Foreign Trade – Transfer – Adaptation: British Iron Making Technology on the Continent (Belgium and France)

Abstract

This chapter aims at disclosing general features of the transfer pattern to the Continent, exemplified for some particular countries. It explains why the differences between the British and Continental technologies persisted for such a long time, or even held on Sweden. But before that, a brief introduction to the primary iron industry is given with a simplified model of the production stages and processes. In Great Britain, it took the iron industry almost a century to proceed from charcoal to mineral fuel. The British model of smelting, refining and shaping iron was framed by two benchmark innovations, namely Abraham Darby's coke-fired blast furnace of 1709 and Cort's puddling and rolling process of 1784. In Britain, the diffusion of coke smelting did not gain momentum before the 1750s, or even 1760s, although in Coalbrookdale it had been a viable commercial process of producing cast-iron products directly from the molten coke pig iron from 1709 onwards.

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