Understanding growth in Europe, 1700–1870: theory and evidence (original) (raw)

The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe

In one witty formulation, God gave the easy problems to the physicists (Lebow et al., 2000) 2 Adam Smith had no doubt that "the annual produce of the land and labour of England... is certainly much greater than it was a little more than century ago at the restoration of Charles II (1660)... and [it] was certainly much greater at the restoration than we can suppose it to have been a hundred years before" (Smith, 1776-1976, pp. 365-66). correlates that came with that: longer life expectancy, more comfortable daily existence, and the kind of military potential that made Western dominance possible. And yet it is arguable that the question why did China fail to develop is, indeed, illegitimate because what needs to be explained is not what failed to happen in China, India, Africa or the Middle East, but the European Miracle (Jones, 1981). In this interpretation, the evolution of the rich and industrialized economies in the West was a highly unlikely event, the result of a fortunate concatenation of circumstances. Unified growth theory is willing to concede that accident may determine the timing of economic growth but that the event itself was wholly preordained from the day of creation. But how can we be sure? Many things could have wrong in the European experience, starting with military events (e.g., the failure of the Mongols to devastate Europe after the battle of Legnitz in 1241), the fact that the Black Death killed "only" a third of the population but left the rest alive (unlike the demographic devastation of the indigenous populations of America after 1492), the failure of the counter-reformation to suppress the reformation, and the rise of a free and competitive market for ideas in Europe (Mokyr 2006). The origins of economic growth in Europe, in this interpretation, far from being pre-ordained in the inevitabilities of unified growth theory, are a fluke of history. Once it happened, however, its effects on other parts of humanity were ineluctable. Whether one buys this interpretation or not may be a matter of taste; but there are few tests we can bring to bear to discriminate between it and the models of economic growth that imply that the roots of economic growth are to be found in European history long before it actually blossomed. Either way, it is hard to avoid the fact that the history of economic growth is Eurocentric. This raises, of course, the question what it was about Europe that gave rise to the phenomenon. The answer is hopelessly overidentified: we have but one event, and yet we are facing a huge range of answers, from the silly (Christianity was the only religion that was suitable to economic growth, as in Stark, 2000) to the geographically deterministic (Jones, 1981), to the superiority of European culture (Landes 1997). Yet, to date, growth theory has been of little help in answering that question. 2. The pre-industrial economy Many formal models of historical growth assume that before 1800, there was no or negligible long-term growth (e.g.