Abstract

AbstractPatrick O’Brien has dedicated most of his career to studying British economic history, focusing on the Industrial Revolution, its antecedents, characteristics and consequences. He has always paid attention to long-term developments and never confined himself to strictly economic aspects. From the late 1990s onward, he increasingly turned ‘global’. His importance for global history cannot be overstated. His essay in this issue presents the outcome of his long intellectual journey. I will in this rejoinder try to assess his approach and his findings and comment on Patrick as a scholar and as a person. As we are close friends I will be critical.

Highlights

  • Against the wind In my experience trying to determine what a person rejects, is always an effective strategy to find out what he or she is up to

  • Patrick is clearly against specific Whig interpretations of British economic history which maintain that industrialization occurred first in Britain because it had a distinctive set of institutions, first and foremost its ‘representative’ state and its market economy

  • Such views have long been influential through the work of Douglass North, Robert Thomas and Barry Weingast, who emphasized the importance of secure and well-described property rights that they claimed were established with the Glorious Revolution of 1688.1 It has recently been restated in an adapted form by Daron Acemoğlu and James Robinson, who focus on the assumed inclusiveness of Britain’s political and economic institutions

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Summary

Introduction

Against the wind In my experience trying to determine what a person rejects, is always an effective strategy to find out what he or she is up to. Abstract Patrick O’Brien has dedicated most of his career to studying British economic history, focusing on the Industrial Revolution, its antecedents, characteristics and consequences.

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