A Little History of the World

Gombrich, in his chapter on the advent of industrialization, first considers the aftereffects of the Napoleonic Wars. In many ways, the leaders of Europe succeeded in reverting to the way things were before the French Revolution. However, the Enlightenment approach to observing and studying nature could not be repressed, and a new world emerged from its inventions.

Gombrich now suggests that the history of an invention is not as simple, or linear, as the reader may think. Often, the person who first came up with an idea would abandon it, and whoever was able to take that idea and create something useful from it would be considered the inventor. Gombrich names the steam engine as the first such invention, but the machines that made the greatest impact were the ones that automated labor, like the mechanical loom. Suddenly, guilds and artisans were rendered useless. One no longer needed a lifetime of training to create these products, only a few hours, and one mechanical loom could do more than 100 trained weavers for no pay at all. There were far fewer jobs to go around, and the people whom the machines had replaced were starving. This turn of events gave a great deal of power to a business owner.