At a time when Britons are coming to terms with the costly implications of their special relationship with the United States, it is salutary to be reminded by two excellent books reviewed here of its benefits for the accumulation of knowledge in the natural sciences, humanities, and social sciences. The academic alliance continues to be significant for a small but intellectually indispensable tribe of economic historians who research, teach, and publish about the long-term economic development of the British economy. Since the war we have all gained enormously from the breadth, depth, and sophistication of scholarship from Americans writing about their mother country. Our prolonged association with the brightest and best of graduates, largely from economics departments of Ivy League universities, has kept the British Industrial Revolution at the forefront of historical studies throughout the world, partly because both professions publish in English, but mainly because Anglo-Saxons continue to take immense (if by now anachronistic) pride in the long established historiography proclaiming that this small island completed the first transition to a modern industrial economy before any other society in the world. Americans have, moreover, also retained the nerve to construct stimulating syntheses designed to grasp its essence and explain the causes of the realm’s brief interlude of hegemony in the economic and, by extension, geopolitical and imperial history of the entire world.

As Hugh Trevor Roper often declaimed, ‘history without controversy is not history’. And Joel Mokyr has prefaced his textbook on the economic history of Britain, 1700–1850, with a provocative title – The enlightened economy – that predictably invites engagement with one of the most intellectually stimulating of scholars who have devoted long years of study to the First Industrial Revolution. Robert Allen, who has found it both congenial and intellectually profitable to emigrate to Britain and take up a chair in British economic history at Oxford, has written an equally controversial book that has also been designed to expose its nature and to tell us ‘why the Industrial Revolution took place in eighteenth century Britain and not elsewhere in Europe or Asia’. Anyone interested in this meta question, which (despite efforts to undermine and provincialize its status) remains as significant for British, European, and global economic history as the Renaissance does for the history of art or the French Revolution for political and geopolitical history should read both books by these two American scholars at the very apex of their powers.Footnote ¹

Considered as textbooks for university students covering the state, status, quality, and validity of scholarship on British economic history over a chronology that precedes, includes, and more or less completes the first transition to a modern industrial economy, both authors offer professional summaries of developments in major economic sectors (agriculture, trade, and services) connected to industry; analyse flows of key inputs (capital, labour, energy, technology) into manufacturing; elaborate upon institutions (states, markets, factories, households) sustaining those flows; and, above all, reflect on the cultures enveloping Britain’s precocious industrialization.

By now the library of books, articles, and working papers in print dealing with this famous conjuncture occupies literally hundreds of kilometres of shelves. No scholar, however diligent, could hope to satisfy an expert’s critical gaze by working his way through the specialized literatures that drown the Industrial Revolution in painfully recovered detail about anything and everything relevant to its progression and primacy.Footnote ² Inevitably, as the tide continues to come in, authors of textbooks can be criticized for omissions. Thus, British historians will ask: where are the regions of this our complex interlinked island economy? Why has religion, which continued to be such a powerful influence on economic behaviour until well into the nineteenth century, been relegated to a place of benign coexistence with reason? Why do economists now entranced with the thesis that Britain possessed superior institutions for the promotion of economic growth fail to read more of its mainstream political, legal, and intellectual history, which does at least set out to expose how they operated on the ground and changed over time? Finally, and since both these distinguished scholars have long been key figures in a transatlantic mission to convert British economic history into cliometrics, it would have been salutary to read their mature reflections on just where and how far the import of neo-classical economic theory and econometric methods has transformed perceptions of Britain’s Industrial Revolution for those who lack the skills to participate in that technocratic discourse.Footnote ³

Textbooks appearing after a more-than-a-century-long flow of academic scholarship, following Toynbee’s lectures on The Industrial Revolution, will include chapters that can be placed on a spectrum where a critical mastery of the secondary literature ranges from competence through to a critical mediation of accessible knowledge about an input, sector, or institution under survey. Joel Mokyr has done his best to keep up, but since Yale University Press allowed him 19 chapters and 485 pages to write an ‘economic history of Britain 1700–1850’, his text seems more uneven in quality than Robert Allen’s shorter (275-page) interpretation for roughly the same chronology.

