At Harvard Economics Talk, Northwestern Professor Reinterprets Industrial Revolution

Economic historian Joel Mokyr argued that the expertise of British craftsmen fueled that country’s rise to dominance during the Industrial Revolution in a lecture sponsored by the Economics Department Wednesday.

Mokyr, a professor at Northwestern University, attributed Britain’s sudden economic growth to its superior “artisanal elite” — a group of engineers and mechanics whose technical skills gave Britain a competitive advantage over the rest of Europe.

“Britain taught Europe, and Europe taught the world, how the miracles of technological progress, free enterprise, and efficient management can break the shackles of poverty and want,” he said.

Mokyr’s talk — called “The Holy Land of Industrialism: Rethinking the Industrial Revolution” — challenged widely accepted views about the time period. Many historians attribute British dominance in the Industrial Revolution to the country’s scientists, who they argue looked for labor-saving, coal-burning technologies.

Mokyr, by contrast, argued that the driving force behind British growth was the workers who implemented those innovations. He contended that British artisans outstripped their peers on the continent because of the British apprenticeship system. Whereas European craftsmen handed down “codified knowledge” mostly from instructional manuals, the British system passed on “tacit knowledge” from observation, imitation, and in-person teaching.

Mokyr argued that even European contemporaries echoed this idea. He cited as an example British engineer John Farey, who, according to Mokyr, argued that the British did not produce better inventions than other countries but had more effective ways of implementing existing technology.

He said that British advantage launched the nation toward economic fertility because, in addition to the ideas of inventors, countries needed the “mechanical expertise” of “tweakers and implementers” to put new technology into practice.

Audience members said they appreciated Mokyr’s new take on the material.

Mike Andrews, Mokyr’s former graduate student and a postdoctoral fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research, said he found Mokyr’s talk engaging.

“Anytime you hear Joel talk, there’s just an avalanche of anecdotes that is just fascinating to hear,” he said.

For David Autor, an economics professor at MIT, the highlight of the talk was Mokyr’s willingness to challenge accepted arguments about the Industrial Revolution.

“Like many things in this area, we can’t really have certainty about them,” he said. “We can’t go back and do a randomized trial to evaluate them. So it’s always a matter of weighing hypotheses and contributing a hypothesis that is fresh and has new implications.”