Johannes Staudt

PhD Student

Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg
Department of History
Rempartstraße 15
79085 Freiburg

Email: staudtj@tcd.ie

CV

Grants and Awards

Research Project

Rural Cultures of Innovation and the Emergence of European Capitalism: A Comparative History of the Black Forest and the Jura, c. 1740 – 1880

The project aims to contribute to explaining the emergence of sustained economic growth in 18th and 19th century Europe by inquiring the genesis and evolution of rural cultures of innovation. Recent research has frequently highlighted the role of innovation in contrast to institutional, imperial, and spatial issues of the Industrial Revolution, which have traditionally been invoked for its explanation but proven to be insufficient to explain either its timing or its location. This focus on a culture of innovation opens a fruitful perspective on how the disposition of different forms of knowledge changed in a favourable way to foster economic productivity. However, in explaining its European scale it still falls short of solid empirical insights on the agents of innovation and their social and economic circumstances and, instead, it is stuck in rather vague narratives of urbanity and progressiveness.

To solve this problem, this project questions the common dichotomic perception of rural and urban spaces in terms of progressiveness. In contrast, it understands the rural societies of 18th and 19th century Europe as “capitalisms in action” of their own and thereby enables an analysis of their ways of an Industrial Enlightenment. In doing so, the project will focus on horology as the key technology of early industrial capitalism. While clockmakers in Paris and London worked at the scientific frontier to solve the longitude problem, their colleagues in the remote areas of the Black Forest and the Jura transformed mechanical clocks and watches into a mass product. Thus, they played a key role in fostering the chronometrisation of societies and spreading a mechanistic world view on a global scale.

To understand the geneses and the operating modes of these rural cultures of innovation, a comparative analysis of horology in the Black Forest and the Jura will provide new insights into the concrete agents of innovation and the formation of networks for the horizontal, vertical and translocal transmission of knowledge as well as the underlying conditions of institutions and socioeconomic thought. By understanding the genesis and evolution of these rural cultures of innovation and their interrelations with other socioeconomic spaces, rural and urban, the project aims to amplify our understanding of the emergence of sustained economic growth and to contribute to explaining its location.

Publications

• “Walter Eucken.” In Freiheitslexikon. Last modified 16 January 2019.

Lectures

• “Europäische Innovationskulturen und die Entstehung des modernen Wirtschaftswachstums: Eine globale Geschichte der Schwarzwälder Uhrmacherei, ca. 1740 – 1830.” Walter Eucken Institut, Freiburg/online, 25 January 2021.