They share the same ambition, and study the British case in order to expose (to quote Mokyr) ‘the factors that led to modern economic growth in what became the industrialized world in which by all accounts the British economy played a pivotal role’. Unfortunately – and except for a diminishing minority of its historians who continue to argue that the British Industrial Revolution offered other national economies a paradigm example to follow or that Britain’s precocious transition can be represented as a necessary condition both for the industrialization of the West and for economic progress on a global scale – the British ‘case’ is no longer regarded as either quintessentially British or as ‘pivotal’ as Mokyr’s or Allen’s more traditional Anglo-centric conclusions suggest. Furthermore, the range of factors now distinguished between potentially quantifiable and proximate determinants on the one hand and a satisfying way of comprehending the deeper historical, political, social, and cultural forces behind Britain’s famous transition on the other have become plural and interconnected in so many complex ways. This means that today’s textbooks can be written in one of two ways. Either they can be presented as lengthy summaries of public knowledge, arranged by chapters, listed under familiar headings and themes, and moving (pace Mokyr) towards conclusions that seek to integrate them into a coherent and (as all intellectuals hope) temporarily hegemonic reinterpretation of the Industrial Revolution. Alternatively, they can adopt Bob Allen’s more parsimonious?strategy of formulating a model, assiduously assembling a database of wages paid to builders in a sample of Eurasian towns, and testing new and recalibrated evidence to ascertain if it offers a superior interpretation for British exceptionalism and precocity.

Mokyr’s own ‘story’ has been constructed around an interrelated set of ideas that he has been developing for several years now to persuade us to accord primacy to the role of scientific knowledge, personal beliefs, and enlightened values for British economic growth. His more inclusive and historical treatment of the wide range of themes and topics that have found their way into publications about the Industrial Revolution has drawn him into uncharacteristic degrees of equivocation, as well as (paradoxically) to an apposite tendency to wield Ockham’s razor to derogate rival overarching interpretations currently in print. Thus the emphases or weights accorded by other economic historians in their narratives to such factors as prior and impressive levels of labour productivity in agriculture, the role of foreign trade, extraordinary and sustained investment in naval power, rapid (but not too rapid) population growth, and the peculiarly British trajectory towards mechanization, incentivized and promoted by relatively high wage rates and access to cheap supplies of energy, are degraded as ‘mono-causal’. Some of Mokyr’s critiques are certainly enlightening to contemplate, but they are marked by an overdose of eloquent rhetoric, which denigrates as ‘second order steering’ arguments that, for example, draw attention to the significance of the Isles’ favourable natural endowments. Moreover, he has not resisted the temptation to draw upon the now discredited toolkits of economists to deploy unreal counterfactuals, to parade potential substitutes for almost all inputs (without measuring relevant elasticities), and to deploy contradictory models, all to undermine other equally rigorous theories that are used here and there without warrant as proxies for historical evidence.

Finally, to reach that point where I stand between the rock and the hard place, let me proceed to offer points of departure from and disagreements with the books of both my friends. Economic historians of my generation will simply not believe that either the cultural forces that Joel Mokyr has boldly attempted to draw together under the umbrella of enlightenment or the geographical and economic factors embodied in Bob Allen’s rigorously specified and tested model provide the definitive cliometric narrative containing both the elements of and a necessary and/or sufficient explanation for the First Industrial Revolution.

On the one hand, everyone will surely welcome Joel Mokyr’s efforts to analyse the role of intellectual, institutional, and cultural forces and above all to restore the role of human agency into narratives of a historical process as complex as a long transition to modern economic growth. On the other, although some historians will recognize the value and purpose of parsimonious models, others may well deplore Bob Allen’s simplifying assumption that male elites who made the day-to-day decisions to research into, develop, improve, diffuse, patronize, invest in, and afford political support for the range of technologies, techniques, processes, organizations, and institutions that promoted the precocious progress of British industry and agriculture were, by and large, archetypal economic men motivated above all by the commonplace desire for material gains.

Now that cultural styles of history have become hegemonic in higher education, historians seem more likely to remain sympathetic to Mokyr’s contention that the Industrial Revolution emerged from the ‘preceding changes in the mental world of the British economic and technical elite’. Nevertheless, his problem in insisting, on page after page of a long book, on representing the progress of the economy from 1700 to 1850 as the achievement of an elite is that he has not and probably cannot transform a label imported from intellectual history into an ‘operational concept’, usable for the analysis of long-term economic change.

