For those of you who follow me via Medium, I’ve moved my blog away from it, and onto antonhowes.com. I have also set up an email newsletter, which I hope will be a much better way for people to keep up to date with my work. Please do sign up — you can see any posts you’ve missed here.
I’ve already found that hosting my own blog and the newsletter are a much better way of communicating with people who are interested in my work on the history of innovation and the causes of the British Industrial Revolution.
I’m just back from a week-long trip to Dublin — my first time in Ireland. A few things I learned, one for each place I visited:
- From the National Museum of Ireland’s archaeology section: in the Bronze Age, it seems that a way of swearing fealty to a king was to ritually suck their nipples. Some bodies found preserved in bogs had their nipples deeply cut, suggesting that they were perhaps deposed kings or rejected heirs to the throne.
- From the Book of Kells exhibit in Trinity College Dublin: the word “miniature” apparently comes from the dye used to colour…
I’ve spent a lot of time recently thinking and writing about the role of innovators as cultural entrepreneurs — in other words, how it is that innovators themselves created the institutions that would support innovation. It’s an especially important question when considering the origins of modern, innovation-led economic growth, which had appeared in Britain by the mid-eighteenth century.
The cultural entrepreneurship of innovators often took the form of creating entirely new organisations. Take the Royal Society, which in its early years in the 1660s attempted to promote practical technologies as well as what we would now call science. Its founders…
Dietz Vollrath has written a new blogpost calling attention to a working paper on measuring economic growth for the most hotly debated time period and region in economic history: early modern Britain. The paper, by Jane Humphries and Jacob Weisdorf, assembles evidence on annual wage contracts (rather than daily wages) to suggest that modern, sustained economic growth began a lot earlier than the “classic” accounts of the Industrial Revolution. They try to solve the contentious matter of how many days in the year people actually worked — if you’re measuring only day wages, it matters how many holidays people took…
Today I gave the first lecture for a new course I’m teaching at King’s College London, The World Economy and its History. It’s a compulsory first year course for a brand new BSc in Economics. Which means they will be getting an exceptionally well-rounded Economics education, including, in other modules, the evolution of economic theories from Smith through to Marx, Hayek, Keynes and others. It’s a degree I’m very excited to be a part of.
Here is what I told my students in the opening lecture about why studying Economic History is worthwhile. …
Tyler Cowen asks whether the world would have seen an Industrial Revolution if Britain had failed to have one. I’m going to take “Industrial Revolution” to really mean a sustained acceleration of innovation, which is, after all, the underlying source of sustained economic growth.
So let’s assume that Britain had no innovators whatsoever — every single one of the 1,452 individuals whose biographies I lovingly reconstructed over the past few years simply never became innovators. Thomas Newcomen remained an unremarkable iron merchant. Josiah Wedgwood merely copied the tried and tested methods of making ceramics. Sarah Guppy took no interest in…
Much of my work focuses on how more and more people in Britain in the eighteenth century sought to improve technological processes and create more valuable products, thereby becoming innovators. They each received, in my view, an improving mentality: everywhere, and anywhere, they saw room for improvement. But I’m often asked whether innovators also tried to improve fields other than technology.
The answer is certainly yes. Take William Fairbairn, later an inventor of machinery. Fairbairn, when just a teenager, developed a crush on a girl in a nearby village and tried to reverse-engineer the correspondence published in a magazine between…
One of the most popular facts about the British Industrial Revolution is that more troops were sent to quash the machine-breaking Luddites than were sent to fight Napoleon in the Peninsular War — one finds it endlessly repeated (see here, here, here, etc).
But it’s not true. Not even close.
The total number deployed against the Luddites was 12,000. But at the Peninsular War’s peak in October of 1813, there were 73,000 British troops in Iberia (Linch, p.16) — a vastly higher figure. The total number deployed over the course of the war must have numbered over 100,000. …
When we think of inventors of the Industrial Revolution the first names that come to mind are usually those of men: Brunel, Arkwright, Darby, and Watt. But many women were innovators too, some of whom utterly transformed our world for the better. This post is to call attention to their remarkable achievements, and to identify a few who have been completely forgotten.
- Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762)
Lady Mary was among those responsible for saving more lives than any other human being in human history (and so I’ve devoted the most space to her, and put her first): in 1721…
Joel Mokyr, among many other things, is known for his distinction between macro- and microinventions. Macroinventions are the radical breakthroughs, seemingly coming from nowhere. They create whole new industries, or at least new technological avenues to pursue. Following the macroinventions come the microinventions: these are the incremental improvements, the minor additions and gradual tweaks that are often necessary to bring a macroinvention to its full potential.
At least, that was the distinction he made in Lever of Riches (1990). But the definition has evolved since then (mostly the doing of others), to signify macroinventions as inventions that were impactful.