Abstract
AbstractThis paper examines the relationship between the coming of the railroads, the expansion of primary education, and the introduction of national school curricula. Using fine-grained data on local education outcomes in Sweden in the nineteenth century, the paper tests the idea that the development of the railroad network enabled national school inspectors to monitor remote schools more effectively. In localities to which school inspectors could travel by rail, a larger share of children attended permanent public schools and took classes in nation-building subjects such as geography and history. By contrast, the parochial interests of local and religious authorities continued to dominate in remote areas school inspectors could not reach by train. The paper argues for a causal interpretation of these findings, which are robust for the share of children in permanent schools and suggestive for the content of the curriculum. The paper therefore concludes that the railroad, the defining innovation of the First Industrial Revolution, mattered directly for the state's ability to implement public policies.
Highlights
Do technological advances increase state capacity? Throughout history, new technologies such as the printing press, the telegraph, and the automobile have transformed cultures, societies, and economies
On the basis of a novel argument about the relationship between technology and state capacity and using detailed data from Sweden, we present an empirical analysis of how the main technological innovation of the First Industrial Revolution, the railroad, influenced one of the nineteenth century’s defining social institutions, primary schooling, by empowering national school inspectors
We have examined the relationship between one of the defining technological innovations of the First Industrial Revolution – the railroad – and one of the most momentous social and political changes of the nineteenth century – the expansion of primary education and the introduction of national school curricula
Summary
Do technological advances increase state capacity? Throughout history, new technologies such as the printing press, the telegraph, and the automobile have transformed cultures, societies, and economies. A first, rather naive approach to modelling the effect of the railroad would be to estimate the equation yi = a + b0 Railroadi + gXi + ei where yi is an outcome we wish to explain in deanery i (that is, either the share of children in permanent schools or the proportion of children taking classes in geography and history), the variable Railroad takes the value 1 if there was a train station in deanery i and 0 otherwise, and X is a vector of controls (which we discuss in more detail below).
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