̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - industrial revolution

Britain industrialised much earlier than history books claim

fpjl2 — Fri, 05 Apr 2024 07:41:37 +0000

Millions of historical employment records show the British workforce turned sharply towards manufacturing jobs during the 1600s – suggesting the birth of the industrial age has much deeper roots.

How 9,000 lists written over 300 years are helping to test theories of economic growth

lw355 — Tue, 03 Jul 2018 10:59:23 +0000

In 1752, Juliana Schweickherdt, a 50-year-old spinster living in the small Black Forest community of Wildberg, was reprimanded by the local weavers’ guild for “weaving cloth and combing wool, counter to the guild ordinance”.

When Juliana continued taking jobs reserved for male guild members she was summoned before the guild court and fined the equivalent of one third of a maidservant’s annual wages. ̽��ֱ��entire affair was then recorded neatly in a ledger.

It was a small act of defiance by today’s standards, but it reflects a time when laws in Germany, and elsewhere, regulated people’s access to labour markets. ̽��ֱ��dominance of guilds not only prevented people from using their skills, as in Juliana’s case, but also held back even the simplest of industrial innovations.

What makes this detail of Juliana’s life so interesting is that it is one among a vast number of observations in a huge database on the lives of southwest German villagers between 1600 and 1900. Built by a team led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie in the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge's Faculty of Economics, the database includes court records, guild ledgers, parish registers, village censuses, tax lists and – the most recent addition – 9,000 handwritten inventories listing over a million personal possessions belonging to ordinary women and men across three centuries.

Ogilvie, who discovered the inventories in the archives of two German communities 30 years ago, believes they may hold the answer to a conundrum that has long puzzled economists: the lack of evidence for a causal link between education and a country’s growth and development.

“It might sound as if this is a no-brainer,” explains Ogilvie. “Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, earn more, have fewer children and invest more in them – surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier.”

She explains that between 1600 and 1900, England had only mediocre literacy rates by European standards, yet its economy grew fast and it was the first country to industrialise. Germany and Scandinavia had excellent literacy rates, but their economies grew slowly and they industrialised late.

“Modern cross-country analyses have also struggled to find evidence that education causes economic growth, even though there is plenty of evidence that growth increases education,” she adds.

̽��ֱ��inventories Ogilvie is analysing listed the belongings of women and men at marriage, remarriage and death. From badger skins to Bibles, dung barrows to dried apple slices, sewing machines to scarlet bodices – the villagers’ entire worldly goods were listed. Inventories of agricultural equipment and craft tools revealed economic activities; ownership of books and education-related objects like pens and slates suggested how people learned.

In addition, tax lists recorded the value of farms, workshops, assets and debts; signatures and people’s estimates of their age indicated literacy and numeracy levels; and court records revealed obstacles that stifled industry, like Juliana and her wool-combing.

“Previous studies usually had just one proxy for linking education with economic growth – the presence of schools and printing presses, perhaps, or school enrolment, or the ability to sign names.
This database gives us multiple indicators for the same individuals,” she explains. “I began to realise that, for the first time ever, it was possible to link literacy, numeracy, wealth, industriousness, innovative behaviour and participation in the cash economy and credit markets – for individual women and men, rich and poor, over the very long term.”

Since 2009, Ogilvie and her team have been building the vast database of material possessions on top of their full demographic reconstruction of the people who lived in these two communities. “We can follow the same people – and their descendants – across 300 years of educational and economic change,” she says.

Individual lives have unfolded before their eyes. Stories like that of the man who wanted to grow a new crop – turnips – but was forbidden by the village council because it meant driving his cart to the fields at a different time, threatening others’ crops in the communal rotation system.

Or the young weaver’s wife Magdalena Schöttlin fined 11 days’ wages for wearing an “excessively large neckerchief ... above her station”. Or the 24-year-olds Ana Regina and Magdalena Riethmüllerin who were chastised in 1707 for reading books instead of listening to the pastor’s sermon. “This tells us that they were continuing to develop their reading skills at least a decade after leaving school,” explains Ogilvie.

It would be easy to focus on these stories – the aspirations and tragedies, the societal norms and individual rebellions, the possessions precious and prosaic – but, says Ogilvie, now that the data-gathering phase of the project is complete, “it’s time to ask the big questions”.

One way to look at whether education causes economic growth is to “hold wealth constant” and follow the lives of people of a certain level, rich or poor, she explains. “Do we find education positively linked to the cultivation of new crops, or to the adoption of industrial innovations like knitting frames or sewing machines? Or to the acquisition of ‘contemporary’ goods such as cottons or coffee cups? Or to female labour force participation or involvement in the credit market?”

̽��ֱ��team will also ask whether more highly educated women had fewer children – enabling them to invest more in those they had – as well as what aspect of education helped people engage more with productive and innovative activities. Was it, for instance, literacy, numeracy, book ownership, years of schooling? Was there a threshold level – a tipping point – that needed to be reached to affect economic performance?

Ogilvie hopes to start finding answers to these questions over the next two years. One thing is already clear, she says: the relationship between education and economic growth is far from straightforward.

“German-speaking central Europe is an excellent laboratory for testing theories of economic growth,” she explains. “We know that literacy rates and book ownership were high and yet the region remained poor. We also know that local guilds and merchant associations were powerful and resisted changes that threatened their monopolies. Entrenched village oligarchies opposed disruptive innovations and blocked labour migration.

