The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (The New Economic History of Britain seri) by Joel Mokyr

The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700-1850 (The New Economic History of Britain seri) Reviews

• 
  Vidur Kapur

  A sprawling and somewhat awkwardly structured book, filled nonetheless with countless gems. The Enlightened Economy was Joel Mokyr’s first book-length attempt to argue that the Enlightenment was a key cause of the Industrial Revolution, focusing on the period from 1700 to 1850. In a later work, A Culture of Growth, he makes a similar case that beliefs and ideologies can strongly influence economic growth, focusing on the prelude to the Industrial Revolution and the origins of the Enlightenment from 1500 to 1700.
  
  Mokyr starts off by contrasting the views of thinkers like Marx, who believed that ideologies were a product of economic conditions, and those of people like Keynes, who believed that “the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas… soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil”. After all, many intellectuals throughout history have adopted positions that run counter to their own economic interests.
  
  Crucial to Mokyr’s case that the Enlightenment had these “good or evil” effects is his description of the Enlightenment as a movement which aimed not just to promote knowledge and reason, but to use them to achieve practical ends. It was not simply an extension of the Scientific Revolution; indeed, many of the inventions during the Industrial Revolution did not rely heavily, or even at all, on scientific breakthroughs in the early modern era. Rather, it involved theoreticians and practitioners working, bi-directionally, in concert with each other to improve society. The ultimate goal, as the subtitle of Ritchie Robertson’s recent comprehensive treatment of the Enlightenment puts it, was “the pursuit of happiness”.
  
  What were the channels through which the Enlightenment exerted its influence on the economy, according to Mokyr? Its values were certainly not to be found in the fields and shops of everyday Britain in the eighteenth century. Rather, it influenced rulers and policymakers, and above all it had an indelible effect on the thinking of intellectuals, scientists, skilled mechanics, inventors and entrepreneurs. Because this latter group had decided that knowledge was necessary for societal progress, they codified it in books and articles or tacitly passed it on to apprentices and learners. For instance, the French Encyclopedie, perhaps the paradigmatic book of the Enlightenment, was filled with detailed illustrations of technical matters as well as loftier philosophical speculation. The impact of this process was slow and subtle, affecting only a selection of economic sectors, but the benefits eventually spread outward.
  
  This was a historical aberration. From ancient Grece and Rome, to classical India, to the Islamic world during its Golden Age, the loftier intellectual types tended to be well-separated from artisans, farmers and tinkerers. Mokyr cites specific examples of how this was useful, but concedes that there are many inventions which would have occurred without this transformation of the intellectual climate. However, the Enlightenment, with its codification of knowledge, also helped to lower access costs: mechanics, ironmongers and chemists were able to further improve or combine the inventions of their predecessors. As Mokyr puts it:
  
  

  The Enlightenment was the reason that the Industrial Revolution was the beginning of modern economic growth and not another technological flash in the pan. In previous ages, new techniques, even revolutionary ones, soon crystalised around the dominant designs that emerged and after a while progress fizzled out. Invention before the Industrial Revolution had been an event, an efflorescence, rather than a continuous process.

  
  
  The Enlightenment also, as mentioned earlier, had an influence on rulers and policymakers, and by extension on the political economy of Britain. As it was concerned with improving the well-being of society as a whole, it was naturally hostile to rent-seeking (the use of political power to redistribute rather than create wealth). As such, economic liberalism and free trade became dominant in the country, with governments repealing everything from the Navigation Acts to the Corn Laws. Dugald Stewart, one of the most effective teachers and popularisers of Smithian doctrine, had among his pupils two future Prime Ministers (Palmerston and John Russell) as well as several senior officials.
  
  To be sure, there were self-interested commercial lobbies who clamoured for mercantilism to be dismantled; opposition to it was not solely driven by ‘enlightened’ motives. But persuasion was key, and the influence of Enlightenment values was widespread and crossed political parties. Both Enlightenment ideology and economic self-interest were probably necessary for the triumph of economic liberalism.
  
