The British Industrial Revolution: A persistent puzzle · 2020. 4. 21. · The British Industrial...

1

The British Industrial Revolution:

A persistent puzzle

Joel Mokyr

Departments of Economics and History

Northwestern University

and Berglas School, Tel Aviv University

Presented to the Economics Workshop at IDC in honor of Zvi Eckstein’s 70th birthday

Note: this talk relies on joint work in progress with Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda, as well as on joint work in progress with Assaf Sarid and Karine VanderBeek.

1Zvikafest-June 2019

2

The British Industrial Revolution remains the Defining Event of modern economic history

Significance:

1. Created British economic leadership between c 1780 and c 1890.

2. Created European (really “western”) economic leadership between c 1880 and 1980.

3. Created the rising tide of sustained economic growth that has lifted boats world wide and created the current prosperous world.

Zvikafest-June 2019 2

3

Its effects have been global:


Zvikafest-June 2019 44

WHAT was the Industrial Revolution ?• At its core, a series of technological advances in a set of industries in

England and Scotland, important but limited, usually defined as the years 1760-1830

• Using modern terminology, these sectors included:

• Materials• Energy• Engineering• Light industries (textiles, food processing)• Miscellaneous industries (e.g., gas lighting, cement, printing)• Agriculture • Services (transportation, medicine)

What this meant: the “engine” of economic growth, which for millennia had been “Smithian” (gains from trade and specialization, improved allocations) now became increasingly “Schumpeterian” --- process and product innovation based on some form of improved knowledge (scientific or otherwise).

Zvikafest-June 2019

5

But there are other interpretations:

1. The breaking of the “Malthusian Regime” that had kept much of the world’s population at subsistence level (Lucas, Galor).

2. A change in the “mode of production” (rise of the Factory System).

3. A rise in the ratio of fixed to circulating capital in manufacturing (Orthodox Marxist definition, but also Hicks).

4. A growth in the importance of “formal” markets in both goods and services and factors. “Industrial Capitalism” (Polanyi, “History of Capitalism” literature).

6

We should not think of it as a period of economic growth, because during the Industrial Revolution itself, growth was rather slow, living standards were stagnant, and the “real action” started in earnest only after 1850.


7

How should we think of the British Industrial Revolution?

One of my more justly neglected analogies is to compare the Industrial Revolution with the rise of Christianity. Here is what I rashly wrote in my youthful days of sturmund drang:

“Examining British economic history in the period 1760-1830 is a bit like studying the history of Jewish dissenters between 50 B.C. and A.D. 50. At first provincial, localized, even bizarre, it was destined to change the life of every woman and man in the West beyond recognition and to affect deeply the lives of others… Although the center of the stage has long been taken over by others, Britain's place of honor in the history books is assured: It will remain the Holy Land of Industrialism.”


China and Europe 8

Broadberry 2015 calculations

9

But why Britain?

There is more or less a consensus why the Industrial Revolution happened first in Europe and not in Asia (and few would contest that in the end the difference between Britain and France/Germany/Belgium/Netherlands was dwarfed by the gap between Europe and China/India/Middle East), although the question is a bit overdetermined.

Indeed, had it not happened in Europe, it would never have happened, since the alternative locations were all in what seems to have been stable equilibria.

Also, the consensus accepts today that whereas the actual divergence in living standards and income only took off at full speed after 1850, the origins of the Great Enrichment are to be found in the more remote past, most of them in early modern Europe, although many scholars have begun to look for medieval roots as well (e.g., Mitterauer, 2010; Schultz et al., 2018).

But the causes of Britain’s leadership are still hotly contested. Here is a very partial list of the competing schools:


10

Traditional views of “why Britain?”The Geographical School: Britain was blessed with minerals (above all coal but also iron, non-ferrous metals and fireclay) as well as being a hard-to-invade island with good ports and well-integrated markets. Emphasized by geographical determinists such as E.A. Wrigley and Pomeranz.

The Institutional School: it was above all “1688 and all that” --- North-Weingast(1989), Pincus-Robinson, Stasavage, Cox. Good governance and property rights. Constraints on the executive. Solved “commitment problem” without violence. Greif (2006) view: strong contract-enforcement coupled with CCI’s (“coercion-constraining institutions”), with deep medieval roots. Especially popular among political scientists and new institutionalists.