“Early findings suggest that the potential benefits of education for the economy can be held back by other barriers, and this has implications for today,” she says. “Huge amounts are spent improving education in developing countries but this spending can fail to deliver economic growth if restrictions block people – especially women and the poor – from using their education in economically productive ways. If economic institutions are poorly set up, for instance, education can’t lead to growth.”

Ogilvie also hopes to dig deeper into which aspects of education matter. “We feel intuitively that the answer to the famous question posed by Tolstoy – ‘Can there be two opinions on the advantage of education?’ – is the one that Tolstoy gives: ‘If it’s a good thing for you, it’s a good thing for everyone’.

“But while some types of schooling just benefit the providers or the authorities, other types make kids happier, increase their productivity, maximise impact on people’s wellbeing and benefit the wider society.”

Ogilvie believes the data will contain answers, and says: “I look at what we’ve amassed and I realise that I’m going to be working on these inventories for the rest of my life… I can think of much worse fates.”

Research funded by the British Academy, the Wolfson Foundation, the Economic and Social Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust.

Inset image: read more about our research on the topic of work in the ̽��ֱ��'s research magazine; download a pdf; view on Issuu.

̽��ֱ��handwritten inventories had lain largely untouched for centuries. Sand used to dry the ink still lay between the pages. Written neatly inside were thousands of lists that might hold the key to an enduring puzzle in economics – does education fuel economic growth?

Education helps us to work more productively, invent better technology, earn more, have fewer children and invest more in them – surely it must be critical for economic growth? But, if you look back through history, there’s no evidence that having a high literacy rate made a country industrialise earlier

Original and Reproduction: Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. HStAS A573 Bü. 4923

Death inventory for Michael Planckh of Wildberg, 30 Oct. 1676

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Industrial Revolution: damaging psychological ‘imprint’ persists in today’s populations

fpjl2 — Sun, 10 Dec 2017 09:22:56 +0000

People living in the former industrial heartlands of England and Wales are more disposed to negative emotions such as anxiety and depressive moods, more impulsive and more likely to struggle with planning and self-motivation, according to a new study of almost 400,000 personality tests.

̽��ֱ��findings show that, generations after the white heat of Industrial Revolution and decades on from the decline of deep coal mining, the populations of areas where coal-based industries dominated in the 19th century retain a “psychological adversity”.

Researchers suggest this is the inherited product of selective migrations during mass industrialisation compounded by the social effects of severe work and living conditions.

They argue that the damaging cognitive legacy of coal is “reinforced and amplified” by the more obvious economic consequences of high unemployment we see today. ̽��ֱ��study also found significantly lower life satisfaction in these areas.

̽��ֱ��UK findings, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, are supported by a North American “robustness check”, with less detailed data from US demographics suggesting the same patterns of post-industrial personality traits.

“Regional patterns of personality and well-being may have their roots in major societal changes underway decades or centuries earlier, and the Industrial Revolution is arguably one of the most influential and formative epochs in modern history,” says co-author Dr Jason Rentfrow, from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology.

“Those who live in a post-industrial landscape still do so in the shadow of coal, internally as well as externally. This study is one of the first to show that the Industrial Revolution has a hidden psychological heritage, one that is imprinted on today’s psychological make-up of the regions of England and Wales.”

An international team of psychologists, including researchers from the Queensland ̽��ֱ�� of Technology, ̽��ֱ�� of Texas, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and the Baden-Wuerttemberg Cooperative State ̽��ֱ��, used data collected from 381,916 people across England and Wales during 2009-2011 as part of the BBC Lab’s online Big Personality Test.

̽��ֱ��team analysed test scores by looking at the “big five” personality traits: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism and openness. ̽��ֱ��results were further dissected by characteristics such as altruism, self-discipline and anxiety.

̽��ֱ��data was also broken down by region and county, and compared with several other large-scale datasets including coalfield maps and a male occupation census of the early 19th century (collated through parish baptism records, where the father listed his job).

̽��ֱ��team controlled for an extensive range of other possible influences – from competing economic factors in the 19th century and earlier, through to modern considerations of education, wealth and even climate.

However, they still found significant personality differences for those currently occupying areas where large numbers of men had been employed in coal-based industries from 1813 to 1820 – as the Industrial Revolution was peaking.

Neuroticism was, on average, 33% higher in these areas compared with the rest of the country. In the ‘big five’ model of personality, this translates as increased emotional instability, prone to feelings of worry or anger, as well as higher risk of common mental disorders such as depression and substance abuse.

In fact, in the further “sub-facet” analyses, these post-industrial areas scored 31% higher for tendencies toward both anxiety and depression.

Areas that ranked highest for neuroticism include Blaenau Gwent and Ceredigion in South Wales, and Hartlepool in England.

Conscientiousness was, on average, 26% lower in former industrial areas. In the ‘big five’ model, this manifests as more disorderly and less goal-oriented behaviours – difficulty with planning and saving money. ̽��ֱ��underlying sub-facet of ‘order’ itself was 35% lower in these areas.

̽��ֱ��lowest three areas for conscientiousness were all in Wales (Merthyr Tydfil, Ceredigion and Gwynedd), with English areas including Nottingham and Leicester.

