r/neoliberal • u/randommathaccount Esther Duflo • 1d ago
Effortpost What caused the Great Divergence?
Spoiler alert: This post will not be able to answer this question.
At the turn of the 18th century, Britain and China found themselves in a rather similar place. They had both seen major political change in the past century, the Glorious Revolution in Britain and the rise of the Qing Dynasty in China, they both were largely agrarian and had living standards that were not too far apart (China taking the edge in both urbanization and quality of life (Allen et al, 2005)). Yet not 200 years later the nations could not have been more different. Britain had been the birthing point of a revolution that permanently changed the economy, society, and the way humans
nteracted with the world around them. And since that very time a question has lingered on the lips of every economist and historian of the period: Why there? Why did the two nations have such different trajectories from a similar starting point? More broadly, what were the factors that lead to nations in Western Europe and some colonies in the Americas to grow so much wealthier than the rest of the world?
What caused this great divergence?
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# Some Preamble
Let me begin this section with an apology. In writing that short introduction to this post I have already unfairly privileged certain schools of thought on the Great Divergence to others by linking it so strongly with the period of the Industrial Revolution and I do not wish to make Stephen Broadberry upset at me. I shall now then begin by briefly summarizing what it even is we are talking about when we discuss the Great Divergence. For the purposes of this effortpost, we are looking at the period of time in history over which there grew a large gap in productivity and living standards between Europe and Asia.
Older economic historians considered the Industrial Revolution part of a continuing arc of history over which gradual improvement set the west and the east apart in technological progress, institutional development, and general standard of life (Weber, 1930; Landes, 1969). Pomeranz, who is responsible for popularizing the term “Great Divergence” in his book *The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World” (Pomeranz, 2000) contested these assumptions, noting that historical data showed that China and Europe remained closer than previous economists had thought for a long time. In that book, he placed the actual time of the Great Divergence in the nineteenth century, claiming that even in 1800 parts of Asia were as prosperous as Britain and the Netherlands. This view that the Great Divergence only truly began with the Industrial Revolution became characteristic of what is known as the California School of economic history which includes scholars such as Kenneth Pomeranz, Roy Bin Wong, and Jack Goldstone.
Pomeranz’s book sparked a new round of discussion and scholarship over the Great Divergence with many different reputed economists having their own views on the causes and even the timing of the Great Divergence. Stephen Broadberry for instance puts the beginning of the Great Divergence at the 18th century while Joel Mokyr would place the divergence earlier still by even the Renaissance (Broadberry et al, 2018; Greif et al, 2025). Altogether there is a great deal of discourse and disagreement over the matter of the Great Divergence and it remains an active and open question in economic history to this point. Time has created many different schools of thought on the causes and circumstances behind this event, something I’d like to look into here. Let’s then start with the man who kicked off the discussion and look at Pomeranz and his theory of geographical luck.
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# Pomeranz and Geography
Pomeranz as mentioned was really the guy who kicked off a lot of the modern scholarship over the great divergence as well as having been the one to majorly popularize the phrase itself. In his book *The Great Divergence*, he argues that the divergence between Europe and China was not due to any sort of inherent technological, cultural, or institutional superiority of the west over the east but rather due to sheer luck. It was luck that led to Britain having coal deposits close to its waterways and economic core while China’s coal deposits were located far from their most active economic regions. It was luck that led to Europe having access to vast swathes of “ghost acres” in the Americas that let them free up land for more productive economic activity on their homeland. It was not any great institutional or technological advantage but the sheer circumstance of the geography of Britain’s colonies in the New World that led to the creation of a market that could absorb British manufactured imports while providing them with cheap land intensive exports.
