9310699 Jacob The relationship between science and commerce plays a crucial but little understood role in modern society. For much of its existence as a nation, for example, US entrepreneurs "imported" scientific work from European nations to use in the development of American industry. Currently, Japanese entrepreneurs are said to be taking advantage of scientific and technological knowledge produced in the US and Europe. But how do entrepreneurs take advantage of scientific developments in order to establish commercially profitable technological enterprises? One way to get at this critical question is to examine the historical record. This is what Professor Margaret Jacob is doing. Professor Jacob, working with six to eight graduate student research assistants over the three years of this grant, is continuing her study of the cultural foundations of Western industrialization. Her goal is to show the dynamic interaction of industrial culture with political and economic realities within national and comparative contexts. The nations she is comparing are Britain, France, the Netherlands and Belgium (then the Austrian Netherlands). She is undertaking a study of the cultural history of the Industrial Revolution that factors scientific and technological knowledge into a complex picture of the values, attitudes and beliefs that permitted industrialization to occur. Her model depends upon the techniques of the cultural historian trained in the history of science and technology. The focus of this research -- to be conducted in three languages in libraries and archives of Wales, Birmingham, Manchester, Paris, Troyes, Brussels, Mons, Rotterdam and the Hague -- is the actors in the industrialization process: entrepreneurs, agents of governments, members of scientific societies, scientific lecturers, and engineers, most in their home countries, a few as foreign travelers seeking to sell or buy (or steal!) skills and knowledge. ***