An assessment of life satisfaction was included in the BBC Lab questionnaire, which was an average of 29% lower in former industrial centres.

While researchers say there will be many factors behind the correlation between personality traits and historic industrialisation, they offer two likely ones: migration and socialisation (learned behaviour).

̽��ֱ��people migrating into industrial areas were often doing so to find employment in the hope of escaping poverty and distressing situations of rural depression – those experiencing high levels of ‘psychological adversity’.

However, people that left these areas, often later on, were likely those with higher degrees of optimism and psychological resilience, say researchers.

This “selective influx and outflow” may have concentrated so-called ‘negative’ personality traits in industrial areas – traits that can be passed down generations through combinations of experience and genetics.

Migratory effects would have been exacerbated by the ‘socialisation’ of repetitive, dangerous and exhausting labour from childhood – reducing well-being and elevating stress – combined with harsh conditions of overcrowding and atrocious sanitation during the age of steam.

̽��ֱ��study’s authors argue their findings have important implications for today’s policymakers looking at public health interventions.

“ ̽��ֱ��decline of coal in areas dependent on such industries has caused persistent economic hardship – most prominently high unemployment. This is only likely to have contributed to the baseline of psychological adversity the Industrial Revolution imprinted on some populations,” says co-author Michael Stuetzer from Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State ̽��ֱ��, Germany.

“These regional personality levels may have a long history, reaching back to the foundations of our industrial world, so it seems safe to assume they will continue to shape the well-being, health, and economic trajectories of these regions.”

̽��ֱ��team note that, while they focused on the negative psychological imprint of coal, future research could examine possible long-term positive effects in these regions born of the same adversity – such as the solidarity and civic engagement witnessed in the labour movement.

Study finds people in areas historically reliant on coal-based industries have more ‘negative’ personality traits. Psychologists suggest this cognitive die may well have been cast at the dawn of the industrial age.

̽��ֱ��Industrial Revolution has a hidden psychological heritage, one that is imprinted on today’s psychological make-up of the regions of England and Wales

Jason Rentfrow

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Industrial workplace

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A real piece of work

tdk25 — Tue, 16 Jun 2015 13:06:53 +0000

There comes a point when talking with Dr Leigh Shaw-Taylor at which it seems necessary to go over the facts again, if only to establish that he really does mean what he appears to have just said.

While many historians will spend their careers chipping away at the past with gentle care, 12 years into his research project, ̽��ֱ��Occupational Structure of Britain, 1379–1911, Shaw-Taylor seems to be calling for a wholesale rewrite. If his emerging results are correct, then they have the potential to transform not only the most important chapter in our social and economic history – the industrial revolution (so-called) – but with it the wellspring of much of our local and national identity.

So isn’t this a little drastic? “We’re talking about a fundamental change in what we understand about the past,” he says. “That is a fairly widespread view of our work. I’ve always felt that you can do more with historical research than people think, but I never thought that we could do this much. And it’s nothing compared with what we could achieve if we can keep the project going.”

̽��ֱ��project, as its name suggests, is a hugely ambitious, wide-scale attempt to reconstruct the picture of how working life changed and developed in Britain from the late Middle Ages through to the early 20th century. Co-directed by Shaw-Taylor and his Cambridge colleague Professor Sir Tony Wrigley, the research team has spent years assembling information about matters such as population size, transport infrastructure and sector-by-sector employment, at different points in time.

It’s a complex job and, before this, nobody had really tried it. Much of what we know about social and economic history is based on records such as wills and parish registers, which are patchy, inconsistent or highly selective. As well as collating information, the team therefore had to develop a method of controlling for this lack of coherence, to avoid distorting the resulting picture of the past. “We had to develop a system of weighting the importance of the data when analysing it,” Shaw-Taylor explains. “We still can’t be sure that it’s right, but it puts a limit on the extent to which we can be wrong.”

Textbook orthodoxy says that, before the industrial revolution, most people in Britain worked in primary sector employment, overwhelmingly in agriculture. During the ‘revolutionary’ 80-year period starting in about 1760, this landscape was transformed as secondary industries – like processing and manufacturing – took off. Only in the 1950s did Britain supposedly begin to evolve into the tertiary, service-based economy that we have today.

On such things are national and local myths founded – tales of a green and pleasant land that rapidly became black with the smog of industry, for example, or of a country that used to make things, but doesn’t any more.

When Shaw-Taylor and colleagues looked at the data that they had assembled, however, they found that it didn’t fit the existing picture. Nationally, for example, secondary sector employment seems to have grown more between 1500 and 1750 than between 1750 and 1850. “We’ve always presumed that the major structural shift in employment from the primary to the secondary sector took place between 1750 and 1850,” he says. “Well, according to what we’ve found, that change took place about 100 years earlier than we thought.”

Similarly, the data transforms our picture of the evolution of tertiary, service-based industries in Britain. Rather than taking off in the mid-20th century, these seem to have been growing all the way through the 18th and 19th. By 1911, one man in 10 was, for example, working in transport – others were shopkeepers, merchants, clerks or professionals.