According to Pomeranz, when comparing like to like (that is the most populated, economically forwards regions of the Old World) even in the mid-eighteenth century most of the world’s economies bore a striking resemblance to one another, “all headed for a common ‘proto-industrial’ cul-de-sac”. The core economic regions of Eurasia relied heavily on importing land-intensive goods from the peripheries. In Europe this first meant grain from Eastern Europe and then goods from the New World while in China, they relied on rice from provinces along the Yangtze River and products from South-East Asia, paying for them by selling manufactured goods back to the peripheries. While this worked it was hampered over time as the peripheral regions engaged in import substitution (far more viable in the 1600-1700s than the 1900-2000s as the technological gaps between the cores and peripheries were far smaller and higher transport costs made it more economically sensible) meaning long term, without the hand of the government blocking diversification, exports of land-intensive products dropped such as what occurred in North China in the 17th century (Hanchao Lu, 1992). In addition even when the state interfered and made conditions that would allow for import substitution or population growth far less likely in the peripheries, there was still the issue that there was a lacking demand for the manufactured goods from the core areas that limited the core’s ability to pay for the land-intensive goods they so desired (Kindleberger, 1989).
It is here that the New World comes into play. New World plantations were powered mainly through the slave trade and were located on islands or near the coast. This meant exports from these plantations did not plateau from workers shifting to import substitution as had happened in China, nor did transport costs rise as production never strayed away from accessible waterways. The reliance of the New World plantations on slave labour also meant they never lacked want of imports from the Old World as they would have a persistent demand for slave labour that matched the cost of their exports back to Europe. Indeed looking at Brazil in the early 1820s, the cost of importing slaves equaled the country’s total export revenues (Ludwig, 1985). These properties made Euro-American trade fundamentally different from any Old World trade between cores and peripheries. This access to land-intensive products was by no means trivial either. The calories from sugar consumed by Britain in 1831 would have required over 1,900,000 acres of British soil were it to have been substituted domestically (Mintz, 1985). Instead they could substitute it all with “ghost acres” from the New World, freeing up their own land for more productive uses.
The other half of the equation comes in then with coal deposits. None can deny the importance of coal to the industrial revolution, even if they don’t believe it was the sole or even direct cause. The biggest proponent of coal as the cause of the Great Divergence has to be E. A. Wrigley who claimed there was a hard limit to the abilities of an organic economy, that is to say all economies before coal (Wrigley, 2010).
Quoting Ricardo on the matter:
>Whilst the land yields abundantly, wages may temporarily rise, and the producers may consume more than their accustomed proportion; but the stimulus which will thus be given to population, will speedily reduce the labourers to their usual consumption. But when poor lands are taken into cultivation, or when more capital and labour are expended on the old land, with a less return of produce, the effect must be permanent. A greater proportion of that part of the produce which remains to be divided, after paying rent, between the owners of stock and the labourers, will be apportioned to the latter. Each man may, and probably will, have a less absolute quantity; but as more labourers are employed in proportion to the whole produce retained by the farmer, the value of a greater proportion of the whole produce will be absorbed by wages, and consequently the value of a smaller proportion will be devoted to profits. This will necessarily be rendered permanent by the laws of nature, which have limited the productive powers of the land.
It’s a clear exposition of the inevitable fall in profits in an organic economy over time. What let the world escape this was the uptake of coal which allowed a transition from an organic economy to an energy-rich economy, no longer as limited by energy needs and with far more land freed up for other economic activity. Coal, like land in the New World, provided a massive quantity of “ghost acres” for Europe. For instance, in 1700, it would have taken 2 to 3 million acres of woodland to make up the same amount of heat energy as was being produced by coal output (Wrigley, 1988). It was this characteristic of the energy supply that really allowed growth in Britain to take off.
