Eventually, hegemonic empire also came to play a role in reinforcing this trend. In the seventeenth century, Ottoman religious elites promoted purity in response to internal rebellions. Their Turkic overlords demonstrated commitment to their religious obligations, not just in waging war against infidels but also in curbing contact with Christian Europe: travel to and trade with Europe as well as engagement with European scholarship generally met with disapproval.
Except for Jews and Christians, printing was banned until the early eighteenth century. Just as in imperial China, the potential for random intervention was significant. In 1580 the religious leadership persuaded the sultan to destroy a newly built observatory in Istanbul—in the same year that the king of Denmark had built one for Tycho Brahe, which was to provide Johannes Kepler with valuable data that in turn contributed to Isaac Newton’s discovery of the laws of gravity and motion. And all of these European scholars accessed information in printed works. Restraints loosened only after Napoleon’s invasion of the Middle East, as Ottoman hegemony began to erode.33
This was not a unique outcome. In India, Mughal rulers such as Aurangzeb had championed adherence to orthodox Islam. The decline of the Mughal empire in the eighteenth century and the emergence of a violently competitive cluster of polities coincided with growing interest in sponsorship of scientific knowledge and technology. Rulers sought to attract skilled workers and showed themselves to be receptive to foreign ideas, funding imports of European experts and scientific literature. The kings of Mysore acquired a large collection of technical treatises from India and Arabia alongside some translations of Western works, and other libraries and observatories were set up elsewhere. The pressures of war precipitated advances in the manufacture of guns and artillery.34
In the end, investment in foreign knowledge was of limited consequence. As Sheldon Pollack puts it, “No Indian Enlightenment lies hidden from view.” Library stocks would have little if any effect on practical application. Notwithstanding the presence of skilled workers, information flows across industries were more limited than in Europe because they were family-based and subject to strong collective social control. Nothing like the European “package,” with its incentives and opportunities, was available.35
Imperial hegemony as such did not foreclose innovation: empires were “not necessarily antithetical to technological progress.” Even if, empirically, “a negative correlation between the two has been observed,” what mattered most was what empires were not. Large-scale imperiogenesis, however intermittent, fatally interfered with the development of the kind of stable state system whose cumulative competitive dynamics, cross-fertilization, and exit options supported European development.36
It is worth remembering that even in Latin Europe, powerful bodies strove to uphold the status quo, and failed only in the face of persistent polycentrism. During the seventeenth century, when Ottoman, Mughal, and Qing rule obstructed intellectual innovation, many European rulers tried to do the same. In Spain, conservative attitudes had been hardening, and the Counter-Reformation provided pushback on a broad front. In the late seventeenth century, only England, Denmark, and Prussia promoted religious toleration.37
The flowering of knowledge in early modern Europe was only as robust as the fragmentation of power within and between polities. These advances were by no means a foregone conclusion: greater consolidation of reactionary forces might have blocked them. At the same time, these advances, and the transformative transitions that depended on them, could not plausibly have taken place elsewhere.38
Industrial Enlightenment
Conditions differed greatly even within Latin Europe. Britain’s Industrial Revolution was rooted in a very particular configuration of circumstances, which Mokyr labels the “Industrial Enlightenment.” It was predicated on general Enlightenment premises—measurement, experimentation, replicability, intelligibility of nature—but also and crucially on their application to practical and economically profitable matters.39
Applied scientific learning was a key part of this process. The Industrial Enlightenment promoted material progress by harnessing the growing understanding of nature and making it accessible to those who could employ it for productive purposes. Concrete problem-solving and cost-cutting results were key objectives.40
Democratization of scientific knowledge drove progress. Eighteenth-century France alone boasted about 100 local academies. Many such entities published proceedings. Universities became less important for the advancement of useful knowledge: fewer scientists attended top institutions, and engineers generally owed little to higher education. Instead, knowledge was widely diffused by technical journals, proceedings, newspapers, public lectures, and academies, “many of which were hardly affected by restrictive legislation imposed by religion or state.”41
The ongoing expansion of such outlets disseminated information among lower-class men and enabled them to participate meaningfully in the scientific enterprise, which in turn favored inquiry oriented toward practical application. This opening-up unfolded unevenly across countries. By all accounts, Britain was a pioneer. Its traditional elite education had little to offer to scientists or engineers. Yet science was still basic enough to be understood by the moderately educated. This redounded to Britain’s benefit: primary school enrollment and literacy rates were high and created a large pool of sufficiently skilled men. Even ordinary workers such as millwrights had access to mechanical theory and applied knowledge. High levels of literacy and numeracy, themselves rooted in the Reformation and the region’s antecedent regional economic development, were crucial preconditions.42
The resultant group of knowledgeable actors in Britain was small—a few thousand engineers, chemists, physicians, and natural philosophers—but influential. Their success relied on the presence of a few tens of thousands of skilled workers who provided tools and craftsmanship, such as mechanics, instrument makers, and metalworkers. Declining wage premiums associated with these skills reflect adequate supply in these areas already by the late eighteenth century. This favorable environment ensured that “macroinventions”—changes that represented a clear break with prior practice—were complemented and calibrated by much more numerous “microinventions” driven by continuous tinkering for the sake of improvement.43
That formal science did not make a great direct contribution to the earliest stages of industrialization suited this practical-minded approach. Whereas development of the steam engine relied on insights into facts that could not be derived from mere observations, advances in cotton and iron processing owed little to improved scientific understanding. Insofar as science contributed, it did so above all in terms of style: the culture of controlled experimentation was carried over from science to technology.44
The early Industrial Revolution was greatly aided by the free flow of information in critical sectors, via mechanical journals, patent specifications, manuals, and more generally technical literature that was accessible to nonelite audiences. This openness did not merely sustain continuing expansion of useful knowledge but also raised Britain’s appeal to skilled immigrants. Long a haven for intellectual or religious refugees from the continent, it now also attracted foreign patent holders and businessmen who benefited from the supply of capital and the mechanisms for the registration and protection of property rights.45
Political economy mattered. Patent law went back to the early seventeenth century and helped ensure that inventors could enjoy the fruits of their labors. Patents simultaneously protected and publicized innovation. The British authorities, a thoroughly materialist elite, generally sided with industrial interests even if they entailed unpopular change. They were ready to reject new regulations and rescind existing ones that obstructed change, and resisted anti-machine lobbying: more than anything else, the Luddite riots were a sign of powerlessness.