Enlightenment (which Mokyr appropriates but does not clearly define) usually refers to that most deeply studied of Western discourses among savants from philosophy that began in the late seventeenth century and continued beyond the outbreak of the French Revolution. This famous movement aimed to bring about a ‘revolution in the minds’ of monarchs, aristocracies of birth, oligarchies of wealth, and ecclesiastical hierarchies in order to promote reforms in morals, forms of governance, and individual freedoms, and to undermine roles and rules derived from religions in favour of the application of reason to social, political, and (at the margin) economic affairs. It was part of a discourse that Deirdre McCloskey subsumes and continues to reify as ‘bourgeois virtue’. Both of these cliometricians have apparently matured to a position from where they wish to accord a position of primacy in their explanations for the Industrial Revolution to changes in the (presumably hegemonic) discourse among British elites.Footnote ⁴ Considered as a set of famous, well-analysed texts authored by intellectuals (both men and women) from all over Europe and America with diverse localized priorities, Enlightenment – as a connected and trans-European intellectual movement – shared a common concern for progress. Nevertheless it is currently represented by its historians as a ‘family’ of national enlightenments that fissured over three decades leading up to the French Revolution, splitting into a moderate enlightenment, characterized by a strategy for political and moral reform that sought to persuade and work with established hierarchies of birth, wealth, and religion; and a radical enlightenment that advocated the replacement of anciens regimes and the ideologies and modes of thought that underpinned them with democracy, racial equality, social mobility, religious toleration, and sexual freedom.Footnote ⁵ Mokyr knows that the Enlightenment was pan-European, and recognizes that it came on-stream over the century before the French Revolution and that its origins and antecedents can be traced to other Western movements, including the reconnaissance overseas, the renaissances, the reformation, and above all to the revolution in science from Copernicus to Newton that led to an accumulation of knowledge about the operations of the natural world that permeated into the mindsets and reordered the mentalité, dispositions, and policies of political and economic elites across Europe.

Connections can certainly be drawn between the Enlightenment (as conventionally understood) and the progress of the British economy. Nevertheless they are more convincing when linked to technological innovations, institutional reforms, and the reordering of elite cultures that preceded and accompanied the initial and initiating stages of the Industrial Revolution, rather than to the programme of economic and political reforms expediently implemented by conservative Whigs and Tories over the decades that succeeded the French Revolution and the wars with France of 1789–1815. Otherwise, anything and everything that might secure approval from modern neo-classical economics comes to be represented as an outcome of a British industrial enlightenment spanning some two centuries before 1851.

Mokyr might also agree that, apart from the movement’s rather cautiously expressed antipathies to dynastic warfare, lending support to Kant’s plea for ‘perpetual peace’, and the admonitions from the precursors and followers of Turgot, Becarria, and Smith in favour of less regulated markets and more open competition, the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century generated very little by way of propositional knowledge universally applicable to or as prescriptions for enlightened economies. All in all, the movement or mood that historians designate as enlightenment made about as much difference to the mercantilist and imperial policies enacted and implemented by states as the campaign for unilateral nuclear disarmament made to geopolitical strategies and policies pursued by governments in our own times.

Furthermore, Mokyr (today’s most qualified practitioner of European economic history) opts, at least in this text, to disengage from any explicit way in reciprocal comparisons. This means that he has found it impossible to support his implicit assumptions and occasional assertions that enlightened ideas for the development and management of Britain’s economy had permeated into the actions and policies of the British elite more extensively and intensively than their rivals on the mainland. Indeed, he admits that ‘such differences are hard to measure and their overall impact is unclear’. I conclude that an enlightened economy (or indeed bourgeois virtues) are labels awaiting research and development to mature into operational concepts. That programme might well move along two or three parallel tracks in comparative economic history and could conceivably help historians specify those cultural, intellectual, and institutional variables that Joel Mokyr senses could be more significant sources for British exceptionalism than its relatively higher wages and cheaper energy, situated by Bob Allen at the core of his explanation.

The latter’s lucid interpretation is certainly rigorously argued and is underpinned with new and impressively constructed databases. Nevertheless, Allen knows full well that his hard won historical evidence would probably not be hard enough to clinch the argument for economists engaged in measurement of productivities across modern economies.