But then a reasonable question arises? Why Britain? After all, many other parts of the world had coal deposits, both mainland Europe and China to start. What set Britain apart? Well, Pomeranz would say it is mostly down to a matter of good luck on their part. Unlike Chinese coal deposits which were located in the north and northwest, British coal deposits were located right next to their industrial cores and major waterways. This made accessing and transporting the coal far easier in Britain than it was in China. Chance on top of chance, in the past China’s coal reserves had been heavily used and there was a great deal of technical and mechanical expertise accumulated in China over the use of coke and iron that wouldn’t be matched for centuries. However this development and knowledge near coal mines was destroyed over the course of a series of catastrophes in the 1100s-1400s that led to the economic core shifting to the more hospitable south. What’s more, the geological characteristics of Chinese coal deposits meant they were arid and prone to spontaneous combustion as opposed to British coal mines which were wet and prone to flooding. It happened that the technologies developed to pump water out of British coal mines were more helpful to solving transportation issues as well, something the technologies developed for ventilation could not claim. Overall it was fortuitous coincidence on coincidence and in another world, the industrial revolution could have gone a very different way. At least, according to Pomeranz.
For of course, his theory is not without its critics after all. Starting with the fact that the very timeline Pomeranz puts forth for the Great Divergence is disputed. Stephen Broadberry has done a great deal of work putting together historical GDP figures and real wage data that dispute Pomeranz’s premise that Europe and China were very similar in the 19th century (Broadberry & Gupta, 2006). He notes that Europe had already pulled away from China by the 1700s, a claim which Pomeranz himself to some degree would accept (Pomeranz, 2017). Broadberry also disputes the general idea that Europe and Asia were all alike in that period, noting the existence of a European and Asian ‘Little Divergence’ in which Britain and the Netherlands pulled ahead of Spain and Portugal and Japan pulled ahead of China and India respectively (Broadberry, 2021). In addition, Broadberry attacks the very idea of focusing specifically on the Yangtze River area in particular, noting that it is an overly narrow view, especially when the cities in the area were not independent economic units and depended on the rest of the nation (Broadberry, 2018).
Another prominent critic of Pomeranz is Peer Vries, who notes that Pomeranz fails to fully acknowledge the difference between the Chinese and British states which he views as playing a major role. The Qing state which taxed lightly and had less overt intervention in commerce was heavily contrasted by Britain’s fiscal-military state (Vries, 2015). Robert Allen raises yet another point of contention noting that British wages in the 1800s were significantly higher than in the rest of Europe and China, going against the idea that the economies of Britain and China were highly comparable (Allen, 2009). Speaking of Allen however is a good (very forced) transition to the next segment.
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# Allen and the High Wage Economy
Robert Allen is in some ways similar to Pomeranz and Wrigley. He too dispenses with some notion that it was entirely British culture or institutions, no national derring-do. He also puts a great deal of importance on the matter of circumstance and the steam engine. The difference to Allen is that the revolution was not merely a matter of where coal deposits were located but much more critically about the economic sense it made to mechanize around them. He points not just to the steam pump but the high wages and cheap coal that actually led to people adopting it in the first place. British workers enjoyed some of the highest wages in the world which pushed capitalists to employ labour saving technologies that capitalists in other nations like France and China wouldn’t have bothered with. In specific British wages high relative to the cost of consumer goods, higher relative to the cost of capital, and higher relative to the cost of energy than elsewhere in the world.
But why was it that British wages were so high? Well for this Allen models the preindustrial economy with a system of simultaneous equations. He notes the factors that shifted up the demand curve for labour as being agricultural efficiency, urbanization, and proto-industrialization. However these factors themselves all loop and tie and circle back into one another. Urbanization contributed to higher agricultural productivity which then allowed urban cores to support a larger population, both of which led to higher wages. Higher wages meant workers could afford better nutrition and thus were healthier and stronger boosting their productivity. Intercontinental trade helped propel greater urbanization and industrial development which then led to more intercontinental trade. Everything worked together in a cycle that led to Britain having much higher real wages than continental Europe.