If this is true, it means an adjustment to our ‘island story’ that has some radical implications for the history of places far beyond these shores as well. For instance, it is often argued that Britain’s industrialisation was made possible thanks to the raw materials gathered by the slaves of Empire. If industrialisation began before the Empire existed, however, as these findings suggest, the story changes. “Moreover, for a small island off the coast of north-west Europe to start projecting its power around the world, something unusual must have happened internally before that, not after,” Shaw-Taylor points out.

Equally, if the shift to secondary sector employment happened before the dark, Satanic mills that populate the nation’s consciousness as temples of the industrial revolution even existed, then we need to modify our picture of what people were actually doing. If not farming, then what?

It seems likely that more early-modern Brits than we thought were carpenters, shoemakers, bakers, butchers, tailors and masons. This, in turn, raises puzzles about when and why agricultural and primary labour ceased to be dominant. ̽��ֱ��likelihood is that the evolution of more productive, less labour-intensive farming led to a decline in the relative importance of primary work. Over time, the children and grandchildren of agriculturalists would have been drawn to new opportunities in the secondary sector, or even tertiary, service industries.

Much remains to be done and there are still significant gaps in the research, most notably around the role of women in British employment history. Many historians associate the industrial revolution with new opportunities for female employment; others believe, just as fervently, that female employment collapsed. Only with more work and more funding will the team be able to establish exactly how women’s lives, and the family, changed during this period, and the consequences that this had for women’s social status.

What exists at the moment is, nevertheless, a compelling case for a data-led approach to writing the story of the past. “Methodologically, explaining why things happened in history is very difficult because it only happens once and you can’t run it under controlled conditions,” Shaw-Taylor observes. “Yet the processes historians are trying to describe are often vastly more complex than those described by science. Our approach has been to eschew questions of why until we have the data at our disposal. Until you have those patterns, you’re just trying to explain things that may or may not have happened, and that’s a waste of time.”

In 2003, researchers embarked on a project to piece together a picture of changes in British working life over the course of 600 years. ̽��ֱ��emerging results seem to demand a rewrite of the most important chapter in our social and economic history.

We're talking about a fundamental change in what we understand about the past

Leigh Shaw-Taylor

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Coalbrookdale, Shropshire, by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg in 1801

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Lessons from history: how Europe did (and didn’t) grow rich

amb206 — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 08:00:00 +0000

In the modern world, we take for granted the fact that our economies become richer and more sophisticated decade-on-decade – and that our grandchildren will live a better life than our own, just as we live a better life than our grandparents. However, for the greatest part of human history, the standard of living was low and subject to little improvement.

One of the most important questions that economists seek to answer is how we made the shift from stagnation to continued growth, a shift commonly thought to have occurred with the Industrial Revolution in late 18th-century Britain. ̽��ֱ��stakes are clearly high: being able to answer this significant question would give us the potential to unlock millions of people from poverty across the world today.

̽��ֱ��most popular answer to the question of who or what created lasting growth can be found on the reverse side of the British £20 note, which bears the face of Adam Smith, champion of the free market. Following Smith’s Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, liberalisation and free trade have become familiar to us all, and the state and the market are commonly seen in opposition, with the release of the market requiring reining in the state through privatisation and deregulation.

In the tradition of Smith, modern day economists argue that the reason why economies were poor in the past was that absolutist monarchs undermined property rights (reneging on debt and forcibly extracting wealth from minority groups), and that the state too heavily regulated the economy, including granting monopoly privileges to guilds and international trading companies, all of which limited the incentives and ability of people to buy and sell goods freely. ̽��ֱ��result was that people lacked the incentive to produce, invest and invent – economic growth was thereby hampered.

Only with the onset of the Glorious Revolution in Britain in 1688, which transferred power from the monarch to an elected parliament, were markets supposedly set free, culminating in the Industrial Revolution a century later. In the century which followed, the collapse of the Communist regime in Russia and the success of market liberalisation in China, seemed to add credence to this free-market led view of growth. By 2003, following decades of market liberalisation across the globe, the President of the American Economic Association stood up and publicly announced that the future was bright for the global economy. Instead, what happened was the very opposite: we now stand in the middle of the greatest global economic crisis since the Great Depression.

So, with the economic crisis in mind, what evidence is there to support the claim that markets really do deliver in the long term? As my recent book Markets and Growth in Early Modern Europe has uncovered, very little historical evidence exists to support this claim, despite its power and influence on policy-making over the last two centuries.

Looking at evidence from as far back as ancient Babylonia and through to medieval, early-modern and modern Europe, my research has built a picture of the evolution of markets across the long span of human history using one particularly abundant historical data source – the prices of goods. ̽��ֱ��prices originate from sources as wide as the clay tablets of ancient Babylonia to the account books of Oxbridge Colleges, and include those for a number of commonly consumed goods (such as candles, soap and linen), with the most abundant being for cereals (which provided around 80 per cent of calorie intake in pre-modern Europe).

Where markets became more developed, one should find that in response to trade flows, prices became less volatile and, for the same good, converged across different locations. By applying statistical techniques to measure price behaviour, I have been able to measure market development in a consistent and comparable way across different parts of Europe and across many hundreds of years.

If the free-market view were correct, the picture revealed should have been very simple: poorly-developed markets throughout history until the 17th and 18th centuries, at which point new previously unseen levels of market development were achieved (particularly in Britain), culminating in the Industrial Revolution and the birth of modern economic growth. Instead, the picture I found was very different indeed: markets were certainly not a ‘modern invention’.

