Why was the Industrial Revolution British?

Why Was the Industrial Revolution a European Phenomenon?

Introduction Introduction The new growth economics has restored technological progress to the center of the debate about why economic growth occurs. There is no question that in some way new technology can bring about a period of rapid economic growth, whether measured in terms of productivity growth or in the more subtle improvements in the quality of life that occur through improvements in pr...

The British Industrial Revolution

The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective

During the past two decades, Robert Allen’s researches into English agriculture have fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the nature and pace of rising agricultural productivity between the late middle ages and the 19th century. More recently, Allen has turned his attention to the study of real wages as a measure of economic development and begun investigating the progress of wages in ot...

A Quantitative Model of the British Industrial Revolution, 1780-1850

A simple quantitative model is presented that is consistent with the available evidence about the British economy during the early phase of the Industrial Revolution. The basic model is a variant of a standard growth model, calibrated to data from Great Britain for the period 1780-1850. The model is used to study the importance of foreign trade and the role of the declining cost of power during...

Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution

This is a unique account of working-class childhood during the British industrial revolution. Using more than 600 autobiographies written by working men of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Jane Humphries illuminates working-class childhood in contexts untouched by conventional sources and facilitates estimates of age at starting work, social mobility, the extent of apprenticeship, and th...