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Following Adam Smith’s vision of a self-regulating moral economy the focus turned toward these self-regulating features and away from moral concerns. The chapter traces the development of the classical and neoclassical economists who emphasized the rational discovery of underlying natural principles in a social order and the fitting of human law to those principles. The Industrial Revolution brought with it issues of income distribution and controversy over whether poor people should receive public assistance. Population growth was viewed by many as an inevitable deterrent to increases in living standards. Bentham’s utility view of value and Marshall’s merging of supply and demand cemented the neoclassical view of value and left moral questions to the philosophers and theologians. Finding equilibrium states rather than economic processes became the research agenda. Vignettes on “Alfred Marshall and the Value of Something” and “Mill: The Life of Homo EconomicusIs Depressing at Best” conclude the chapter.

This chapter examines the scope and intensity of productive labour and its relationship to consumer aspirations. It demonstrates that changes in consumption demands play a role in the process of industrialization. The first ‘industrious revolution’ within the household sector reinforced significant changes in business organization, affecting both the international wholesale trade and the retail provision of goods. This phenomenon paved the way for the Industrial Revolution, which was advanced by new technologies and changes in organization.

The national innovation system (NIS) of Norway is characterized by diversity. This chapter examines the multiple and heterogeneous historical processes, each defined as a path, that have given rise to such diversity. Each of the paths has involved specific types of social groups, organizations, knowledge bases, and institutional set-ups, and for each path a specific type of innovation structure has been developed. The chapter defines three main historical paths emerging from three major industrial transformation processes in Western history defined as Industrial Revolutions. Each of these transformations created new industrial paths constituting a new layer in the economy. The Norwegian NIS is therefore described as the historical outcome of three diverse paths and consisting of three distinct layers. The creation of a new path does not indicate that the old paths of the economy remain static. Rather, each path historically has undergone radical transformation processes in order to remain competitive in changing environments. The main dynamics of the innovation system are therefore linked to path transformation and path creation processes.

The available statistics show that there was a sharp acceleration of the growth of British industrial output, investment, and trade in the last few decades of the eighteenth century, justifying the general use of the expression ‘Industrial Revolution’ and refuting the efforts of a few historians to deny its very occurrence.

In particular, the extraordinarily rapid growth of output and exports of the cotton industry was widely remarked upon both at the time and ever since, and was generally and plausibly attributed to a series of inventions and innovations, which increased productivity per hour of work by more than an order of magnitude and made possible rapidly descending costs and prices.

Only a little less rapid was the growth of the British iron industry, its rate of technical change, and its widening range of applications throughout the economy.

These exceptionally dynamic industries made an outstanding contribution to the growth of the economy as a whole based on water‐powered mechanization and a new transport infrastructure of canals, rivers, and roads.

Finally, British leadership in the Industrial Revolution must be attributed not only to these changes in technology and in the economy but also to the confluence and congruence of these changes with developments in the political and cultural subsystems particularly favourable to science, technology, and entrepreneurship.

The book asks when financial development is good for growth. It turns to industrializing England for an answer, using London goldsmith bankers as a case study. The book traces the early history of domestic banking in eighteenth-century London. It reveals how goldsmiths learned to be bankers in the tumultuous early years of the century, how a few of them prospered in the South Sea Bubble, and how the banks operated after mid-century. Financial repression by the government—a response to the pressing need to finance ever longer and more expensive wars—was a key constraint for private financial development. The usury laws restricted the ability to lend; war-time borrowing shocks crowded out private loans. Based on new evidence from historical bank archives, especially those of Hoare's Bank, the authors compile a rich new dataset with micro-level information on lending decisions, cash ratios, and profitability. Their conclusions shed light on one of the great unsolved puzzles of the Industrial Revolution—if technological change was fast, why was growth itself slow? Their answer emphasizes the important difficulties thrown up the institutional context in Hanoverian England—a “warfare state” bent on repressing financial development to facilitate its access to private savings.

This chapter examines the British experience with structural change and fiscal crisis, before dealing with the postwar United States. The rise and decline of Victorian Britain is a variation on the theme of structural change and fiscal crisis played out in the case of Renaissance Florence. History did not repeat itself in Victorian Britain, but certain underlying themes of human nature can be found in these two important periods. Britain adapted extremely well to one set of very large structural changes, the ones that created the Industrial Revolution. However, the patterns that led to that success became rigid and prevented Britain from responding to a second set of structural changes late in the nineteenth century. The result was that Britain, like Florence, was overtaken by other nations and slipped from the top rank.

This chapter examines the role of apprenticeship in the British Industrial Revolution. The apprenticeship system contributed in four ways. First, it provided training of necessary skills in the expanding area of employment and newer sectors. Second, it promoted efficient training among masters and men. Third, it reduced the transaction costs involved in transferring resources from agriculture to non-agriculture and facilitated the expansion of sectors which promoted trade and commerce. Finally, apprenticeship saved poor children from social exclusion and enabled them to become more productive adults. The chapter also suggests that the apprenticeship system also created a structure of contract enforcement which ensured that both masters and trainees would derive the benefits from human capital accumulation.

This lecture discusses a quest for the Industrial Revolution. It determines that the key feature of this revolution consisted less in an acceleration in growth than in the absence of any deceleration. The lecture further considers certain implications that may be termed the crafts revision and the prominence of agriculture.