For example, variations across time and space that pop up several times in the data set for wage rates for builders in European cities look like statistical?artefacts. Let us agree with him that urban real wages in British towns almost certainly became higher than elsewhere in Europe. Nevertheless these revealed gaps, measured ambiguously in terms of grams of silver and more convincingly by Allen’s cleverly formulated purchasing power parities, serve as contestable proxies for the strength of the relative incentives and pressures confronting entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators across Europe, who were making decisions on whether to engage with costly research and development projects designed to substitute cheaper sources of energy and mechanized technologies for relatively expensive artisans and labourers. Thus and if (?) it could be constructed (and preferably by Bob Allen), could a database exposing cross-country differentials in real product wages, industry by industry, be more revealing? Furthermore, while access to cheap coal as the basis for general-purpose technology certainly mattered for growth in all the manifold ways specified by Allen, for precise measures of its significance, gaps in labour productivities across European industries can only be revealed only by methods utilizing double deflation, as recommended by Simon Kuznets long ago.Footnote ⁶ Such tediously labour-intensive exercises would almost certainly show, as John Harris observed, that its significance was high for heat-intensive industries.Footnote ⁷ Nevertheless, the elasticities of the substitution of coal for alternative forms of energy (including labour) were by no means comparable across the range of manufacturing activity. Coal’s relative significance may well have resided (as Wrigley suggested) in releasing ‘substantial’ areas of scarce, cultivable land from timber production and from growing foodstuffs for horses.Footnote ⁸

Bob Allen’s thesis explaining British exceptionalism will command the heights among economists but, if it turns out to be less than empirically impregnable or underspecified, attention will return (as Mokyr’s book advocates) to intellectual, institutional, cultural, and (I will add) geopolitical foundations.

Meanwhile, both authors are closer than their famous debate, symbolically held in a cathedral in Utrecht, suggests. They continue to place at the core of their stories that traditional (but unmeasured) perception of an eighteenth-century upswing in the rate at which useful and reliable knowledge was discovered, developed, diffused, and applied to agriculture, transportation, and, above all, manufacturing industry. Yet both are aware that representing that knowledge as ‘British’ has been exposed as Anglo-centric. We can agree with them that its transformation into saleable commodities, useful artefacts, and efficient technologies, techniques, and processes for production proceeded earlier and more rapidly in the economy of the offshore Isles than it did on the mainland.

Both authors also believe that, among several categories of human agent selected by historians of science and technology as central for this precocious transformation (including projectors, patrons, investors, and natural philosophers or proto-scientists), technicians, or proto-engineers, have been elevated to a position of primacy. Thus national economies employing labour forces with high proportions of artisans and craftsmen embodying the ranges of skills required to cultivate crops, exploit and control sources of natural energy, mine minerals, manipulate metals and other matter, engage in product innovation, and so forth would, ceteris paribus, possess higher potential for technological innovation and development than countries less well endowed with that ‘vital few’ – now represented as an indispensable component for the British economy’s precocious transition.

For example, Joel Mokyr’s thesis (which could only be tested by reciprocal comparisons with a group of potential competitors for industrial primacy – Holland, France, Catalonia, Southern Netherlands, Saxony) is that by the mid seventeenth century, if not before, the British economy had accumulated a considerable stock and an elastic supply of skilled technicians. Furthermore, Britain had also developed more effective conduits (books, drawings, models, educational curricula, public lectures, associational networks, and a fluid class structure) to connect its technicians with ‘enlightened’ projectors, patrons, investors, entrepreneurs, factory masters, and, above all, another important professional sub-group of society, namely natural philosophers. These last had studied, systemized, and formulated some general but potentially useful principles about the operations of the natural world, which offered educated elites, literate craftsmen, and their patrons a rational basis for a widespread belief that technologies and techniques could be developed to accelerate the rate at which useful and commercially viable knowledge could be applied to problems of production.Footnote ⁹

In her deeply researched study of these technicians (mindful hands), Celina Fox marshals her impressive range of knowledge of artefacts, machines, models, drawings, technical manuals, and encyclopaedias to illustrate clearly and elegantly how a European dialogue between mechanics and philosophers had proceeded from the Renaissance onwards, long before Francis Bacon published his plans for a programme of research, experiment, and development for the British nation-state and its economy to pursue.Footnote ¹⁰

Most historians would now accept the view that innovation in sciences, the arts, and technology can be analysed as part and parcel of a common European enterprise for economic and social progress. Yet Joel Mokyr and Bob Allen share an Anglo-centric perception that, from the mid seventeenth century onwards, the culture and institutions surrounding an elite of statesmen, investors, businessmen, natural philosophers, and technicians promoting innovation in Britain constituted a ‘regime’ that was probably superior to anything operating in continental Europe. Mokyr thinks that superiority arose because the cosmology associated with the scientific revolution and the prescriptions of a peculiarly English enlightenment (presumably the ‘moderate’ rather than the ‘radical’ version – which was anyway viciously repressed by aristocratic and popular reactions to the French Revolution) permeated British life before other Western cultures.