Specific British Institutions: English poor laws played a role (Solar, Kelly-O’Grada; Greif-Iyigun); Effective IPR’s and functional Patent system (North; Bottomley, and others). Relatively weak guilds (Wallis; Ogilvie; Doepke et al.) No effective resistance to technological change. Civil Economy: informal networks in the “Associational Society” --- enhanced trust and cooperative behavior (Peter Clark).


11

The Imperialist School: Ghost acreage and ghost workers. Britain exploited its colonies and other non-Europeans and got rich at their expense (e.g., Inikori; Parthasarati; Beckert) in a zero-sum setting. Popular in History departments and among “History of Capitalism” scholars.

Induced Innovation (Robert Allen): high wages + cheap energy in Britain stimulated labor-saving inventions in an endogenous growth setting (Acemoglu). At first popular among economists, but has become very controversial. [See below].


12

More recent suggestions

British Enlightenment (Roy Porter, 2000; Mokyr, 2002; 2009; Peter Jones, 2008; 2016; James Dowey, 2016): The Enlightenment was a critical cultural change with profound economic implications. Britain had an enlightenment, but it was different from the Continental one: it was more pragmatic, applied, materialistic, oriented toward concrete problem-solving rather than radical institutional reform or abstract philosophy and mathematics.

Psychological view (Nicolas Baumard, 2018). Higher living standards in Britain before 1700, coupled to lower inequality, led to widespread changes in behavior and preferences according to “Life History Theory” --- richer people are more risk-taking, inclined to entrepreneurial behavior, innovative, more cooperative, more trusting and publicly-minded.


13

More recent suggestions (cont’d)

Higher worker quality. To that we can add enhanced physical strength, health, and the cognitive abilities correlated with them due to better nutrition (Kelly et al., 2014). Consistent with higher income per capita in Britain in c. 1700 (Broadberry et al.) and lower-inequality and larger “middling classes” (Lindert-Williamson; G. Clark).

Social Structure view (Henrich-Schulz): the British were just the most extreme form of WEIRD people: nuclear families, late marriage, highly individualistic, non-conformist, more trusting of strangers (generalized morality). Above all: willing to associate and cooperate with non-kin in corporate forms (Greif). This “WEIRDness” made them into the “polite and commercial people” that Blackstone called them.


14

More recent suggestions (cont’d)

Cultural School: Britain was the most extreme case of McCloskey’s “Bourgeois virtues” --- the growing appreciation and rising prestige of commercial and industrial activities:

“Free innovation led by the bourgeoisie became at long last respectable” (McCloskey Trilogy Vol. II, p. 386).

Oddly enough this view is shared by Gregory Clark (2007) though his cultural mechanism is demographic-genetic.


15

A few notes on induced innovation

In an influential contribution, Robert Allen (2009) has argued that the main driver of the Industrial Revolution was factor costs. He noted that in Britain coal was plentiful and cheap, while labor was expensive (high wages). This clearly created, in his view, an incentive for innovators to direct their efforts toward labor-saving inventions.

These labor saving inventions such as the spinning jenny and the puddling wrought-iron making process constituted the heart of the Industrial Revolution. This is consistent with theoretical work in endogenous growth theory (Acemoglu, 2002, 2010).


16

On many fronts, this interpretation has come under heavy criticism

• Allen’s is really a theory of process innovation, whereas much of the innovation in the Industrial Revolution was product innovation or quality improvement which cannot be explained by factor prices (true even in the cotton industry).

• Most other (macro) data for the Industrial Revolution do not support the idea that technological change was biased toward labor-saving inventions.

• Micro data (e.g., patent statistics) does not support labor saving either.


17

• Allen relies heavily on the cotton industry which has been shown to be atypical (Meisenzahl and Mokyr, 2012)

• Even for cotton spinning, however, it may not hold (Gragnolati et al, 2011).

• The wage data he uses may be seriously flawed and pertain to men only whereas female and child labor were cheap (Humphries, 2017; Stephenson, 2018).

• Coal was not uniformly cheap. Cornwall, where coal was scarce, developed Cornish steam engines etc). Novulari-Verspagen (2011): dear coal in Cornwall stimulated search for more fuel-efficientengines.


