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     

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.     

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     

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.     

Prices and the growth of the knowledge economy in Sweden and Western Europe before the industrial revolution

Abstract

This article uses long-term series of real prices for various goods and services to analyse the evolution of the knowledge economy before the Industrial Revolution by focusing on Sweden in comparison with other European countries. During the early modern period, the relative price of knowledge-intensive goods and services, such as iron, paper, salt, sea transports and silver, decreased relative to a Consumer Price Index. The increased productivity levels of these goods and services were caused by increased division of labour and accelerated diffusion of knowledge. However, the real price of foodstuff tended to increase, implying that living standards declined with increased population. Early modern Western Europe acquired a peculiar price structure, characterized by low prices of industrial goods relative to the price of food. Only with the advent of industrial society could the knowledge economy escape the Malthusian entrapment.     

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.     

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.