and ascertain the place of origin of slaves from Africa to test whether there had
been long-term effects on growth and development into the post-slavery era.
Daren Acemoglu and others have collected historical evidence to estimate the
health/disease environments of now developing countries in the seventeenth
century to answer similar questions. These exercises have opened up new areas
for research, posed new questions and broadened the debate. An introduction
to one ongoing debate in economic history shows how the growth framework
used in this book can help organize the question ‘what determines growth?’
The British Industrial Revolution was the first instance of modern economic
growth, so to some extent all subsequent scholarly discussion of growth draws
from its images of industrialization, exploitation, urbanization and demo-
graphic change. The great contemporary scholars of the era such as Adam
Smith, Thomas Malthus and Karl Marx who placed the eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century British economy at the centre of their work have continued
to influence thinking about economic growth ever since.
By the mid-nineteenth century, England in particular had been substantially
transformed from an rural-agricultural economy to an urban-industrial one.
The effort to explain,measure and date this process has become an ‘industry’
in itself in the scholarship of economic history. The framework used in this
book helps frame this discussion and brings clarity to an often confusing schol-
arly debate. It helps to draw together, for example, the work of Charles
Feinstein on investment, Robert Brenner on labour and Douglass North on
institutions. There are long-standing debates about important ‘causes’, the
weak statistical base on which much of the discussion hinges and even a prob-
lem with conceptualising the meaning of ‘industrial revolution’. Is an ‘indus-
trial revolution’ something that can be defined and measured in terms of
economic growth and productivity, or is an ‘industrial revolution’ something
more qualitative, linked to changes in the way people view the world, how they
live their daily lives and connected to the role of science versus religion in soci-
ety, concepts that are much harder if not impossible to measure?
The British Industrial Revolution: proximate determinants
Each of the key proximate determinants of growth has been extensively
debated and quantified in terms of its causal influence on the industrialization
of Britain at the end of the eighteenth century. This part of the debate shows
first, how measuring economic growth, employment, investment and produc-
tivity is very difficult, especially using eighteenth-century data, and second,
how important aspects of the process of economic growth such as the organi-
zation of firms, the quality of the labour force and its working conditions, and
the role of innovations and technology are even harder to measure.
Growth
Estimating aggregate growth requires accurate information on the growth of
output of different goods and on the total output of each in relation to the whole
14 Introduction