manufactures seem to arise principally from three sources: The addition
which they make to human power.-The economy they produce of human
time.-The
conversion of substances apparently common and worthless into valuable
products." (Charles Babbage, On the economy of machinery and
manufactures,
6)
"John Stuart Mill says in his Principles of
Political
Economy: 'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet
made
have lightened the day's toil of any human being.' That is,
however,
by no means the aim of application of machinery under capitalism.
Like every other instrument for increasing the productivity of labour,
machinery is intended to cheapen commodities and, by shortening the
part
of the working day in which the worker works for himself, to lengthen
the
other part, the part that he gives to the capitalist for nothing. The
machine is a means for producing surplus-value" (Karl Marx, Capital,
Chapter XV, 491)
Marx and Babbage clearly had different conceptions of the role the
machine
was playing in England's industrial society. Clarify these
differences
by applying their analyses to nineteenth-century American
industrialization and to the spread of machinery into the domestic
sphere.
Use detailed information from both the lectures and the readings.
Pledge
"This paper represents my own work in accordance with
University
Regulations."
Essays are due by 3:00 PM Monday, 8
November, in your preceptor's box in the History Department Office, 129
Dickinson Hall.