In explicit acknowledgment of the role of Europe’s competitive state system, the government even claimed that machine business might depart if operations were bl
ocked at home. Political will thus helped create an environment in which useful and disruptive knowledge “was indeed used with an aggressiveness and a single-mindedness that no other society had experienced before.”46
Technology innovators’ influence rested in no small measure on their interaction with business. Industry played a greater role in supporting their endeavors than public patronage. The fusion of a dominant ideology of commercial development with mechanical applications connected capital and applied science. This process not only fostered an environment that valued improvement and progress but also brought engineers and investors together. Businessmen were exposed to mechanical knowledge in schools and publications and were welcome to participate in scientific culture. Both entrepreneurs and engineers operated in a shared value and knowledge system of “industrial culture wedded to scientific knowledge and technology.” Barriers between crafts, business, and science were lower than on the continent, and the focus on practical application was stronger.47
Interest in science, whether genuine or faked, became part of “polite society,” just as an “improving frame of mind” had already become fashionable. The resultant links “between the savants and the fabriquants” were rare in other societies where class and status distinctions acted as brakes. In Spain, for example, aristocratic culture proved resistant to novelties, and in France a rigid status pyramid separated land and trade.48
Such alternatives highlight once again the critical importance of political pluralism within Europe. The prerevolutionary French elite maintained a stronger grip on learning while state funding created a new elite of scientists under state direction. Engineering knowledge was regarded as “property of the state, in the service of national interest.” Though potentially promising, this approach subordinated science to political preferences, which tended to incline toward preservation of the social status quo. Scientists’ ties to the state forced them into personal relationships with the political establishment, as opposed to the deepening cooperation with industrialists that occurred in Britain. Whereas Britain was run by a pro-business elite, French kings were too weak to overcome vested interests even if they desired reform.49
Far from bringing relief, the travails of the revolutionary period and of restoration further retarded progress. All-out war stalled diffusion of British innovation into France at a critical juncture. Scientific academies were abolished in 1793, even if the Paris academy soon reopened. After 1815, clergy were restored to a prominent position within the education system, charged with promoting “religion and love of the king”: primary school teachers faced religious probity tests and science education retreated despite continuing public interest. Books were censured for inspiring “sentiments of animosity toward the elevated classes,” and industrial development attracted suspicion of political subversion. Higher education likewise fell under clerical influence. Only renewed revolution in 1830 ended obstruction.50
Sovereignty was key. In Britain, security—both vis-à-vis foreign opponents and domestically in terms of property rights—and the specific political economy it sustained were as important in facilitating transformative technological innovation as in ensuring access to international trade and domestic coal: all of these inputs were required to support ongoing development. Even if the British state did not contribute much directly to scientific and technological progress, it did not obstruct it either. Overall, it helped create a climate that was favorable to innovation and its practical application. In this regard, it differed from many other states at the time. Had a single hegemonic political economy dominated Latin Europe, no comparable outliers could have emerged.51
VALUES
The ascent of an enlightened culture of knowledge and its practical application for economic gain inevitably involved adjustments in the valuation of entrepreneurship and the dignity of work and craftsmen. This raises the question of the extent to which changes in values were instrumental in fostering transformative economic development.