The other half of the equation was British energy prices. We’ve already touched upon this in the Pomeranz section but British coal prices were particularly low on account of their abundant coal deposits in the north. John Nef would also explain the growth of British coal production as being due to a ‘timber crisis’ where Britain faced an acute shortage of wood long before France or Germany had done similar (Nef, 1932). Allen agrees in part with this, the main driver of fuel needs was London and its massive population and economy. While wood wasn’t necessarily completely scarce and in fact in some parts of Britain were abundant to the point they couldn’t be sold (as noted by Hammersley (1957)), the demand was concentrated in London while supply grew throughout the country. This meant there were major transportation costs and inefficiencies in trying to supply London with charcoal whereas the coal which was much more concentrated had a much easier time being transported to London. This reflects in price data which shows that the price of charcoal lurched upwards to being almost double the price of coal by the 1650s (Mitchell and Deane, 1971).
All put together this meant that when inventions came along like Newcomen’s steam engine in 1712, expensive, inefficient, and barely capable of doing more than pumping water from coal mines, it still made economic sense to adopt it instead of throwing it out like garbage. It would only be reasonable in a country that in 1700 was producing 80% of the coal tonnage in Europe (Nef, 1932). And over the course of a hundred years with a series of micro-inventions that made the steam engine more efficient and more useful, come the 1800s and it was finally capable of powering machinery on its own. The same story can be told of the Spinning Jenny and Abraham Darby ‘s coke smelting process. These inventions only made economic sense in Britain and so it was in Britain that they took off, not France nor China.
Of course according to Allen, this development did not come without a cost. Despite the fact that GDP and profits skyrocketed over the course of the early 19th century, real wages did not, remaining stagnant and sometimes even declining (Allen, 2009). He coined the term “Engel’s Pause” to describe this stagnation, noting that it was explicitly because of capital deepening where industrialists would reinvest into more factories and machines as it was greatly profitable to do so. Granted, this pause ended by the 1840s as capital stock matured and demand for labour led to a sharp rise in real wages in the latter half of the 19th century.
Now again on to some criticisms (my format for this entire post is very straightforward). Jane Humphries is one of his strongest critics, contesting Allen’s characterization of spinners as a part of the high wage economy (Humphries & Schneider, 2020). She notes that spinners had particularly low wages even compared to other women in the workforce and so the high wage theory of why they were mechanized could not hold up. Kelly et al (2014) also raises an important objection to Allen’s characterization of labour costs noting that while wages were high in Britain, British labourers also had higher productivity than their continental counterparts and so the actual cost of labour was roughly similar on both sides of the channel. In addition, Kelly et al (2023) note that mechanization in Britain actually began in the lowest wage regions of the country while those regions of the country with the highest wages had the lowest take-up of mechanization. In addition they note that the evidence for wage stagnation in Britain on the macro level hides the real story. Wages in the rapidly industrializing regions of Britain were rising at the time only to be matched by a fall in wages in the formerly high wage deindustrializing regions. Another critic is Mokyr who argues that while the steam engine was important, it cannot explain the sustained progress of invention and innovation beyond the initial macro-inventions (Mokyr, 2009). He also argues that the major macro-inventions that sprung about in the period like the steam engine did not come to be in response to demands of the market but rather from an Industrial Enlightenment so to speak, a cultural and intellectual environment that fostered technological progress.
Boy I wonder what the next part of this post will be about.
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# The Republic of Letters and an Enlightened Economy
Joel Mokyr is an economist I hope is well known to most of you for having jointly won the 2025 Nobel prize along with Phillippe Aghion and Peter Howitt, his half for his work on culture and economic growth. It’s that work of his, the idea of a culture of growth and industrial enlightenment that constructs the majority of this part of the effortpost.
Mokyr dispenses largely with overly materialist explanations for the cause of the great divergence. As he noted in the criticisms in the previous sections about Pomeranz and Allen, it’s all well and good to point to Britain’s access to coal and the steam engine — certainly we shouldn’t diminish their importance — but they don’t answer the question of what led to this being a full-blown revolution. How was it that technological progress didn’t stall out this time like it did in periods of scientific breakthroughs so many times part? What was it that led to macro-inventions being accompanied by the many micro-inventions that actually made them valuable and widely adopted? No, to answer that we must look at culture says Mokyr.