Indeed, the presence of markets in Europe as far back as Roman times would not surprise any visitor to museums, many of which have on display a great abundance of coins indicative of market-exchange, together with artifacts such as vases which had been traded across hundreds of miles to the point at which they were unearthed in an archaeological dig. Such markets were supported by the vast state infrastructure for which the Romans are famous – a stable coinage system, a taxation system that funded transport and utilities, and a common legal system to uphold contracts.

Once the Roman state began to crumble, so did the markets it supported, leaving Europe in what was once called the ‘Dark Ages’, falling behind Byzantium and the Orient. Indeed, it was only with the development of institutions in medieval Europe which substituted for the state (such as the Church, guilds and city-states) that markets began to recover – a process which took many centuries.

My research shows that, by the end of the medieval period, markets were around two or three times as developed as in the early ancient period and were highly active throughout Europe. At this time, Venice was the leading long-distance trader on the continent, sourcing exotic silks and spices that had travelled along the ‘silk road’ from the Orient and Middle East all the way to Constantinople. In an effort to sell their goods to European customers, the Italians carved out and linked themselves into trade routes across Europe, exchanging the exotic goods from the East together with the produce of the Mediterranean (oil, soap and wine) for the woolen cloth of north-western Europe (where 45 per cent of the residents of Bruges worked manufacturing cloth in the early 14th century), and the grain, metals, amber and furs of central and eastern Europe.

̽��ֱ��customs records of Southampton reveal a constant battle between the English authorities and the Italians, with one official refusing in 1423 to disembark an Italian ship on which customs duties were owed, only for the captain stubbornly to set sail, with the official eventually having to give in and disembark on the Isle of Wight.

Not only were markets for goods advancing in the medieval period, but so were those for finance, as along with the medieval trading boom came a demand for credit. It was in medieval Italy that Europe’s financial markets first began to develop, benefiting from the mathematical techniques which flowed from the East alongside the spices and silks. For this reason, many modern day banking terms have their origins in the Italian language, including the old symbols for the British currency (L, s and d), and, more generally, why the ‘intellectual fizz’ that was the Renaissance originated in the part of Europe most closely tied with the East.

Looking in envy at the wealth created by the Italian cities through trade with the East, other parts of Europe soon started to take advantage of developments in trading technology (such as sturdier ships, navigation and maps) to search for their own route to the Middle East and Orient. In the late 15th century, Christopher Columbus sailed across the Atlantic to find a ‘back door’, stumbling on the Americas along the way (some say that he took some convincing that he was not on Chinese soil). ̽��ֱ��result was the birth of the Atlantic economy, and the first major globalisation of the world economy: as calculated by O’Rourke and Williamson, world trade in the first half of the 16th century grew at a rate of 2.4 per cent a year, a figure not far off that in the twentieth century.

̽��ֱ��level of market development achieved by the end of the medieval period was already so advanced that, as my book argues, it was barely surpassed by the time of the Industrial Revolution three centuries later, only after which did markets witness a second phase of significant improvement. This is evident in the reduction in the disparity of wheat prices across Europe in the course of the 19th century, when the average price-gap fell from 45 per cent to only 4 per cent, indicating significantly more connected markets. This second major phase of improvement was an outgrowth of the Industrial Revolution itself, based on the application of the steam engine to ships and rail, which drastically cut transport costs, making the world ‘smaller and flatter’.

With these greater flows of goods came significant flows of people – around 30 million people emigrated from Europe to the USA in the century after 1820. This was a process of globalisation that worked on all levels: goods, people and money, and it was not surpassed until towards the end of the 20th century. As with that most recent round of globalisation, it was economic growth itself (or the technologies it brings) that enables markets to reach a new level of development.

In sum, what my research has shown is that the two most significant phases of market development occurred either side of the period traditionally emphasised - and that they took place well before the Industrial Revolution, and then subsequent to it, as opposed to during the 17th and 18th centuries. ̽��ֱ��idea that markets are at the root of the modern age of sustained economic growth is therefore seriously in doubt when we look at the historical evidence. Instead, it makes much more sense to argue that markets, while necessary, are both insufficient for growth and are as much a consequence as a cause.

If we want to understand why the Industrial Revolution occurred and so how Europe and the West grew rich, we need to continue to pursue this long-span historical approach; looking back at economies throughout the past to work out in which ways they were similar and, more importantly, in which ways they truly were different to those of the modern age.

For economists immersing themselves in theory and models, economic history provides a wealth of evidence that is yet to be fully exploited – and which has the potential for revolutionising economic policy and, with it, the lives of many people in the present and future. Until the lessons of history are learned and we realise that more than markets were required to light the fire of continued growth, we may find it difficult to escape the current economic crisis and return to the sustained growth we had begun to take for granted.

Dr Victoria Bateman is Fellow and College Lecturer in Economics at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. She is author of Markets and Growth in Early Modern Europe (Pickering and Chatto, 2012) and contributor to RJ Van der Spek, Jan Luiten van Zanden and ES van Leeuwen (eds), A History of Market Performance: From Ancient Babylonia to the Modern World (Routledge, forthcoming).