Mokyr documents his thesis that enlightened ideas promoting innovation took hold earlier and more easily on the British Isles on page after page of Geertzian dense description, which essentially adapts, updates, and adds more names and examples to the research of an earlier generation of British historians influenced by Musson and Robinson’s famous tome of 1969, which had exposed the networks, relationships, and associations of innovators, entrepreneurs, patrons, and businessmen who managed the transition to an industrial market economy.Footnote ¹¹ Accepting the challenge, Bob Allen prefers to test the weight that might be accorded to connections (subsumed by Mokyr under the umbrella of enlightenment) by constructing a prosopography for seventy-nine major inventors, in order to reveal their social backgrounds and to specify the extent and intensity of their connections with natural philosophy and proto-scientists. He finds the scope and scale of that connection to be a lot less than ubiquitous and its significance for innovation difficult to sum up. Yet Allen offers no systematic comparisons with the Dutch republic and regions such as Catalonia when he asserts that ‘the potential supply of innovators was the same across north western Europe’. His persuasive tabulations do, however, clarify the facts that the backgrounds of important (macro) inventors were overwhelmingly urban, commercial, professional, and artisanal. This established and now quantified view leads him to conclude that Britain’s endowment and supply of the human capital necessary to become the locus for technological innovation emanated from prior developments in commerce and overseas trade and that ‘the greater inventiveness of the British comes down to demand’, the powerful incentives offered to exploit the potentialities of cheap coal, minerals, and imported cotton fibres, and the substitution of machinery for relatively expensive labour. Economic historians prefer tables and graphs to dense description, and from them Bob Allen will surely poll more votes after this particular and stimulating debate.

In conclusion it simply remains for me to supplement and complement the underspecified arguments of my friends and colleagues by reminding them of the gains that the British economy obtained by way of high and sustained investment by the state in naval power, neglected by Bob Allen and regretted and denigrated by Joel Mokyr. Purely to prolong the argument, here is my own list that cannot, alas, be either negated or properly weighted to occupy the position of primacy it surely held in the perceptions of political elites and their intellectual advisers of the day. As mercantilists, and lacking the benefits derived from a modern education in neo-liberal economics and statistics, they perceived that the following were all to some ‘considerable degree’ derived from massive investment in naval power: higher wages for England’s urban workforce; protected coastal sea lanes for the transport of coal; imports of income-elastic groceries that stimulated industriousness; raw materials and luxuries manufactured abroad and available for the realm’s craftsmen to make at home; colonial and Asian markets for exports overseas; truly massive shipping and shipbuilding industries; ever increasing shares of the gains from servicing the extension and integration of a global economy; and internal security, with external order and political stability.

Historians will continue to remind liberal economists that Britain’s exceptional and sustained investment in that form of power occurred primarily to defend the realm, but, because a ‘smallish’ island economy en route through the First Industrial Revolution operated within an international economic order that was mercantilist through and through, the ideology that pervaded British culture and influenced the policies of the country’s political, intellectual, economic, business, and technocratic elites far more strongly and persistently than enlightenment was mercantilism. To condemn them from the vantage point of modern neo-liberal economics is not only anachronistic but represents a failure to recognize the British Industrial Revolution as possibly the sole example of successful mercantilism that created geopolitical and economic conditions required for the liberal international order that came all too gradually on-stream under the benign hegemony of the Royal Navy after 1815 – a point more than halfway through its transition to becoming (as Allen points out) a workshop for the world.Footnote ¹²

For this island realm, the French Revolution and other radical enlightenments operated to retard prospects for a more rapid convergence of rival economies on the mainland. While England’s moderate enlightenment served to secure a victory over revolutionary France, that was followed by a programme of prudent reforms that strengthened the internal order and political stability provided by an ancien regime of gentrified elites who held on to their power, rents, and gains from trade all the way down to 1914.

Despite the proclivities of scholars educated in modern social sciences to think otherwise, conjunctures in history emanate more often from above than below. The British case of precocious industrialization was promoted by aristocratic elites that few of the savants who participated in that celebrated European discourse would describe as ‘enlightened’ – although they may have been a bit more bourgeois than nobilities on the mainland.