  In sum, Mokyr’s case is as follows: technological progress and the rational reform of institutions were both sustained by Enlightenment values, helping to limit any negative feedback from special interest groups. This was particularly the case in Britain, where the Enlightenment was able to find a mor peaceful accommodation with existing power structures. The institution of Parliament worked to balance interests, ensuring that revolution did not spread to the country in 1789 or 1848. Britain of course had unique features such as its system of apprenticeship and its natural resources, and the British Enlightenment, perhaps being more practical and pragmatic, may have enhanced the country’s ability to take advantage of these resources.
  
  There are some limitations to the book. As Mokyr is discussing the realm of ideas, his case is invariably limited by a sparsity of quantitative data. He does deploy figures and statistics to argue that other putative causes of the Industrial Revolution (such as slavery and imperialism) aren’t strong enough to account for the progress that was made, but this is more difficult to do when it comes to drawing a direct line between Enlightenment values and economic growth. However, he draws on important examples to bolster his thesis, and the final two chapters of the book, in which among other things he discusses the influence of the Benthamites on public policy and public health, are superb. Ultimately, his argument that the effects of the Enlightenment were only fully evident after 1850, when scientific progress became more central to economic growth, is persuasive.
  
  Finally, he notes another limitation of his account of the Industrial Revolution, which is that it replaces one unexplained event (the Industrial Revolution) with another (the Enlightenment): “it just pushes the chain of causation one step higher, but it does not provide a complete and satisfactory theory”. For this, Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome is indispensable:
  he would posit that the political fragmentation that occurred in Europe after the Fall of Rome, combined with the continent’s geographical features, help to explain the emergence of the Enlightenment itself.
  
  Overall, this is a very good read, and not just for utilitarians and other supporters of the Enlightenment. Indeed, as Mokyr recounts, even its detractors such as Carlyle could not help but admit that the material comfort that they enjoyed was in significant part a product of the Enlightenment. Whether or not this comfort has been good for humanity, or whether the Enlightenment had deleterious effects which outweigh its impact on the economy, is not the subject of this oddly structured but fact-filled book.
• 
  Frank Stein

  Often exciting, almost always frustrating, this sprawling, disorganized and occasionally useful book brings much of what we know about the Industrial Revolution together with an idiosyncratic account of Enlightenment thought.
  
  Mokyr's argument, in miniature, is that a new kind of rhetoric arose in the 18th century, especially in Britain, and it was overwhelmingly concerned with not just logical deductions but improving the actual physical position of man in the world. The Enlightenment wasn't just about the airy-fairy matters of separation of powers and free thought, it was about melting points and separate condensers and, through these, Watt's steam engine. The intellectual godfather of this mundane Enlightenment was Francis Bacon, who said science was "for the glory of the Creator and the relief of Man's estate," and his torch was carried especially to the University of Edinburgh, where Hume distilled the "spirit of the age" into the desire to "carry improvement to every art and science." This supposedly infused the culture.
  
  Mokyr shows that men like Watt and Boulton consulted scientific magnates like Joseph Priestly (who himself invented carbonated water) in their Birmingham "Lunar Club," and that some engineers consulted Edinburgh dons when creating early steam or textile machines, but the evidence on the whole is really thin. Did the thought of Voltaire really have much to do with the creation of the "spinning jenny"? Or, to take it further, doesn't saying just that the "spirit of the age" was to encourage improvements only beg the question of why the spirit changed? This is not the best part of the book.
  
  The best parts are those in which he details the state of the art in thinking and writing on the industrial revolution. In short, the enclosures didn't force the revolution because by 1700 only a 1/4 of the land was open-field anyway and the productivity gains from privatizing it was minimal. Light taxes and easy government didn't cause it because Britain was in fact that most taxed country on earth in the 18th century. The demographic boom was only simultaneous with the revolution and seems to have had little relation to it as well (marriage ages dropped early in the 18th century, but infant and overall mortality stayed high because of movements into urban death traps).
  