̽��ֱ��Industrial Revolution is seen as the spark that lit Europe’s economic prosperity. In her analysis of markets over many hundreds of years, economist Dr Victoria Bateman presents a compelling argument for a broader global perspective.

My research has built a picture of the evolution of markets across the long span of history using one particularly abundant data source – the prices of goods.

Dr Victoria Bateman

Bernardo Bellotto (Canaletto) A View at the Entrance of the Grand Canal, Venice, c.1741 Oil on canvas, 59.3 cm x 94.9 cm (detail)

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Rage against the machine

ns480 — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 08:58:24 +0000

New research marking the bicentenary of Luddism – a workers’ uprising which swept through parts of England in 1812 – has thrown into question whether it really was the moment at which working class Britain found its political voice.

April 11 will mark the 200^th anniversary of what was arguably the high-point of the Luddite rebellion; an assault by some 150 armed labourers on a Huddersfield mill, in which soldiers opened fire on the mob to stop them breaking into the premises, fatally wounding two attackers.

It was, perhaps, the most dramatic in a series of protests which had begun the year before in Nottinghamshire, then spread to Yorkshire, Lancashire and other regions. ̽��ֱ��Luddites were angered by new technologies, like automated looms, which were being used in the textile industry in place of the skilled work of artisans, threatening their livelihoods as a result.

Invoking a mythical leader, “Ned Ludd”, the insurgents broke into factories and wrecked the offending equipment. At its most incendiary, the rebellion saw exchange of fire between soldiers and workers as well as the notorious murder of a Yorkshire mill-owner, William Horsfall. It also led to the use of the word “Luddite” to describe technophobes.

For historians, the revolt has traditionally been seen as a watershed moment in which the industrial working classes made their presence felt as a political force for the first time. This supposedly laid the ground for later reform movements, such as Chartism, as well as the Trade Unions.

̽��ֱ��great social historian, EP Thompson, even saw Luddism as something close to the workers’ equivalent of the peasants’ revolt. His definitive study, ̽��ֱ��Making Of ̽��ֱ��English Working Class, linked the insurrection to the birth of a left-wing working class movement in Britain.

Now a study by Richard Jones, a research student at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, suggests that Luddism may be celebrated for the wrong reasons. He argues that it was not a movement which represented the concerns of the working classes at all – rather those of privileged professionals with disparate, local concerns. In a British textile industry that employed a million people, the movement’s numbers never rose above a couple of thousand.

“For historians, the Luddites have traditionally been seen as a phenomenon of social history,” Jones said. “They are viewed as workers dispossessed by economic advances, frozen out of existing structures and doing whatever they could to make their voices heard. But these were not downtrodden working class labourers – the Luddites were elite craftspeople.”

Focusing in particular on Yorkshire, Jones has examined oral testimonies, trial documents, Parliamentary papers and Home Office reports to establish who the Luddites were, how they operated, and what their chief motivation was.

His findings, some of which will be published in History Today next week, suggest that for a movement representing the birth-pains of a politicised working class, the numbers were peculiarly low. While as many as 150 may have stormed Rawfolds Mill in Huddersfield on April 11, 1812, most of the machine-breaking acts involved groups of four to 10.

Jones believes that this smallness of scale reflects the fact that Luddism was far from a genuinely pan-working class movement. Instead, Luddites were skilled workers – a relatively “elite” group, whose role had traditionally been protected by legislation regulating the supply and conduct of labour.

This centuries-old body of laws had also laid down rules for access to certain professional roles, such as the “croppers”, or cloth dressers, who led the rebellion in Yorkshire. These skilled workers had to spend seven years in apprenticeships before they could take up their chosen profession. At the end of it, they tended to feel that they were owed a living.

New machinery in the textile sector was starting to deny them this. For the real working classes, however, that was an old story – many unskilled jobs had long-since been displaced by technological advances and there was little reason for these groups to get involved in an uprising in 1811/12.

Critically, Jones also challenges the idea that the Luddites were organised into any sort of national movement – in fact, the form of rebellion varies considerably from place to place. In Nottinghamshire, for example, there was less violence, with workers simply removing the jack-wires from new knitting frames so that they collapsed. In Lancashire, however, handloom weavers plugged into radical movements in the densely-populated industrial areas around Manchester, leading to full-blown riots.

̽��ֱ��study of Yorkshire reveals that local grievances lay at the heart of the attack on William Cartwright’s Rawfold’s Mill, and the assassination of William Horsfall, near Huddersfield, on April 28^th. Both had made themselves deeply unpopular with the local workforce already, and the assaults appear to have been linked to this reputation.

Similarly, there is little indication that Yorkshire Luddism, in spite of its explosive high-points, was part of a hierarchical or organised criminal fringe linking up on a national scale. Its leaders met in local pubs, and their grievances similarly represented community concerns.

In spite of this, Luddism succeeded in becoming a cause célèbre in the region, not least because it was picked up in 19^th-Century fiction which presented it as the precursor to later, nationalised reform movements like the Chartists.

“Luddism remains an important aspect of local identity in the regions where it was most active,” Jones added. “ ̽��ֱ��problem with this is that sometimes a fictional interpretation of events can slip into the historical analysis. We can only understand the lessons of history if we look at it properly. Two centuries after the Luddite uprising, it is surely time to ask exactly whose views they represented, and exactly what the movement was about.”

