Interesting article Michael, but I think you are overselling what Taylor and Drucker did and underselling what people did in the past.

I write a lot about economic history and production as well but focus on earlier time periods than the 1900s. I know lots of examples of many of these principles applied in the past which undermine a lot of the rather bombastic claims made by some of the management gurus.

Most famous is perhaps Adam Smith's pin factory. He details how the manufacture of a simple metal pin is broken down to something like 18 different steps and how that increases productivity. In his example I seem to remember something like 1000x increase in productivity.

That is from work published in 1776 so well over a hundred years before guys like Ford and Taylor.

The Assembly line is also not a new concept. The Venician Arsenal in the 1400s built ships on assembly line principles. The same idea Ford had about avoiding that workers had to move around to get tools applied. Ships at different levels of completness moved through a pipeline with different workstations. Ship production was modularized.

A lot of this stuff goes back to the developmen of interchangable parts. Guns were crucial in this development. Once you got interchancagble parts you can do assembly line style of production.

So technology played a significant role. It was not merely management. Until you could make interchangable parts it would be hard to build an assembly line. Ship building developed assembly line production early because the parts were easier to make interchangable as the tolerances on the wooded parts of a ship is much lower than for parts making up a gun.

You can go back to ancient Greece and find mass production of swords. Again technology played a significant role. Iron requiring a lot of hammering in processing which means it is a very bespoke approach. Yet brozne used earlier can be poured into molds. Hence in the Bronze age mods were used to mass produce swords and armor.

With the transition to iron working we took a step back actually as everything had to be more tailor made. Thus the ability to mass produce and be more productive has always been strongly tied to technology.