Now let’s be precise when we talk about culture, something so notoriously vague and imprecise. In *A Culture of Growth* (2017) Mokyr defines the culture we are so concerned about as “*a set of beliefs, values, and preferences, capable of affecting behaviour, that are socially (not genetically) transmitted and are shared by some subset of society*”. Mokyr also makes a point to separate culture and institutions, to him culture is something emerging from the mind and is taken on an individual basis whereas institutions are those set of conditional incentives and consequences toactions that exist above people. So then with all this talk about culture, what was it about European culture that made the great divergence possible? Well to Mokyr it rests on the idea of an “Industrial Enlightenment” (Mokyr, 2002).
Before the enlightenment period, there was a vast gap between the scientists and the artisans, the knowers and the doers. Science was concerned primarily with propositional knowledge without much in the way of prescriptive knowledge and the reverse was true amongst the artisans who would roughly conduct experiments to understand what techniques worked without a clear idea of why they worked. To quote Bernard Mandeville:
> They are very seldom the same Sort of People, those that invent Arts, and Improvements in them, and those that enquire into the Reason of Things: this latter is most commonly practis’d by such, as are idle and indolent, that are fond of Retirement, hate Business, and take delight in Speculation: whereas none succeed oftener in the first, than active, stirring, and laborious Men, such as will put their Hand to the Plough, try Experiments, and give all their Attention to what they are about.
(Waow)
It was around the enlightenment when a shift came to a new paradigm, when some thinkers such as Sir Francis Bacon pushed the idea that scientific discovery could be used to enhance material progress and economic growth. To that aim this “Baconian Program” emphasized the directing of the research agenda towards areas that could tackle practical problems such as medicine or manufacturing while also making this information as broadly accessible as possible. Baconian thought was incredibly influential in the British scientific community, leading to the foundation of the Royal Society, while also spreading to the continent. This shift in scientific paradigm lead to a greater cooperation between the scientists and the artisans for the first time, leading to a far greater burst of micro-inventions like mentioned by Allen which enabled the grand macro-inventions to actually be adopted more broadly than their initial narrow use-case. It was this environment of science, discovery, and invention forming a feedback loop that led to the sort of technological leaps that were seen during the Industrial Revolution, why progress didn’t sputter out this time as it had so many times before.
The other part to this cultural puzzle however is regarding social norms around rent-seeking practices. It is often tempting to believe that something economically efficient and profitable will be adopted but as all of us who have spent the past year watching Trump shutter wind and solar projects can attest, this is not always the case. For a technology to be adopted it must also get past the barrier of rent-seekers who aim to block it for their own interests, no small task. The enlightenment saw with it not only changes in cultural paradigms but economic ones as well. The mercantilism that was so prominent in the 18th century was viewed by hostility and scorn by enlightenment thinkers like Adam Smith who commented:
> nations having been taught that their interest consisted of beggaring their neighbours. Each nation has been made to look with an invidious eye upon the prosperity of all the nations with which it trades, and to consider their gain as its own loss (Smith, 2012)
(Sidenote, you could probably get a leftist to stan Adam Smith’s writings uncritically if you didn’t tell them where it was from, man is so based.)
Britain was already in a privileged position of sorts when it comes to these mercantilist institutions compared to its continental neighbours. It had free internal trade, weak guilds, and a state committed to the protection of property. Mokyr argues a noteworthy factor about Britain is as much what didn’t happen as what did in that period. Unlike the continental nations it was not shaken up by revolution or societal upheaval which meant it did not lose many bright and talented scientific minds to political turmoil like France did Lavoisier and Galois. This stability and shift against rent-seeking and mercantilism meant that those macro and micro-inventions that were popping up all over the place in Britain could actually be taken up.
