Spinning the industrial revolution

The prevailing explanation for why the industrial revolution occurred first in Britain during the last quarter of the eighteenth century is Allen's ‘high wage economy’ view, which claims that the high cost of labour relative to capital and fuel incentivized innovation and the adoption of new techniques. This article presents new empirical evidence on hand spinning before the industrial revolution and demonstrates that there was no such ‘high wage economy’ in spinning, which was a leading sector of industrialization. We quantify the working lives of frequently ignored female and child spinners who were crucial to the British textile industry with evidence of productivity and wages from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century. Spinning emerges as a widespread, low‐productivity, low‐wage employment, in which wages did not rise substantially in advance of the introduction of the jenny and water frame. The motivation for mechanization must be sought elsewhere.     

Counting the industrial revolution

In all my experience … I have found how insecure all details of mere figures are upon which to build an argument. … It is easy to add a little here, and subtract a little there; gently to slip in a figure, it may be a cypher, among your data; slyly to make what seems a reasonable postulate in your premises, but which turns out in the result to be a begging of the question-and behold you gain your point, and triumph, until it is found that your adversary, having access to the same stores of arithmetic, just proves his case and refutes yours with the same facility.'(Lord Brougham, 1849)²     

China's industrial revolution: A new perspective

In “The Industrial Structure of Production: An Outline of a Research Program,” Ronald Coase and Ning Wang (2001) made a plea for a new economic research program that can go beyond the Arrow-Debreu framework and explain China's miraculous rise. They point out that the greatest trouble with the Arrow-Debreu framework lies in its inability to explain production. In this article I will push this insight further to shed new light on why and how production, or mass production in particular, emerged and mushroomed in the 18th–19th century England, the 19th–20th century United States, and 20th-21st century China but not in other parts of the world with similar geo-developmental conditions such as the Netherlands, Mexico, or India. My central thesis is that production or firms emerge in response to market demand, yet the so-called “market” is itself a fundamental public good that must be created by a development state instead of the “invisible hand.” Therefore, the lack of industrialization in any nation seems on the surface due to the lack of mass supply, but is in fact due to the lack of a mass market, which in turn is due to the lack of powerful and strong-willed market creators.     

Why the industrial revolution was British: commerce,induced invention,and the scientific revolution1

Britain had a unique wage and price structure in the eighteenth century, and that structure is a key to explaining the inventions of the industrial revolution. British wages were very high by international standards, and energy was very cheap. This configuration led British firms to invent technologies that substituted capital and energy for labour. High wages also increased the supply of technology by enabling British people to acquire education and training. Britain's wage and price structure was the result of the country's success in international trade, and that owed much to mercantilism and imperialism. When technology was first invented, it was only profitable to use it in Britain, but eventually it was improved enough that it became cost‐effective abroad. When the ‘tipping point’ occurred, foreign countries adopted the technology in its most advanced form.     

The high wage economy and the industrial revolution: a restatement

This article responds to Humphries's critique of Allen's assessment of the high wage economy of eighteenth‐century Britain and its importance for explaining the industrial revolution. New evidence is presented to show that women and children participated in the high wage economy. It is also shown that the high wage economy provides a good explanation of why the industrial revolution happened in the eighteenth century by showing that increases of women's wages around 1700 greatly increased the profitability of using spinning machinery. The relationship between the high wage economy of the eighteenth century and the inequality and poverty in Britain in the nineteenth century is explored.