From Constitutional Commitment to Industrial Revolution

Abstract

North has argued that Britain's Industrial Revolution was explained by “a combination of better-specified and enforced property rights and increasingly efficient and expanding markets” (1981, p. 166). If property rights became significantly more secure due to the Glorious Revolution, then a strong link is suggested between the changes in England's politics after 1688 and the changes in Britain's economy after 1780. While North and Weingast (1989, p. 831) were circumspect in drawing this link, others have asserted it more emphatically. For example, Olson observes that “individual rights to property and contract enforcement were probably more secure in Britain after 1689 than anywhere else, and it was in Britain, not very long after the Glorious Revolution, that the Industrial Revolution began” (1993, p. 574). More recently, Acemoglu and Robinson (2012) entitle one of their chapters “The turning point: How a political revolution in 1688 changed institutions in England and led the way to the Industrial Revolution.” Sceptics, however, have questioned whether England's political reforms led to Britain's economic success. Mokyr observes that “the precise connection between the events of the Glorious Revolution and the Industrial Revolution that followed more than half a century later remains murky” (2008, p. 27). Allen wryly notes that “it was a long stretch from the excise tax on beer … to Watt's invention of the separate condenser” (2009, p. 5). Jones points out that “a link has not been established between supposedly greater security of property under William III and industrialization a century later” (2013, p. 328). Findlay and O'Rourke doubt that “British success can really be attributed to superior institutions, put in place by the Glorious Revolution” (2007, p. 349), while Rodger remarks that “it seems less and less plausible that parliamentary government could have been the essential factor in Britain's economic success” (2010, p. 9). In this chapter, I consider three specific causal mechanisms that might have connected the two revolutions. My aim is to show these paths make good sense and are supported by prima facie evidence, rather than to attempt conclusive tests. The first path connects the Glorious to the Transportation Revolution, per Bogart (2011), and then connects the Transportation to the Industrial Revolution, per Szostak (1991).