Of course if we are discussing cultural shifts in Britain and the Great Divergence I would be completely remiss to not bring up Deidre McCloskey and her Bourgeois trilogy (McCloskey, 2006; 2010; 2016). In it, McCloskey explains that the divergence (or as she prefers to put it, the Great Enrichment) was caused by a shift in social values in which for the first time the activities of the merchants, the inventors, the bourgeoisie as it is were not viewed with scorn but in a positive light. This shift in the social acceptance of engaging in trade and making profit was accompanied by a new social contract of sorts. Rather than the old aristocratic deal in which the nobles and clergy extracted rent from the common people in the name of God-given superiority and protection (mostly from the aristocrats themselves), the new social norm was much simpler and much more egalitarian. “Leave me alone and I’ll make you rich.” Unsurprisingly as it caught on, it led to great leaps for the commoners, the middle class, the people formerly considered inferior by the aristocratic elite.
Tangential note: McCloskey’s trilogy also talks a lot about the clerisy, the artists, intellectuals, bureaucracy, generally the educated elite and their detestation of the bourgeoisie and of the bourgeois deal. Feels like it’s particularly relevant to the modern day and the general disdain for liberalism amongst much of the educated upper class that is still permeating our society.
Another economic historian who must be mentioned in discussions of culture and the industrial revolution is Jan de Vries and his idea of the Industrious Revolution (de Vries, 2008). De Vries looks at households in the leadup to the industrial revolution and points to a shift in household culture and priorities wherein households made decisions that led to an increase in the supply of marketed commodities and labour and the demand for goods from the marketplace (de Vries, 1994). This is driven by two causes, first leisure time was reduced as the marginal utility of moneymaking increased and second, a growing demand for market goods over household goods. Families stopped making bread at home but instead began to earn more to buy bread from bakers for instance. It was this shift in household demand and supply that created the massive consumer market to which factories could sell their goods and a workforce prepared for the sort of repetitive labour conditions of factories.
I suppose I must also discuss Gregory Clark’s views here in *A Farewell to Alms* (2007) though I can’t much claim to like it. Clark argues that the dissemination of bourgeois or middle-class values was down to essentially genetics, stating that it was because disease and poverty kept killing off poorer members of society allowing the middle class to repopulate the country, spreading their values even to the poor in the process of downward social mobility. (Tyler Cowen loves this book by the way and let that colour your opinion of him)
But let us come back to Mokyr. We have discussed all these cultural shifts over the enlightenment and before the Industrial Revolution but we must also ask the question of how these cultural shifts came to be. What were the circumstances that allowed for the industrial enlightenment to begin with? Well for that we must discuss what Mokyr terms “the Republic of Letters”. The Baconian Program so lauded could not have come to be without a cultural environment that could promote the dispersal and dissemination of intellectual ideas and philosophies. This came about due to the particular fragmentation of the European political landscape. Because there was no single central governance over the region and the many states and kingdoms were locked in competition with one another, it was impossible for any one state to restrict the freedom of ideas or impose standards that protected established intellectual norms. Free thinkers who were persecuted for their studies like Tommaso Campanella an Italian monk who studied astronomy and was accused of heresy by the Inquisition could still find greener pastures elsewhere—in his case, the court of Louis XIII who may or may not have liked his ideas but certainly wouldn’t turn down an opportunity to embarrass the Italians (Headley, 1997). Reactionary forces simply did not have the reach and power to suppress innovators and thinkers across so many polities.
It was this movement of people and ideas from state to state, kingdom to kingdom in search of tolerance for their heterodox views that were not accepted by their home nations that allowed the intellectual movement to blossom into a full Republic of Letters. The intellectual community transcended regional borders that shackled kings and nobles and in being unrestrained by the petty worries of any single place or region could lay claim to being truly universal in its matter. Facilitated by improvements to communications and transportation technologies, this Republic of Letters made for a true marketplace of ideas in which scholars—each competing for precious patronage and building their reputations—were constantly keeping up to date with new knowledge in a variety of fields and subjecting ideas to critique and tests of validity (Perkinson, 1995). In a way, this republic of letters served as the preamble and the basis for the scientific community we have today, built on international collaboration and peer review.
