Private borrowing during the financial revolution: Hoare's Bank and its customers, 1702–241

The financial revolution improved the British government's ability to borrow, and thus its ability to wage war. North and Weingast argued that it also permitted private parties to borrow more cheaply and widely. We test these inferences with evidence from a London bank. We confirm that private bank credit was cheap in the early eighteenth century, but we argue that it was not available widely. Importantly, the government reduced the usury rate in 1714, sharply reducing the circle of private clients that could be served profitably.     

Canals, coal and regional growth during the industrial revolution

… the great expence [sic] of land carriage will ever deprive us of many useful and desirable articles, particularly mines and minerals, which must lie dormant in the bowels of the earth, to the great loss of the landowner and the public, unless some more cheap and expeditious way of carriage be opened to the internal parts of the country. ¹
… there can be no doubt that a greater extension of our distant navigation has arisen from a system which has, in effect, converted the internal parts of our island into coasts. ¹     

Class structure and inequality during the industrial revolution: lessons from England's social tables, 1688–1867

This article measures the size and incomes of six major social classes across the industrial revolution using social tables for England and Wales in 1688, 1759, 1798, 1846, and 1867. Lindert and Williamson famously revised these tables, and this article extends their work in three directions. First, servants are removed from middle‐ and upper‐class households in the tables of King, Massie, and Colquhoun and tallied separately. Second, estimates are made for the same tables of the number and incomes of women and children employed in the various occupations, and, third, incomes are broken down into rents, profits, and employment income. These extensions to the tables allow variables to be computed that can be checked against independent estimates as a validation exercise. The tables are retabulated in a standardized set of six social groups to highlight the changing structure of society across the industrial revolution. Gini coefficients are computed from the social tables to measure inequality. These measures confirm that Britain traversed a ‘Kuznets curve’ in this period. Changes in overall inequality are related to the changing fortunes of the major social classes.     

Where there’s muck,there’s brass:1 the market for manure in the industrial revolution2

This article presents the first systematic analysis of off‐farm sources of nitrogen, such as urban and industrial waste, used in English agriculture during the industrial revolution, arguing that their use was widespread and intensive by 1700 and that there was only modest growth in their use up to 1840. It explains the pattern of use by supply and demand factors, and develops a new method to estimate the overall impact on wheat yields. It estimates that throughout the period 1700–1840 yields were 20 per cent higher than they would have been if no off‐farm manures had been used.     

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.     

Factor prices and productivity growth during the British industrial revolution

This paper presents new estimates of total factor productivity growth in Britain for the period 1770-1860. We use the dual technique and argue that the estimates we derive from factor prices are of similar quality to quantity-based calculations. Our results provide further evidence, calculated on the basis of an independent set of sources, that productivity growth during the British Industrial Revolution was relatively slow. The Crafts-Harley view of the Industrial Revolution is thus reinforced. Our preferred estimates suggest a modest acceleration after 1800.     

Trends in real wages during the industrial revolution: a view from across the Irish Sea

This article calculates cost of living indices for Ireland between 1785 and 1870 and real wage indices for agricultural labourers, textile workers, and building workers. These indices show gains in real wages which are not consistent with current hypotheses about widespread pre-Famine immiseration, though textile workers did experience a reduction in earning power. Before the Famine, wages proved sticky downwards in the face of falling prices; after the Famine, money wages rose faster than prices. A revised UK index suggests that real wages began their increase earlier, in the 1820s, and increased by around an additional 10 percentage points by 1870.     

Investment under credit rationing and uncertainty: evidence from South Africa

We construct an empirical model of corporate investment whichallows for the various effects of uncertainty and credit marketimperfections described in the theoretical literature. The modelis estimated using cross-sectional data from the South Africanstock exchange. Evidence is found for some (but not all) ofthe predictions of the relevant theoretical models, and differencesbetween firms in different sectors and of different sizes arenoted.     

Engels’ pause: Technical change, capital accumulation, and inequality in the british industrial revolution

The paper reviews the macroeconomic data describing the British economy from 1760 to 1913 and shows that it passed through a two stage evolution of inequality. In the first half of the 19th century, the real wage stagnated while output per worker expanded. The profit rate doubled and the share of profits in national income expanded at the expense of labour and land. After the middle of the 19th century, real wages began to grow in line with productivity, and the profit rate and factor shares stabilized. An integrated model of growth and distribution is developed to explain these trends. The model includes an aggregate production function that explains the distribution of income, while a savings function in which savings depended on property income governs accumulation. Simulations with the model show that technical progress was the prime mover behind the industrial revolution. Capital accumulation was a necessary complement. The surge in inequality was intrinsic to the growth process: technical change increased the demand for capital and raised the profit rate and capital’s share. The rise in profits, in turn, sustained the industrial revolution by financing the necessary capital accumulation. After the middle of the 19th century, accumulation had caught up with the requirements of technology and wages rose in line with productivity.     

New evidence and new methods to measure human capital inequality before and during the industrial revolution: France and the US in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries

We explore pre‐ and early industrial inequality of numeracy using the age heaping method and anthropometric strategies. For France, we map differential numeracy between the upper and lower segments of a sample population for 26 regions during the seventeenth century. For the US, inequality of numeracy is estimated for 25 states during the 19th century. Testing the hypothesis of a negative impact of inequality on welfare growth, we find evidence that lower inequality increased industrial development in the US, whereas for France such an effect was only evident in interactions with political variables such as proximity to central government.