18

More conceptual criticism:

• There is no good explanation why British wages were so high in the first place.

• It has no answer for the “Dutch dilemma”: why didn’t the Netherlands industrialize first? Its wages were even higher!


19

Most damaging:


What counted was not wages per se but labor costs. If British

labor was more efficient for some reason, then higher wages

would not mean higher labor costs. This was already realized at

the time.

Arthur Young

(1790, Vol. 2,

p. 446)

20

Indeed, there is good reason to believe that British workers were on average more productive than French workers (Kelly et al, 2014). They were taller, better-fed, stronger, and better trained.

Yet average worker quality does not explain something like the Industrial Revolution. We need to worry about the human capital and skills of the inventors and the engineers.

Specifically, we have to recognize that technological progress was driven by a relatively small segment of the labor force, perhaps 2-3 percent (UTHC).


21

Upper Tail Human capital in the Industrial Revolution

Human capital. Looking at schooling, Britain’s achievements looked always mediocre compared to much of the rest of northwest Europe (Mitch, 1998; De Pleijt, 2018). But are we looking at the right variables here?

Scientific superstars? It is also clear that eighteenth-century English science, while impressive in its own way, did not produce intellectual superstars like Bacon or Newton, as opposed to France which produced Lavoisier, Laplace, Ampère, Coulomb, and Sadi Carnot, as well as better mathematicians and philosophers.

To be sure, the Scottish Enlightenment, of course, was next-door.

Recent re-thinking has led to some revival here.


22

New Thinking about upper tail human capital: technical competence

What mattered was not so much literacy and formal schooling but top-level technical competence and artisanal skill. This is separate from macroinventions, and very different from scientific breakthroughs based on formal knowledge such as chemistry or physics.

The arguments for a predominance of artisans has been made before, for example in two essays by Liliane Hilaire-Pérez and Maxine Berg in History of Science in 2007, taking me to task for neglecting them in my Gifts of Athena (2002).

Before and during the Industrial Revolution it was widely observed that British craftsmen were more skilled and had been better trained than anywhere else.

Central Proposition: As long as technological progress was primarily skill-based rather than science-based, this gave Britain an advantage.


23

Competence and the Industrial Revolution

Competence is defined here as the high-quality workmanship and materials needed to implement an innovation; that is, to follow the blueprint with a high level of accuracy, carry out the instructions embodied in the “recipe” for the technique, and to have the ability to install, adapt, operate, maintain, and repair the machinery and equipment under a variety of circumstances.

Beyond those, competence often involved minor improvements and refinements (tweaks) of a technique, which may not have qualified as a "microinvention" stricto sensu, but clearly enhanced the innovative effort in economy. These are the “tweakers and implementers” that constituted the second line of defense after the great and not-so-great inventors (Meisenzahl and Mokyr, 2011).


24

It was in this area that Britain’s advantage was most pronounced

Contemporaries, both on the Continent and in Britain, agreed.

Jean-Baptiste Say, France’s leading student of Adam Smith, wrote in 1803 that Britain’s wealth was due to “the wonderful practical skills of her adventurers in the useful application of knowledge and the superiority of her workmen” (Say, [1803], 1821, Vol. 1, pp. 32–33).

The great engineer John Farey, who wrote an important treatise on steam power, testified at a late stage of the Industrial Revolution that “the prevailing talent of English and Scotch people is to apply new ideas to use, and to bring such applications to perfection, but they do not imagine as much as foreigners” (Great Britain, 1829, p. 153).

Thirty years later, Richard Cobden agreed: “Our strength, wealth, and commerce grow out of the skilled labour of the men working in metals. They are at the foundation of our manufacturing greatness.”


25

Prevailing belief: British are better at adopting and utilizing the inventions of others than of original invention

This belief goes back to Daniel Defoe decades before the Industrial Revolution.

Defoe wrote in 1726 that “the English ... are justly fam’d for improving Arts rather than inventing” and elsewhere in his Plan of English Commerce that “our great Advances in Arts, in Trade, in Government and in almost all the great Things we are now Masters of and in which we so much exceed all our Neighbouring Nations, are really founded upon the inventions of others.” (Defoe, [1726–27], 2001, p. 162).