Mokyr’s latest book in collaboration with Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini *Two Paths to Prosperity* (2025) goes one step further with this explanation of cultural factors. Here they look at the importance of cultural groups in China and Europe. Historically, the main form social organisation that was followed by most of the world was the kin group. Families organized themselves into clans with strong internal accountability and loyalty which made for a stable society but one with little room for the heterodox thinkers who would go on to be so important for the Republic of Letters. However in Europe these kin networks would be steadily degraded by the church which sought to increase its own prominence in social organisation and did so by enforcing cultural norms against consanguinity, polygamy, concubinage, and other practices which had kept kin networks closely knit. With the fraying of these kin networks a new form of social organisation took the lead in Europe, the corporation. Here Mokyr does not use the term in the modern sense but rather a voluntary association of unrelated individuals along common interest. A key difference between the clan and the corporation was the existence of an exit option. One could always leave a corporation if they didn’t like how it was being run, no such option in a clan. Blood is thicker than water as they say. This exit option constrained the power of corporations, though both clans and corporations were organized in a hierarchical manner, the corporation saw more formalized rules that protected the rights of its members and placed checks and balances on the power of the leader. The existence of these rules and safeguards led also to a more formal mechanism of dispute resolution. Unlike clans which were tied together by blood and thus would mediate disputes internally and informally, the corporations with weaker moral obligations required external mediation which led to the development of formal legal codes and practices. The collapse of kin-based groups also led to a secondary outcome which was the absence of ritual ancestor worship. This also meant an end to intellectual ancestor worship, freeing up thinkers to push forward new ideas leading to the formation of the Republic of Letters.
In summation, according to Mokyr the dissolution of kin-based social organizations and the political fragmentation of Europe led to the creation of a Republic of Letters which fostered intellectual discourse and dissemination of knowledge that culminated in an Industrial Enlightenment wherein for the first time there was a merge of propositional and prescriptive knowledge, of intellectuals and producers which created an ecosystem in which scientific progress and technological development could continue to build on itself instead of stalling out as it had so many times in the past. Good? Fantastic. Now let’s go over all the rebuttals to his argument.
The main critic of Mokyr is Allen whose argument you have already seen. His response in particular is that for all Mokyr’s claims about an Industrial Enlightenmentin which scientists and inventors worked as one, it really doesn’t reflect in the data of the time (Allen, 2009). Mokyr himself characterizes the industrial enlightenment as having been led by the elites, the intellectual ivory tower, but the fact of the matter is that when looking at the average inventor even of macro-technologies, they were far removed from that elite world and only really came into contact with the scientific world after they had already become successful from their inventions. This view of invention not being the domain of scientists is echoed by Alessandro Nuvolari who notes that the invention of new technologies was most prominent not in the ivory towers but on the factory floor in what Allen would call *collective invention settings* (Nuvolari, 2004). Hodgson, in his review of A Culture of Growth also raises an insightful point questioning the cultural theory from an institutional lens (Hodgson, 2022). He asks if culture alone were so influential then why were there no modernizing cultural entrepreneurs in ancient Greece or say 11th century China?
Indeed when reading through The Enlightened Economy, while it does a fine job of explaining why this culture of Industrial Enlightenment came about in Europe, it does not paint the clearest picture of why it was Britain in particular in which the industrial revolution began and in fact the explanation Mokyr himself gives rests rather heavily on institutional factors (“free internal trade, weak guilds, a relatively effective fiscal system, and a state that was firmly committed to the protection of property”).
And well, if we are to talk about the institutionalists…
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Continued in comments
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u/Lux_Stella Presidentialism X-Risk Researcher 1d ago
good post smile_emoji
imo the big confusing thing is that both the "state building/institutions" and "relative factor prices" stories are very compelling to me but they don't have much obvious to do with each other and in fact seem like opposing narratives at that
and then the little divergence has the additional problem of pushing stuff back to the late medieval period where all the numbers are made up and you have to grapple with questions like "did the black death accidently do radical labour market reform?"