More generally right up until the 1930s the developed world as a whole was a
net exporter of energy, which in the 1880s included 20 million tonnes of coal
exported to developing countries from Britain (Bairoch, 1993).
The causal link here runs from a peculiar geographic location that enabled
parts of Western Europe to participate in trade with and colonization of the
New World and to benefit from the import of goods and energy necessary to
expand output (investment) and to feed more people (labour).
Culture
The achievements of the ‘heroic entrepreneur’ in Britain reflect a distinct
cultural difference separating Britain (and Western Europe) from the rest of the
world (Landes, 1998). In medieval Europe the authority of the church was
limited by competing secular authorities and by religious dissent from below.
This created space for the rise of a rational science freed from the constraints
of religious orthodoxy. The first European university was established in
Bologna in 1080 and by 1500 there were 70 such centres of secular learning in
Western Europe. Gutenberg produced his first book in Mainz in 1455 and by
1500 there were 220 printing presses and Western Europe had produced 8
million books. By the mid-seventeenth century the ‘scientific revolution’ had
been firmly established in North-western Europe, culminating in the 1687
publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematicawhich showed that the
whole known universe was subject to the same laws of motion and gravitation.
The British Royal Society and the French Académie des Sciences were
founded in the early 1660s and the Paris Observatoire and Greenwich
Observatory founded in the 1670s to disseminate this new knowledge (Landes,
1998; Maddison, 2007).
The Protestant religion in Europe was closely associated with this new
learning and encouraged people to read and consider the Bible for themselves
(rather than relying on a priest). This gave a big boost to literacy and so facili-
tated these wider scientific debates and thinking. Catholic countries responded
to the challenge of Protestantism (the Reformation) with repression. Spain
imposed the death penalty in 1558 for importing foreign books without
permission. The impact was long-lasting. In 1900 3 per cent of the population
of Britain were illiterate, compared with 48 per cent in Catholic Italy, 50 per
cent in Spain and 78 per cent in Portugal (Becker and Woessmann, 2009).
The key causal links run from culture to education (labour) with an empha-
sis on savings (investment).
Openness
From the sixteenth century onwards the Spanish Inquisition was an attempt to
assert the dominance of the Catholic Church throughout Europe and to repress
free-thinking ‘heresy’ and foreign ideas. The works of Copernicus, Galileo and
Newton were banned by the Spanish Jesuits (the enforcers of this religious
orthodoxy) until 1746, and those printing presses that were permitted were
monopolized by the church. After the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588
Introduction 19