David Hume pointed out 50 years later that “every improvement which we have made [in the past two centuries] has arisen from our imitation of foreigners ... Notwithstanding the advanced state of our manufacturers, we daily adopt, in every art, the inventions and improvements of our neighbours.” (Hume, [1777], 1985, p. 328).


26

By 1800 the fame of Watt, Crompton, Cartwright, Smeaton, Jenner and many others had put to rest the notion that the British had no ability to “invent” themselves.

That said, Britain may have had an absolute advantage in bothinventors and “tweakers and implementers” and yet a comparativeadvantage in the latter. Britain never dominated the “great inventions” the same way she dominated adoption and diffusion during the Industrial Revolution.


28

The big question was not so much the imagination to invent new things as the competence to install, operate, and maintain it.

Even when foreigners had access to British-made machinery, they could not operate it as well as British artisans. For example,

J.L. Bradbury, a Manchester calico printer, testified before Parliament in 1824 that the equipment in France was less productive than British, leading to far lower labor productivity. However, it was not the British equipment itself that was decisive, but the craftsmen who constructed, installed, and maintained it.


29

Evidence for the superiority Britain’s artisans

This can be inferred from the knowledge flows: Britain was the first and most successful adopter of many inventions made overseas, among them mechanical linen-spinning, chlorine bleaching, and paper-making machinery.

Yet it exported mechanics, engineers, and skilled workmen to every part of the continent to install, operate, and maintain the new machinery developed in Britain.

The mercantilist mindset of the eighteenth century responded to this superiority by the (largely ineffective) prohibition on the migration of artisans and exports of machinery.


30

To transfer tacit knowledge, people had to migrate

The Continent imported British engineers and skilled manufacturers on a large scale, knowing full-well that they represented cutting-edge know-how (Henderson, 1956). But British high-skill emigration in the eighteenth century was notable, and as it predated the Industrial Revolution these were not just skilled that had been accumulated in the Industrial Revolution itself

John Holker, the renegade Jacobite, became inspector general of French manufactures in 1756 and repeatedly recruited skilled workers in England; Michael Alcock, a Birmingham toy- and button manufacturer who moved to France and built a large manufactory of ironware in La Charité sur Loire and brought in English technicians to maintain the equipment. Equally telling was the migration of the clockmaker Henry Sully, the founder of the Paris Societé des Arts in the 1720s.


Singapore1 31

How many skilled workers migrated from Britain to the Continent?

One witness before the Parliamentary committee of 1824 estimated

that in the years 1822 and 1823 alone, 16,000 artisans moved from

England to France (Great Britain, 1824, p. 108); this seems

exaggerated, but a year later another estimated the stock of English

workers in France at that time at 15,000-20,000 workers (Great

Britain, 1825, pp. 37, 43).

Many others went to Belgium, Germany, and the Habsburg Empire.

32

British superior craftsmen lasted deep into the nineteenth century, and British immigrants provided crucial expertise in the construction and operation of the French railroad network in its early stages. Even relatively unskilled British workers (navvies) were more productive and able than their French counterparts.

British emigrant engineers and technicians could be found everywhere on the Continent. The pioneers of the Industrial Revolution in the Low Countries had names like John Ainsworth and William Cockerill.


Here is one more example :

Zvikafest June 2019

33

John J. Hughes, 1814-89, a Welsh

ironmaster, founder of the town of

Yuzovka, today Donetsk and a center of

the heavy iron industry in the Eastern

Ukraine.

34

Moreover, throughout the eighteenth century, the French (and much of the rest of the Continent) engaged in massive industrial espionage in Britain, as Harris’s masterpiece (1998) has so amply shown.

Another indication is that a stream of continental inventors traveled to Britain to have their ideas developed, tweaked, scaled-up, and hopefully commercialized. Best-known: Aimé Argand.


35

One more example:


Friedrich Koenig, 1774-1833, a Saxon inventor, made a number of major

improvements to printing presses, but had to come to England to find the

skilled workers to develop and scale-up his ideas, lived in London from

1806 to 1817.

36

Tacit vs. codifiable knowledge(Michael Polanyi)

John R. Harris, among others, insisted that artisanal skills were a form of tacit knowledge and could only be taught by personal contact and example over many years. Technological competence was to a large extent an instinctive savoir faire.

