There is, perhaps, no bigger question in economic history than, “What caused the Industrial Revolution?” As befits such a broad query, there is also no shortage of explanations. Many reasonable people even believe in several of these explanations. Until recently, however, most have focused their attention on the two centuries just before the Great Divergence. In The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution, Jan Luiten van Zanden endeavors to shift our attention further back in history. In fact, a lot further back, to the period extending from 900 to 1500. It is an enlightening and useful contribution which reveals important challenges and opportunities to the reader, regardless of one's prior beliefs about the origins of modern economic growth.

One of the strengths of Van Zanden's explanation for the “deep” causes of the Industrial Revolution is that it is complex and nuanced. This makes a simple summary of the book's ideas difficult. Nonetheless, the basic argument is that the late medieval and early modern period was a “long runway” to the “takeoff” of the Industrial Revolution. While most regions in Europe experienced surprisingly high growth during the years from 900 to 1300, only England and the Low Countries managed to pull away from their neighbors during the Little Divergence of the mid-sixteenth century. According to Van Zanden, they managed to do this by accumulating more human capital, which also made it possible for them to exit the Malthusian world of low per capita income growth relatively early during the eighteenth century. The large gains associated with the Industrial Revolution were a direct consequence of the gradual development of both efficient institutions and the accumulation of human capital which, according to the story, cannot be understood without understanding developments which began in the tenth century. Thus, according to Van Zanden the Industrial Revolution, far from being the beginning of modern economic growth, was simply “… the second stage in a process that had begun much earlier” (p. 264).

The book is split into five parts. After introducing the puzzle of the origins of the Industrial Revolution, the first section, “Medieval Foundations,” presents the argument that, far from the stagnation a narrow interpretation of the Malthusian model would imply, there was actually an extraordinary amount of dynamism in the European economy during the late medieval period (900–1300). Van Zanden argues that it was during this period that “efficient” institutions emerged in Europe. He partly bases this claim on the observed decline in interest rates from their high of around 30 percent in 1175 to below 10 percent by 1400. This is followed by an excellent discussion of the unique development in Western Europe of a separation between secular and religious law. Van Zanden's analysis is refreshingly subtle, as in the acknowledgement that the efforts of the church and the merchant guilds, on one side, and local lords (seigneuries) on the other, were working at cross purposes during the Middle Ages (pp. 56–57). The seigneurs were the force of rent-seeking and deterred trade, whereas the merchant guilds and the church worked to promote trade. Van Zanden's discussion lays bare the deep puzzle of how we should think about the interaction between the state building which took off in earnest across Europe in the seventeenth century and the initial starting positions of various regions in terms of urbanization and human capital attainment. It is clear after digesting Van Zanden's arguments that institutional explanations alone aren't a silver bullet.

The second section is dedicated to a discussion of the “Little Divergence Within Europe” which was characterized by a bifurcation in the productivity (real wages) of the Low Countries and England from the rest of Europe around the middle of the seventeenth century (perhaps as early as the second half of the sixteenth century). Van Zanden explains this divergence as a consequence of the strength of the European Marriage Pattern in the northern regions of Europe west of the Hajnal line. He characteristically presents a multicausal explanation for this institutional shift, focusing on religion, the system of intergenerational transfers, the expansion of the labor market outside the household, and the effect of the Black Death. Van Zanden claims that, once in place, the European Marriage Pattern was conducive to the emerging commercial environment in the diverging north since parental authority was weak, and women enjoyed relative freedom from their spouses. Section Three on the “Birth of the Knowledge Economy” builds on this line of argument by arguing that the lower fertility rates associated with European Marriage Pattern increased incentives for investment in human capital. Using data on prices, production, and access costs to “useful knowledge,” Van Zanden shows how the incentives for investment in human capital were uniquely strong in the North Sea area by the late middle ages. He then documents the exceptionally widespread use of books throughout the Low Countries and later in England. The end results were relatively well-educated labor forces in both these regions on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. Part Four tackles the question of why it was Britain rather than another highly educated region, like the Dutch Republic, which gave birth to the Industrial Revolution. A major part of Van Zanden's explanation is that the well-endowed city-states in the Low Countries were unable to integrate other groups or regions into their political model, thus hamstringing their ability to scale up in the same manner Britain eventually did. Part Five is dedicated to placing the experience of the European story told in the first four sections into an international perspective.

Of course, a book of such broad scope as The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution is inevitably going to make claims which will not please everyone. For example, using interest rate and wage premium data, Van Zanden repeatedly argues that institutions were “efficient” in most of Europe by the late Middle Ages. And by efficient, he clearly means property rights were secure (pp. 25, 65). This observation is fine, but it elides over some of the most interesting current research in the New Institutional Economics which emphasizes which property rights are being enforced, as opposed to whether they are enforced. For example, Dan Bogart and Gary Richardson have recently argued that it was institutional innovations in late-seventeenth-century England which allowed property rights to be reorganized in favor of coalitions which favored economic growth (“Property Rights and Parliament in Industrializing Britain.” Journal of Law and Economics 54, no. 2 (2011): 241–74). The book also reads awkwardly at times, which is probably due to the fact that many of the chapters are heavily based on previously published articles meant to stand on their own. None of these critiques should deter one from going out and buying this book, however. By emphasizing the institutional, educational, and technological dynamism of Europe in the centuries before the takeoff of the Industrial Revolution, Jan Luiten Van Zanden has done a great service to the economic history community by writing The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution.