Project data

The aim of this project is to offer a new interpretation of the Industrial Revolution adopting a comparative quantitative approach featuring simultaneously Britain (the first industrial nation) and France (the leading continental power of the 18th century). This comparative perspective will permit an innovative characterization of the factors accounting for the precocious origins of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, and for its delayed development in the rest of the continent.
To this aim, we will construct several original datasets covering both countries, and mapping the three main drivers of industrialization (innovation, real wages and human capital) emerging from the recent Allen-Mokyr (2009) debate on the origins of the Industrial Revolution. From a spatial point of view, our unit of analysis will be the provincial level (departments in France and counties in England). This disaggregation corresponds roughly to the modern NUTS-3 level, offering a much more fine-grained perspective compared to the existing accounts of industrialization that tend to adopt a national or a very coarse regional perspective. The dataset will comprise 85 British (England, Scotland and Wales) counties and 89 departments at early 19th century historical borders, enabling a panel structure with 174
provinces.
This richness of data has the potential to provide a more articulated testing of the major interpretative conjectures concerning the drivers of different patterns of industrialization charting both the emergence (18th century) and the consolidation (19th-early 20th centuries) of the Industrial Revolution. The project brings together a team of researchers with a sound expertise in the quantitative economic history of industrialization and also on British and French historical sources.

 

This project has received funding from Ministry of University and Research (MUR) – PRIN 2022