Hence, foreigners had a hard time importing disembodied technical expertise, because the British skilled worker was the repository of the tacit knowledge. He absorbed the skills needed to work with coal and iron “with the sooty atmosphere in which he lived” and would find it hard to express even what needed to be explained.


37

Successful mechanization and technological progress depended on skills

James Watt said as much: “what is the principal hindrance to erecting engines? It is always the smith work.”

What made his Soho works a success is having people at his side who could do the technical heavy-lifting: not just hall-of-famers like William Murdoch and John Wilkinson, but engineers like John Southern, a highly competent engineer known for the invention of the graphical indicator diagram an instrument that was essential in computing the amount of work done in an expansive steam engine, or James Lawson, an outstanding engineer and manager and an astute observer of economic conditions in the kingdom.


38

The French were painfully aware of this

In the late 1780’s one French author wrote despondently: “We have set the French workmen to grips with the English workman. It is the combat of a naked man against an armed man and it has the outcome we may expect and the victory cannot be disputed. Is no resource left to us?”

One obvious solution was protection in the form of the Continental Blockade, which provided the French cotton spinning industry with the necessary infant industry breathing space (Juhasz, 2018).

But it did not do the same for the production and maintenance of machinery, engines, and iron industry, where France and other continental economies still depended heavily on British technicians.


39

The decline of tacitness eventually meant the decline of British technological leadership

Over time, however, technical competence became increasingly codifiable as formal engineering-science books started to appear and become more accessible. Interestingly enough many of these books were written in French; the French were more comfortable with codifiable and formal knowledge. E.g. the work by Agustín de Betancourt:


This work was translated into English twice and

reprinted as late as 1840 and taught in engineering

schools all over Europe. In Britain engineers learned

their trade from other engineers as apprentices; in

France engineering schools taught from

mathematically sophisticated textbooks (Cardwell,

1994, p. 205).

40

To sum up the argument so far:

Britain’s leadership in the industrial transformation of Europe was rooted in its uniquely large and diverse body of artisans, who had the technical competence to design, build, operate, maintain, and continually improve the increasingly sophisticated machinery that began to appear in the mid-eighteenth century.

Without this pre-existing pool of mechanical expertise—ranging from watch- and clock-makers to millwrights, tool-makers, and foundry men—inventors like Arkwright and Watt would no more have been able to turn their ideas into usable technologies than Leonardo da Vinci had been in the fifteenth century.

It is this kind of obstacle that delayed an Industrial Revolution on the Continent.


41

But where did this skill supply in Britain come from?

Part of it was due to the focusing devices from a number of high-skill sectors determined by geography: coal- and other mining, shipbuilding, navigational instruments, and millwrights all generated a high-level of skills. Collieries were particularly important here as they set a large number of technical issues. Many of the engineers who helped develop steam power were trained as colliers.

Britain did not monopolize the production of watches, pumps and hydraulic engines, but it clearly became the technological leader in these industries (aided in part by political events in France).


42

The demand side:

Part of it was demand: Britian had a relatively large “middling class” (less unequal income distribution) and a high-wage economy, which generated a demand for upmarket high-skill and accuracy consumer goods: clocks, watches, musical instruments, fancy toys, telescopes, as well as high-end ceramics, furniture, and up-market textiles.

These skills spilled over --- at least up to a point --- to the dynamic high-skill industries in the Industrial Revolution.


43

Institutions and skills

What about the supply side? Given the well-established fact that the skill premium in Britain was comparatively low during the Industrial Revolution and remained so despite a sharply rising demand, the long-run supply of skills was clearly highly elastic.

The big question: whence these skills has a simple answer: Before the nineteenth century, skills were almost exclusively transmitted through apprenticeship.

Apprenticeship in Britain was central to the functioning of the economy. David Mitch has estimated that in 1700 more than a quarter of all males aged 21 had completed an apprenticeship, others (Humphries, 2003) estimate the percentage higher.

It is telling that after the famous Statute of Artificers was repealed in 1814, apprenticeship remained the central feature of British vocational training.


44

The economics of apprenticeship

The economic problem of apprenticeship is a classic one of incomplete contracts: both sides have serious credible commitment problems, not to mention asymmetrical information.

