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.     

The returns to invention during the British industrial revolution

It was a commonplace among contemporaries, and remains received wisdom today, that inventors were poorly remunerated during the industrial revolution. Adapting a dataset of 759 British inventors, this article presents the first large‐scale attempt to examine the issue systematically. Using probate information, the article shows that inventors were extremely wealthy relative to the adult male population. Inventors were also significantly wealthier than another group who would have received a similar inheritance (in terms of both financial and social capital) and entered similar occupations: their brothers. Their additional wealth was derived from inventive activities: invention paid.     

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.     

Childhood and child labour in the British industrial revolution1

Quantitative and qualitative analysis of a large number of autobiographies by working men who lived through the industrial revolution has demonstrated that there was an upsurge in child labour in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with children's work entrenched in traditional sectors as well as spreading in newly mechanized factories and workshops. I have interpreted this rise in terms of the appearance of a new equilibrium in the early industrial economy with more and younger children at work. The new equilibrium, in turn, was related to a number of co‐incidental developments including: an increase in the relative productivity of children as a result of mechanization, new divisions of labour, and changes in the organization of work; the dynamics of competitive dependence linking labour market and families; high dependency ratios within families; stumbling male wages and pockets of poverty; family instability; and breadwinner frailty. The establishment of these links forges a new synchronization between revised views of the industrial revolution and a revisionist history of child labour.     

Factor prices and induced technical change in the industrial revolution

Using historical data for the 1700–1914 period, this paper analyses the nature and direction of technical change in Britain. The evidence in this paper indicates that, over this long period, labour-saving technology adoption was a major response to changes in relative factor prices, thus supporting the hypothesis that ‘induced innovation’ was a major driver of technical change during the British industrial revolution. Labour saving was made possible and sustained by capital-augmenting and energy-augmenting technical change coupled with continuous capital accumulation and abundant energy supplies. This process placed the British economy on a higher capital–labour ratio equilibrium, and was the primary force driving sustained productivity growth, which further raised wages and living standards.     

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.     

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     

Korea's first industrial revolution, 1911–1940

We estimate output and population of colonial Korea to show that per capita output grew 2.3% with population expanding 1.3% per year from 1911 to 1940. Growth accounting indicated that productivity advance accounted for roughly one half of the per capita output growth. Primary production as a share of GDP fell from 69% to 42% during the period. Rapid productivity improvement caused nontradable sectors to become increasingly important, while capital accumulation drove industrialization. Demographic expansion, per capita output growth, and structural change occurred at considerably faster rates in northern than in southern provinces.