Two articles by Richard Jones based on his current research on Luddism will be published in the next few weeks: “At War With ̽��ֱ��Future” (History Today, May 2012) and “Where History Happened: Luddites” (BBC History Magazine, May 2012).

April 2012 marks the bicentenary of the high-water mark of the Luddite rebellion – but new research suggests that the movement may be celebrated for the wrong reasons.

Two centuries after the Luddite uprising, it is surely time to ask exactly whose views they represented, and exactly what the movement was about.

Richard Jones

Ned Ludd, the mythical Luddite leader, in an 1812 depiction at the height of the rebellion.

Ned Ludd

In brief...

April 2012 marks the bicentenary of the high point of the Luddite uprising. Two hundred years ago this month, two of the most notorious incidents in the rebellion occurred - the attack on Rawfold's Mill and the assassination of William Horsfall, a local mill-owner. Both happened near Huddersfield in Yorkshire.
̽��ֱ��Luddites were machine breakers, opposed to new automated looms that could be operated by unskilled workers, which meant that many of the skilled craftspeople who had done that work lost their jobs.
̽��ֱ��rebellion started in the Midlands in 1811, but spread to other counties - Yorkshire and Lancashire in particular.
Although they have been remembered as the first in a series of industrial working-class movements, the Luddites were probably just a handful of skilled workers with very specific concerns. It seems unlikely that they had a wider political agenda.
̽��ֱ��notion that the uprising was organised on a national scale is also probably misplaced. ̽��ֱ��concerns of Luddites in specific counties seem to be highly localised and the closest they got to uniting was on a community scale, by meeting in local pubs.

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Yes

300 years of list-making

lw355 — Fri, 20 May 2011 12:30:00 +0000

‘One cabbage-spoon, a new dung-barrow, two badger-skins and a half share of an old pregnant mare…’ – so read the belongings of Hanss Hürning on the occasion of his marriage in 1682 to Barbara, owner of ‘nine white bonnets, a new scarlet over-bodice, a small spinning-wheel and a three-year-old red-brown cow.’

Many of us today would find it incredibly difficult to list absolutely everything we own, but in the southwest German territory of Württemberg until 1900 such lists were drawn up over hundreds of years for most newly-married brides and bridegrooms and bereaved widows and widowers.

From clothing to kitchen goods, land to luxuries, the entire contents of homes and businesses were inventoried for inheritance purposes, down to the last oaken water-vat or sack of dried apple slices. And, remarkably, many thousands of these Württemberg inventories survive today.

Now a team of researchers, led by Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie, an economic historian at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, is systematically studying these unrivalled documents for the first time to chart the history of how poor economies improve living standards. They hope that understanding the rise in human wellbeing in European economies over past centuries could hold lessons for developing economies today.

Reconstructing history

Professor Ogilvie first stumbled across the Württemberg inventories as a graduate student 30 years ago: “Ledger upon ledger contained lists that in isolation were fascinating but, together, offered an incredible community-wide compendium of who owned what, and how this changed from marriage to death and with successive generations.”

Although inventories survive elsewhere, those in Württemberg are exceptionally detailed, covering marriage and death, women and men, poor and rich, mansions and mousetraps.

For the past three years, the Cambridge researchers have been painstakingly examining each handwritten document, compiling its contents in a vast database, and carrying out multivariate statistical analyses. In so doing, the team is reconstructing 300 years of economic history, from 1600 to 1900, for two Württemberg communities – the village of Auingen on the Schwäbische Alb and the small town of Wildberg in the Black Forest. In 2013, the completed database will be deposited in the UK Data Archive, which is open to public access.

What really brings the inventories alive is information generated by a previous project, led by Professor Ogilvie and funded by the Leverhulme Trust, which created a full demographic reconstruction of the same two communities. Family trees, fertility and mortality are linked to occupational background, wealth, farm size, household structure, literacy and social networks, and now, through the new project, to individuals’ belongings.

To date, 28,000 handwritten folios have been analysed, representing 460,000 separate items of property and their monetary values. For over 3,000 individuals, the researchers now know who they were and what they owned, their gender, age and marital status, place of origin, occupation, credit relationships and office-holding, whether or not they could sign their name, and who were their family members and heirs.

An ‘Industrious’ Revolution in the making?

This wealth of information is opening a window on how market consumption affects the economy. In fact, it’s the most comprehensive attempt yet to investigate the theory of the ‘Industrious’ Revolution – the idea that the Industrial Revolution was preceded by a time when a growing desire for consumer goods spurred changes in households’ time allocation and productivity.

“Aspirations for the latest fashions, furnishings and stimulants motivated people to shift time from leisure and do-it-yourself to income-earning work, creating a virtuous circle,” explained Professor Ogilvie. “More work meant more earnings, more earnings meant people could buy more consumer goods, and this spurred producers to innovate and expand.”

Up to now, the Industrious Revolution theory has relied almost exclusively on English and Dutch records before circa 1750. But many European economies – such as Germany – were much poorer and slower-growing than the north Atlantic seaboard.

What held Germany back? Professor Ogilvie’s past research has pointed towards the dominance of guilds and merchant associations in resisting changes that threatened their monopolies. Guilds erected barriers against even the simplest commercial innovations such as peddling or rural craftwork that brought goods cheaply to poor consumers. Governments and elites tried to control what ordinary people could consume.