Unless there is strong institutional support to supervise the transaction, to resolve disputes, enforce the rules and to punish opportunistic behavior, apprenticeship as an institution could unravel.


45

There are four solutions to the contractual problems involved in effective apprenticeship (De la Croix et al, 2017).

1. Father-to-son transmission (solved most contractual problems, but had limited technological dynamism).

2. Keep the institution within the clan (mostly ineffective in Europe since extended families had largely disappeared as an effective social unit from Europe in medieval times).

3. Use a “corporate” (voluntary) organization like craft guilds to supervise the training and enforce the contract.

4. Rely on free markets using formal third-party enforcement (city government and local courts), mostly “in the shadow of the law” as well as informal reputation mechanisms through social networks.


46

The role of guilds

The effectiveness of guilds to enforce apprenticeship is a matter of heated controversy between the pro- and anti-guild schools. Guilds helped enforce the contracts (Epstein, 2011), but eventually created barriers to entry and obstacles to technological progress (Ogilvie, 2018).

What is clear is that in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution the formal power of guilds in England had declined and the contracts were mostly self-enforcing through reputation mechanisms, with the legal option being the “grim strategy” (Humphries, 2003). Guilds continued their role as social networks in which reputations were sustained.

The net outcome was a flexible and effective training system that produced competent and agile workers, that responded to market forces, and stood Britain in good service as long as tacit knowledge and innate dexterity were the keys to technological competence (Wallis, 2008; Leunig et al., 2011; Ben Zeev et al., 2017).


47

Integration and skills.

Other historical processes aided Britain in taking the lead in skilled craftsmen. One was regional integration and specialization, due to falling transport cost in the eighteenth century (Szostak, 1991).

Consider a two-sector, specific-factor model, that has a northern region that specializes in skilled and unskilled manufacture and a south that has more fertile land. Growing integration and regional specialization leads to a rise in the output of manufactures in the north, and the income of skilled artisans in manufacturing. As the income of skilled artisans in the North rose, parents there had a greater incentive to invest in the training of their sons, either by spending more time on them or to apprentice them to more expensive masters. In that way, the supply of high-skilled labor increased as the result of integration. Moreover, greater output in the north encouraged finer division of labor. At the same time, the South de-industrialized and increasingly specializedin agriculture.


48

What do the data say?

The geography of the Industrial Revolution: “Great Reversal” --- one that was eventually reversed in turn (also Jones, 2010).

Before the Industrial Revolution, much of the woolen industry was located in the “West country” (Gloucestershire, Wiltshire), then moved to North (Lancastershire, Yorkshire).

The poorer soils of the North led to initial lower wages and thus the growth of cottage industries in those regions. We find that on the county-level the correlation between agricultural wages in the 1760s and the median county level of suitability for wheat, estimated by the FAO, is 0.5; their correlation with the average land tax per acre in 1707 (leaving out London) is 0.6 , while their correlation with the age of the dominant rock type in each county—hard, ancient rock leads to less fertile soil—is 0.7.


49

Origins of the Great Reversal

Over time, cottage industries of the north morphed into more modern industry, driven by a host of potential mechanisms, such as cheap and docile labor, the supply of capital, entrepreneurship, commercial networks.

To that we add: cottage industries and small-scale workshops themselves may have been mostly low-skill, but they spawned complementary industries (makers of tools, metal workers, millwrights) that were high-skill. (Cookson, 2018).

To some extent the reversal was a historical application of Matsuyama’s (1992) seminal paper. Specialization in agriculture is costly historically because ex post both supply and demand factors implies that areas that specialized in agriculture would end up poorer.


50

Regional labor income, 1760s vs. 1830s


51

Can we support the high-skill hypothesis with more than anecdotal evidence?

One can test the prediction that the degree of industrialization in 1831 depended on the availability of skills in the late 1790s. However this supply of skill may itself be potentially endogenous: new industries may have encouraged inward migration of skilled workers in the decades before, or caused men in traditional industries like millwrights and blacksmiths to become specialized machine builders.

We therefore can use a second set of predictions—that these skills would accumulate in low wage areas that were conducive to the accumulation of mechanical skill—to instrument for potentially endogenous skills.


