Technological development is always bounded by culture. I am re-reading Merritt Roe Smith's classic book on the Harper's Ferry Armory. He clearly shows how political and cultural forces limited technological advancement at Harper's Ferry while the Springfield Armory was becoming one of the great innovation centers for manufacturing arms. The reasons? Springfield was geographically in the heart of the American machine tool industry and existed in a culture of innovation. Harper's Ferry was essentially a creature of the local community.  The early gun smiths came from a tradition of hand work and locals treated jobs at the works as a sinecure. Moreover, the Superintendents were often local political hacks engaged in the fierce partisanship of the Antebellum Era.  Often they hired and fired workers based on their political beliefs not their skill.

Gregg Kimball

-----Original Message-----
From: Discussion of research and writing about Virginia history [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of David Kiracofe
Sent: Monday, May 07, 2012 5:53 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: [VA-HIST] The Peculiar Institution's End Without The Intervention Of The Civil War

<snip>

Getting back to the question about the mechanization of agriculture, if one considers how long it took to produce and  put to wide use an automated cotton picker, one can see the pressure of non-economic factors in that technological evolution.   The Rust cotton picker in the 1930s did not catch on as expected because it was either not seen to be in the interest of Depression-era society to displace all those sharecroppers  (not in their immediate interest either) or it was not in the interest of the landholders whose traditional authority rested on having a dependent underclass of people.

Even that long after slavery it is difficult to separate out the economic from the social or political.

My two cents.
David Kiracofe

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