“It might be argued that such prohibitions were merely futile gestures, were it not for the fact that people at the time took them quite seriously,” said Professor Ogilvie. “Social norms about the appropriate quantity, quality and style of consumption for particular social groups were enforced with sumptuary penalties and public shaming, even for inviting ‘too many’ guests to your wedding or wearing excessively wide trousers.” [see panel]

This reduced people’s ability to buy new goods and their incentive to work more hours to afford them. ̽��ֱ��German Industrious Revolution was held back until guilds, merchant associations and sumptuary laws broke down, after about 1800.

For the Cambridge project, this means that small changes in what people owned – even the first coffee cup to appear in someone’s inventory – are significant because they could indicate the beginnings of an Industrious Revolution.

“We encountered our first coffee cup in an inventory of 1718,” said Professor Ogilvie. “After that we expected that a fashion for coffee and its associated equipment would take off, but instead there was no further mention until 1733. We have just found our third coffee cup in 1739. We know that they become common by the 1750s so we are on tenterhooks for the next couple of months while we work our way through the 1740s.”

With their gigantic database at their fingertips, the team can ask fine-grained questions such as who started using coffee cups, calico dresses, or any other trend. Were they rich or poor, educated or illiterate, male or female, locals or migrants? ̽��ֱ��team can trace how rapidly any trend spread and whether – as the Industrious Revolution predicts – it coincided with other household changes.

Tracing such changes in history is important for understanding present-day developing economies, as Professor Ogilvie explained: “We think that household-level changes in consumer behaviour and literacy are good predictors of economic development, lower child mortality, a better position for women, and higher human wellbeing. Now we have a powerful tool to describe these changes accurately – and to explain them.”

For more information, please contact Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie (sheilagh.ogilvie@econ.cam.ac.uk) at the Faculty of Economics or visit www.econ.cam.ac.uk/Ogilvie_ESRC/index.html

Personal inventories spanning three centuries are helping researchers unlock the mysteries of how economies edge towards growth and prosperity.

More work meant more earnings, more earnings meant people could buy more consumer goods, and this spurred producers to innovate and expand.

Professor Sheilagh Ogilvie

Stadtarchiv Münsingen

Marriage inventory, Württemberg, 1682

̽��ֱ��wrong trousers

How would you like the government or your neighbours to tell you how to dress?

Traditional societies often have informal customs about what people (especially women) are allowed to wear. But some go further and actually pass laws about it. This is what happened in many parts of pre-industrial Europe. German states, for example, passed at least 1,350 laws regulating clothing between 1244 and 1816.

You might think such laws were unenforceable. But in early modern Germany they were enforced. In 1662, for instance, a Württemberg community court reprimanded an unmarried weaver’s son “on account of his very wide trousers, a fashion that it is unfitting for him to wear”, fined him about two weeks’ wages, and warned him that “if he should again put on trousers of this fashion, they shall, by virtue of the Princely Command, be confiscated.”

In 1708, another Württemberg village court forbade Magdalena Schöttlin, a local weaver’s wife, to wear “her excessively large neckerchief, which she is accustomed to wearing above her station.” When Magdalena went on wearing it, she was summoned before the court and fined the equivalent of 11 days’ wages for a local maidservant.

Dress laws couldn’t totally stop people from doing new things, of course. But they increased the costs and risks of participating in an Industrious Revolution – especially for women, young people and the poor. It may not be a coincidence that in England and ̽��ֱ��Netherlands, the ‘miracle economies’ of pre-industrial Europe, dress laws were abolished around 1600, just before their Industrious Revolutions really began to take off.

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Yes

Sustainability revolution

bjb42 — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 15:39:48 +0000

These Young Minds is a social based enterprise that provides seminars, conferences, and research papers on corporate responsibility issues.

̽��ֱ��Law Faculty event gathered a number of distinguished speakers: Cathy Taylor, senior partner at Ernest and Young; Stine Jensen, Senior Sustainability Consultant at Radley Yedlar; and Dr Nicola J. Dee, Greentech expert at the Institute for Manufacturing, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

̽��ֱ��discussion was chaired by Dr David Cleevely, Founding Director of ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy, and Dr Beatrix Schlarb-Ridley, business innovation manager, 9InCrops Enterprise Hub, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Speakers shared success stories on how businesses reaped profit from investing in recycling facilities, rather than sending everything to the landfill.

Participants believe that "sustainability" and eco-friendliness will soon no longer be empty words buried in companies' statements of principles.

It was argued that aiming for sustainability, rather than profit itself, might be beneficial as a long term goal as more people insist on making ethical purchases.

Simon Brown, the Managing Director Solutions of 2degree network Solutions said that with the £1bn green tax looming over the economy, it will be imperative that companies make sustainability their goal; otherwise they are likely to lose their competitive edge.

A sustainability revolution could follow the agricultural, industrial and digital revolutions, according to speakers at a discussion hosted by These Young Minds.

Speakers shared success stories on how businesses reaped profit from investing in recycling facilities, rather than sending everything to the landfill.

John Picken from Flickr

South Pond Pavilion at Chicago's Lincoln Park Zoo

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Yes