This book explores the role that energy has played in the economic history of Europe, highlighting the link between energy consumption and economic development. Using three industrial revolutions as the organizing principle, it shows that the path of the modern economy has not been a straightforward story of a constant rate of increase in the use of energy. Instead, the overall trajectory of energy use within Europe follows a logistic S-shaped curve. Three phases can be identified: the first phase, 1500–1800, was marked by little growth in overall energy consumption; the second phase, 1800–1970, is the Industrial Age, which saw explosive expansion in energy use, except during the World Wars and interwar period; the third period, 1970–2008, was marked by stabilization in energy consumption per capita. Based on these developments, the book considers the drivers of energy transitions as well as the economic efficiency of energy use.

This chapter examines the role of energy in the economic growth of twentieth-century Europe. It considers the interrelationships of factors of production in order to identify the general features of a shared experience of growth, rather than to illuminate the local differences. The chapter first explains how development blocks contributed to GDP growth before discussing seven long-run propositions, including the strong growth of capital stock and catch-up with the leader of capital–GDP ratios; machinery increased more than GDP, labor, and other capital; and falling and converging energy intensity in the twentieth century. The chapter concludes with an overview of the link between energy intensity and economic structure. It argues that it was the third industrial revolution that was behind most of the increasing economic efficiency of energy consumption after the 1970s.

This chapter begins by reviewing the traditional historiography on mainly English but also touching more widely on British agricultural production, output, and productivity from the pre-industrial period c.1700, through the early, middle, and mature stages of the industrial revolution, to 1914. It reviews the contested ground over the chronological turning points of the agricultural revolution, turning points that have been determined by historians' estimates of agricultural output. Those estimates, both the contemporary ones by observers such as Charles Smith and Arthur Young, and the recent ones by modern scholars are tabulated, compared, and assessed. It is concluded that a new approach is required, an approach based on the product producers themselves, the farmers.

Economic history has always been quite a peculiar department both in the domain of history and that of economics; dealing with change, institutions, collective rationality, and conflicting strategies of economic agents, privileging descriptive and non‐formal analytical tools, economic history remained for long outside the scope of formal neoclassical economics.

This chapter describes and discusses the story of the incorporation of economic history into the mainstream of economic theory through the cliometric revolution, a powerful intellectual movement emerging by the late fifties, which encapsulated this reconstruction of economic history from the point of view of marginalist price theory and the postulates of individual rationality; Meyer and Conrad were the major drivers of this radical vision, and challenged the ‘old historians’ school’, today best represented by the response of David Landes.

Yet the coherence of the cliometric movement was soon jeopardized by internal contradictions: Paul David issued the most powerful challenge to the seminal building block of the new approach, Fogel's ‘Time on the Cross’, a revision of the traditional approach to the economics of slavery in the pre‐Civil War USA.

Douglass North is another example of a dissident from cliometrics, and Alfred Chandler provided alternative arguments for a reasoned history approach to societal change.

The cliometric analysis of the British Industrial Revolution, using counterfactuals, namely by Crafts and Hawke, is discussed and contradicted in the chapter.

Francis Asbury was born in August 1745 at Great Barr, about four miles outside of Birmingham, England, to Joseph and Elizabeth Asbury. Joseph was a gardener and Francis attended common school until about age thirteen. At fourteen he became an apprentice to a local metalworker as part of the Birmingham area’s booming metalworking industry, a key component in the early stages of the industrial revolution. Elizabeth Asbury sank into a deep depression following the death of Sarah Asbury, Francis’s only sibling, at age six in 1749. Elizabeth eventually found solace in Methodism and directed her son to Methodist meetings, where he experienced conversion and then sanctification by age sixteen.

England experienced its first flurry of public offerings of company shares in the 1690s, followed by promotion ‘waves’ in 1720 (‘the South Sea Bubble’), the mid-1820s, the mid-1830s, and the mid-1840s. Corporate enterprise thus generally grew in importance over time and by the mid-19th century large railway companies had emerged as pioneers of 20th century-style dispersed share ownership. Overall, however, progress was erratic, with periodic waves of enthusiasm for shares being followed by market reversals that swept away many of the new businesses. Moreover, despite Britain experiencing the world's first industrial revolution, few UK manufacturing enterprises had moved to the stock market before the late 19th century. Law was one deterrent but market dynamics were more important, in that industrial enterprises were risky investments and industrialists were disinclined to seek outside investment due to modest capital requirements and a strong sense of independence.

This chapter examines why Britain managed, for about a century, to generate and diffuse superior production techniques at a faster rate than the Continent, and to serve as a model that all European nations wished to emulate; and how and why it eventually lost its leadership and technology. It observes that technological success depended on both the presence of positive elements and on the absence of negative ones. The chapter notes that the generation of technological ideas and the ability to implement them are among the positive factors that provide technological successes. It further observes that one crucial difference between Britain and the Continent that helped Britain to establish its head start was its endowment of skilled labor at the onset of the Industrial Revolution.

The “List Critique” is the most explicit work Karl Marx wrote on nationalism. This work actually remained unknown until it appeared in a Soviet historical journal in 1971, long after he died. Conventional Marxian scholarship has tackled Marx's stand on nation and nationalism, however problems still remain despite its wide acceptance. In Marx's view, modern society consisted of two classes: the capitalists and the industrial workers. The theories and practices plus the Industrial Revolution all added to one process and that was the rise of capitalism. Meanwhile, the doctrine of the list was a contrast to everything that was taking place in society. The list called for the unification of all classes of a nation against other nations. Friedrich Meinecke pointed out the wave of nationalism while Marxism postulated the formation of the proletariat as a force that transcended national identities. Thus, Marxism viewed nationalism as the enemy.