system in agriculture, modern horse harness and nailed horseshoes were
widely adopted in Western Europe. The silk industry emerged in the twelfth
century and had greatly expanded in southern Europe by 1500. In 1000 CE
ship design in the Mediterranean was little different from that in 0CE.
Subsequently there was dramatic advance in the technology of trade and trans-
port. By the thirteenth century the most important innovations were the
magnetic compass with 32 directional points the sternpost rudder replacing
trailing oars for navigation, the Arab lanteen sail (which could be set at an
angle to the mast and allowed sailing under a wider range of conditions) and
the Venetian sandglass to measure time more accurately. Charts with an accu-
rate indication of ports, anchorages, tides, depths, and winds began to appear.
By the fifteenth century there had been further progress in navigation through
the use of charts and the pole star, the quadrant was developed which made
judgements of latitudes and distance sailed more accurate, and the nautical
mile became the standard measure of distance. In 1615 John Napier invented
logarithms to better calculate a ship’s course. In 1714 the British government
offered a £20,000 prize for an accurate invention of a means to measure longi-
tude which was achieved in 1760 with the invention of the chronometer by
John Harrison (Maddison, 2007).
Nef (1934) argues that there was a long history of rapid industrial growth in
England dating from the mid-sixteenth century. There was rapid growth in the
output of coal, salt, glass,and ships and industrial commodities such as
aluminium, soap, gunpowder, and metal goods – much produced by large-
scale industry. The annual output of a coal mine before the middle of the
sixteenth century rarely exceeded a few hundred tonnes and much of the
mining was done casually by manorial tenants. By 1640 collieries producing
between 10,000 and 25,000 tonnes of coal, representing an investment of many
thousands of pounds,and employing sometimes hundreds of miners, had
become common in the Midlands, the north of England and Scotland.
Gregory Clark (2007) uses a Malthusian mechanism to reconcile this appar-
ent paradox of low incomes in the mid-eighteenth century. Until the late eigh-
teenth century, argues Clark, all technological advances stimulated higher
fertility and so increased the rate of population growth, without generating any
gains in per capita incomes. In 1800 English farm workers spent 75 per cent of
their income on food (including 44 per cent on basic starches and bread) and
the rest on the basics of shelter, heating, soap, light, clothing and bedding.
Using these numbers and measuring income as the wage in pounds of wheat
for unskilled labourers, Clark finds that real incomes were no higher in seven-
teenth-century Britain than in Ancient Babylonia (1800–1600 BCE, Classical
Athens (408 BCE), or Roman Egypt (250 CE). It was only after 1770 that
Western Europe, led by Britain, broke with Malthusian stagnation. The popu-
lation of England tripled by 1860 and still real incomes rose. Such findings,
though exciting,are comprehensively dismissed by other scholars, notably
Robert Allen. Allen et al.(2007), examining real annual earnings of labourers
in six cities in Europe and Asia,found that real wages in north-western
The Great Divergence since 1750 149