  Overall, the book left me rightfully confused and distressed that we still have no explanation for what is perhaps the momentous change in human history, but Mokyr's writing, which seems to have no organization or center or purpose or flow, left me more confused and irritated than was necessary. So I got some good info and historiography out of this, but wouldn't recommend it except for die-hards who need to know everything about this revolution.
• 
  Ed

  A really interesting reworking of the Economic History of the Industrial Revolution via the ideas of the enlightenment. As a one time economic historian I found it a great update on the current state of research in this area. It is probably too detailed for the general reader but if you have any interest in the origins of industrial society, this is probably the best book on the subject and Joel Mokyr is interesting on the parallels between then and now on the issue of intellectual property and how it is leveraged.
• 
  Marcus

  It's a remarkable achievement in one sense: the amount of detail per page is unparalleled, and Mokyr is keen to weigh other interpretations. But so much of this information is disconnected from any larger argument, making it a very slow and often-frustrating read.
  
  

  The comprehensiveness of the book is both a triumph, and a curse. For example, on page 352 there is a discussion of methods of capital accounting in the early Industrial Revolution which includes references to the Dowlais Iron Company, Vitruvius the Roman writer, an eighteenth century accounting manual by John Mair, John Smeaton the engineer, Joshua Milne a cotton spinner, and Sidney Pollard the modern historian. . . But at the end of this discussion, informed as we are, it is evident little would have changed in Britain by 1850 had these early entrepreneurs been clearer on depreciation accounting.

  
  - Gregory Clark, reviewing in the Journal of Economic Literature, 2012
  
  Imagine repetitions of the above for hundreds of incredibly dense pages and you'll get a good idea of the bulk of this book. Both a triumph and a curse.
  
  My suggestion is to read the first 20% or so, which advances a clearer argument. Treat the remainder as you would an encyclopedia: read only the chapters covering subjects which interest you, and skip sections liberally.
• 
  James Bechtel

  A provocative thesis about the centrality of Enlightenment ideas in the Industrial Revolution is coupled with an excellent array of evidence to show how free-market capitalism (the enlightened economy) and its failures left unsolved problems ranging from extreme poverty, unemployment, unemployability, to a highly inequitable income distribution. Hmmm...sound familiar? Excellent in some ways, but I had a few questions about his uncritical acceptance of many assumptions and assertions of capitalist theory. However, that might a good thing because it demonstrates the philosophical failures/shortcomings of capitalist theory as well as its real-world failures.
• 
  Vincent Fong

  Comprehensive though sometimes too detailed.
  
  Love the part of the scientific knowledge accumulation part.
• 
  Tiffany

  Joel Mokyr exhaustively explores how the Enlightenment influenced and shaped Britain’s Industrial Revolution, with a particular focus on the economy.
• 
  Sean Rosenthal

  Interesting Quote:
  
  "[T]he relation between agricultural productivity and the rate of industrialization depends on the openness of the economy. In a closed economy, manufacturing depends on productivity growth in agriculture and its capacity to produce a surplus that will permit the reallocation of resources from farming to industry and to provide a market for manufactured products...Yet in an open economy this is clearly false: food can be imported and paid for by industrial goods. In fact, in an open economy a highly productive agricultural sector signals to the economy that its comparative advantage is in farming...
  
  "In Britain [during the 18th and early 19th centuries], high agricultural productivity notwithstanding, industrialization occurred because manufacturing became even more productive...[I]n an open economy the Industrial Revolution occurred not *because* of but *despite* growth in agricultural productivity."
  
  -Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economy History of Britain 1700-1850
• 
  Frank

  This book sets out to give an economic history of Britain during the industrial revolution. It's main contention being that social ideas and, in particular, the inheritance of the enlightenment, played an important role in the developments. TEE stays close to primary sources, which adds credibility, but makes for a very tiresome read. Just one example: the reader is expected to master a detailed history of technologies used in 18th century weaving. This is a lot to ask, even of the enthusiastic amateur.
• 
  Theodore Webb

  I still think the Industrial Revolution would've happened without the Enlightenment, but this book is just brilliant in the way that it paints a detailed picture of Britain during the 1700-1850 period.
• 
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