Deirdre McCloskey has advanced a bold thesis that places values at the center of modernization and the Great Escape. In her telling, “liberal ideas caused the innovation” necessary to sustain this process. By 1700, talk and thought about the middle class began to change. As “general opinion shifted in favor of the bourgeoisie, and especially in favor of its marketing and innovating,” commerce and investment in human capital expanded as a consequence of this shift, rather than precipitating it. This led to a sweeping “Bourgeois Revaluation” embodied in a new rhetoric that protected the pursuit of business: whereas aristocratic-inflected discourse had previously stigmatized it as a vulgar pursuit, it now garnered acceptance and even admiration. This new mode of thinking permitted the bourgeoisie to join the ruling class and to infuse and enrich it with innovative and competitive traits. In the final analysis, the idea of liberty and dignity for ordinary people was the principal driving force behind this change.52
According to McCloskey, this process unfolded in a series of steps. The Reformation together with the growth of commerce, the fragmentation of Europe, and the freedom of their cities enabled the Dutch bourgeoisie to enjoy freedom and dignity. Over time, Dutch influence that encouraged emulation of their practices regarding trading, banking, and public debt converged with the spread of printing and English liberties in similarly liberating and dignifying the British bourgeoisie, whose efforts subsequently unleashed modern economic growth.53
Thus, “the Four Rs”—reading, reformation, revolt (in the Netherlands), and revolution (in England in 1688)—culminated in late seventeenth-century England in the fifth and ultimately decisive “R,” the revaluation of the bourgeoisie, an “R-caused, egalitarian reappraisal of ordinary people.” Democratic church governance introduced by the Reformation emboldened the populace, and northern Protestantism encouraged literacy. McCloskey regards political fragmentation as vital to these processes: these forms of improvement worked better on a small scale. But political ideas, and ideas more generally, took the lead: “rhetorical change was necessary, and maybe sufficient.” She consequently documents at great length the emergence of a pro-bourgeois rhetoric in Britain during the eighteenth century.54
This idealist perspective, however unusual for a professional economist, is once again fully compatible with the notion that political polycentrism was essential. Just as the success of the Reformation was contingent on the absence of hegemonic empire, and the state system protected the growth of commercial wealth, the expansion of international commerce was rooted in overseas expansion driven by competitive fragmentation. The same is true of changes in rhetoric. As McCloskey avers, insofar as social regulation of business and attitudes toward it were controlled by aristocratic or Christian or Confucian elites, this dominance represented a “chief obstacle preventing the march to the modern, namely, the withholding of honor from betterment and of dignity from ordinary economic lives.”55
Throughout, she emphasizes “liberty” as a concept that allowed a previously subaltern class to achieve hegemonic status. It is hard to see, on a priori grounds, how large traditional empires with entrenched ruling classes—whether hereditary aristocrats, conquest elites of warriors, or gentry bureaucrats—would or could ever have allowed comparable shifts in values to occur, most notably the liberation and dignifying of a mercantile bourgeoisie. Late Roman and medieval Christianity were hardly fertile ground for such revalorization, nor was the neo-Confucian intellectual and moral hegemony that constrained commercial interests.56
It is hard to prove a negative: we cannot conclusively show that empire per se ruled out such shifts. Historically, they only took place in northwestern Europe under very specific conditions that had been profoundly shaped by the polycentric nature of state formation and social power: in McCloskey’s enumeration, in the Netherlands from the late sixteenth century, in England from the late seventeenth century, in New England and Scotland in the eighteenth century, and in France after 1789. She is careful to note that this does not mean that other cultures �
��faced permanent and insurmountable obstacles to rapid betterment”: it is just that the appropriate preconditions were not present there. Competitive fragmentation was the critical variable.57
I stop here. In principle there is nothing to keep us from expanding into even more overtly idealist approaches, most famously Max Weber’s thesis of a Protestant ethic, but that would simply take us back to the same lines of reasoning. The proliferation and success of any such attitudes and value systems were necessarily contingent on the same set of circumstances that made the revaluation posited by McCloskey possible: they cannot be treated as autonomous, let alone exogenous.58
SYNTHESIS
Any one way of organizing the numerous competing and complementary arguments about the origins and principal causes of the (Second) Great Divergence and the Industrial Revolution(s) is inevitably somewhat arbitrary. Grouping them in clusters, as I have done in chapters 10–12, tends to sever connections between the different elements of more complex explanations. Realistic accounts are multifactorial. How well can they be reconciled with the thesis that Europe’s multifaceted polycentrism was of paramount importance in transforming the world?
Robert Allen and Britain’s Path to the Industrial Revolution
I begin with a particularly detailed and influential model that seeks to identify and weigh the main factors that made the First Industrial Revolution in Britain possible. For Robert Allen, the key drivers of British economic development up to that transition were textile exports, the growth of international trade, and cheap energy supplied by coal.
Textile exports owed much to the Black Death of the Late Middle Ages, which undermined serfdom and raised real wages. It carried off so many people that farmland was converted to pasture, which fed a larger number of more productive sheep. This output supported British exports of competitive cloths—the “new draperies”—initially to continental Europe. Elevated real incomes were preserved or rather revived by the expansion of international trade, which shifted from the Mediterranean to the North Sea (in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries) and beyond (in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). This commerce boosted urban growth, on a scale that eventually outpaced that in other countries.
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