The factory system in the British industrial revolution: A complementarity thesis

This paper offers an explanation for the rise of the factory system in Britain during the Industrial Revolution (1770-1850) based on the concept of complementarity: Investment in machinery, process supervision, and improved quality control formed a cluster of complementary activities in which adopting any one increased the marginal return to also adopting the others. Further, factory owners introduced process supervision not only to increase work effort, but also to balance worker incentives among production, quality control, and asset maintenance tasks. To test this hypothesis, I have constructed a new data set from firm studies and archival records. Measures of firms’ adoption of the activities are positively correlated in the cross-section of firms, providing evidence in favor of the complementarity hypothesis.