52

The problem: dataThe natural challenge comes in measuring the availability of mechanical skill at the beginnings of industrialization (since obviously the later data are endogenous). We do have detailed data on the supply of one type of skilled artisan in the mid-eighteenth century: watch and clock-makers, where the records of the London Watchmaker’s Company (guild) detail every one of its apprentices during the eighteenth century (Moore, 2003).

However, the 1851 census details the numbers of workers in each occupation broken down by age. By examining elderly men (aged sixty and over, most of whom would have been apprenticed around age 14 in the late 1790s) we can get an idea of the distribution of the availability of skill at an earlier stage of the Industrial Revolution.

For nearly every county and every skill, the number of these men with a particular skill residing in a given area closely matches the number with the skill born in that county, suggesting that most of these men were apprenticed locally and that inter-county migration is not large enough to confound the analysis.


53

The raw correlation looks like this:



Table 1: Determinants of Industrial Employment in 1831:

Ordinary Least squares.

55

The main problem with this result is that the skill data reflect a reality of the 1790s and thus may still be endogenous.

To try to deal with that, we instrument skills with three variables that we think may work here:

1. Size of cottage industry as approximated by agricultural wages.

2. Population growth before the mid-eighteenth century, as regions with cottage industries experienced higher birth rates, and workers from agricultural counties were attracted to upland areas where they could supplement income from farming with part-time manufacturing.

3. Cost of apprenticeship (as approximated by watchmaking costs).


56

2SLS results (First stage)


57

Second Stage 2SLS


58

What is notable in Tables 1 and 3 is the strong explanatory power of a small number of variables: the availability of water power and the supply of mechanics and toolmakers explain nearly all of the variance (over 85 per cent) in industrial employment. The data here are spatial but a Moran statistic (the spatial analogue of the Durbin-Watson statistic) does not indicate substantial correlation in residuals so long as water rather than coal is treated as the energy source.

The data on skilled workers clearly indicate that there is good reason to believe that even at the level of English counties, skills drove industrialization.

The importance of water power is interesting because of the finding by Mokyr, Sarid and Van der Beek (2019) that millwrights were a crucial source of skills for the modern textile industry. This is consistent with micro evidence (Cookson, 2018, pp. 73-76; Byron, 2017, pp. 87-91).


59

We then perform some tests on other variables that traditionally have been put forward as explanations.


60

Traditional explanations work less well:

• Literacy (convicts sent to Australia)

• Market potential (purchasing power weighted by inverse distance).

• Nutrition quality (Horrell and Oxley measure)

• Booksellers (James Dowey)

• Lawyers in the 1730s (Aylett).

Looking at the regression results in Table 4, it can be seen that none of these additional variables adds much explanatory power above and beyond skilled labor and water power, and in every case the coefficient of the proposed variable is low.


61

Upper Tail Human Capital

This result provides support for the UTHC view of technological progress (Mokyr, 2009; Meisenzahl and Mokyr, 2012; Squicciariniand Voigtlaender, 2015).

A small back-of-the-envelope shows why: Out of over 700,000 men aged over 60 in England and Wales in 1851, only 2,680 were or had been mechanics and 1,539 were tool makers: about 0.4 per cent and 0.2 per cent of their age cohort respectively. Assuming that fifty per cent of adult men in the early nineteenth century survived from their late teens into their early sixties, we are talking of somewhere around 8,000 men. Adding millwrights would add another 1550 skilled artisans at most. Fewer still would have been the masters who trained them, who labored through the heroic age of industrialization of the 1770s and 1780s.


62

Some final reflections: What mattered is not just the quantitybut the nature and content of UTHC

In China, UTHC was embodied in the jinshi and juren who had passed the Civil Service examination. It encouraged rote learning and the somewhat mindless memorization of the classical texts of neo-Confucian learning. What students had to study was The Four Books and The Five Classics, which were the lynchpin of China's civil exam.

Among Jews, the chadarim and subsequent yeshivot taught halachic texts, exegetical interpretations of the holy scriptures and the first-millennium legal texts built upon them. Despite the high rates of literacy, learned Jews contributed next to nothing to science, mathematics and technology and very little to medicine until c. 1800 when Jews turned to secular learning.


63

In Britain, it was different

The upper tail of human capital included not just the Desaguliers’s, the Priestleys and the Davy’s but also the Smeatons and Keirs and Watts of this world. Right below them were the great “Ingenious Mechanics” --- dexterous, pragmatic, problem solvers if not great intellectuals, like George Stephenson, Richard Trevithick, and Richard Roberts. And below them were the “tweakers and implementers” (Meisenzahl and Mokyr).

Britain did not have a monopoly on these craftsmen; but it had more of them, and they were better.


64

Finally what about science?

Does this emphasis on artisans vindicate the many scholars who have dismissed the role of science (and more generally are skeptical of the role of formal propositional knowledge) in the technological breakthroughs of the Industrial Revolution?

The answer is, of course, no. Tacit skills and formal knowledge complemented one another on a large and diverse number of fronts. Skilled craftsmen not only transformed ideas and blueprints into working machinery, but scaled-up, installed, operated, and maintained machinery that was complex and hard to repair. Yet inventors and engineers in turn increasingly relied on mathematics, scientifically-designed experimentation, and insights from science, even if this may not have been the case for the spinning jenny.


65

The significance of scientific consultants

How did inventors and mechanics get access to formal knowledge given that few of them had a formal education?

It is telling that many of the great “tinkerers” --- Watt himself, but also Trevithick, Wedgwood, Smeaton and others, found it essential to consult formally trained scientists.

The scientific milieu of Glasgow in which James Watt lived contributed to his technical abilities. He maintained direct contact with Black and his University of Edinburgh colleague John Robison, and as Dickinson and Jenkins note in their memorial volume, “one can only say that Black gave, Robison gave, and Watt received”


66

The clock and instrument maker John Whitehurst, a charter member of the Lunar Society, was a consultant for every major industrial undertaking in Derbyshire, where his skills in pneumatics, mechanics, and hydraulics were in great demand; The chemist Joseph Priestley worked as a paid consultant for his fellow “lunatics” Wedgwood and Boulton.

The ultimate consultant was the Cornish mathematician Davies Giddy (later Gilbert) 1767-1839, a mathematician and engineer, who consulted to the many engineers who tried to weaken Boulton and Watt’s stranglehold over the steam engine industry and testified as an expert witness in one of the cases that Watt brought against a competitor.


Davies GilbertJohn Whitehurst

67

Science and the Industrial Revolution

Even though little science was needed to invent a spinning jenny or the puddling-and-rolling process, science played a role in assorted industries such as textile bleaching, water power, and gas lighting.

More important: even if much of the early Industrial Revolution was the result primarily of “tinkerers,” the significance of the Industrial Revolution is not just what happened in the critical years between 1760 and 1830, but the fact that technological progress did not peter out as it had done in previous efflorescences but gathered momentum and accelerated in the decades after 1830. This would not have happened without the ever-increasing input from formal propositional knowledge.


68

As the process entered its next stage, the input of rapidly-advancing formal science became crucial: chemistry, electricity, metallurgy and many other parts of formal knowledge made the 2nd Industrial Revolution possible .

As this process advanced, Britain’s superiority in skills and tacit competence became less decisive, and it increasingly had to share technological leadership with other countries that had also experienced the Enlightenment and the institutional reforms that it entailed but had more developed formal institutions to teach science and formal knowledge. Britain’s lead was eroded by 1914.

What is not fully acknowledged with all the whining about “Britain’s climacteric” and “Britain’s Decline” is this:


69

The significance of the British achievement

“What ultimately matters is the irreversibility of the events. Even if Britain's relative position in the developed world has declined in recent decades, it has remained an urban, sophisticated society, wealthy beyond the wildest dreams of the Briton of 1750 or the bulk of the inhabitants of Africa or Southern Asia in our own time.

Britain taught Europe and Europe taught the world how the miracles of technological progress, free enterprise, and efficient management can break the shackles of poverty and want. Once the world has learned that lesson, it is unlikely to be forgotten.”


70

Thank you!


The British Industrial Revolution: A persistent puzzle · 2020. 4. 21. · The British Industrial...

Documents

Transcript of The British Industrial Revolution: A persistent puzzle · 2020. 4. 21. · The British Industrial...