Mind Over Matter: Access to Knowledge and the British Industrial Revolution
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MIND OVER MATTER: ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE AND THE BRITISH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION James Dowey Department of Economic History London School of Economics and Political Science A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2017 Declaration I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without my prior written consent. I warrant that this authorisation does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party. This thesis consists of 80,873 words. 2 Acknowledgements Thank you to Max-Stephan Schulze for your faith in this thesis and your invaluable insights and enthusiasm throughout. Thank you to Nick Crafts and Joel Mokyr for kindly examining this thesis and for your extremely helpful suggestions for improvements and extensions. Thank you to LSE for providing me with a scholarship to write this thesis. Thank you to Paul Atherton, Christopher Baxendale, Adrian Beamish, Anthony Bolton, Sean Bottomley, Paul Caruana-Galizia, Chris Colvin, Philip Epstein, Jonathan Haskel, Ed Hopkins, Tim Leunig, Robin Geffen, Stephen Gibbons, Gay Meeks, Alessandro Nuvolari, Stuart Sayer, Stephen Shapin, Luca Serino, Peter Sims, Chris Taylor, Louise Thomas, Oliver Volckart, Patrick Wallis, Caroline Wilcher, Tom Wilcher, Nico Wolf and David Wykes. Without your help and encouragement this would have been a lonely process and a much worse thesis. Thank you and lots of love always Mum, Dad and Shelley. This is dedicated to the three of you. James Dowey London January 2017 3 Abstract This thesis argues that the British Industrial Revolution, which marked the beginning of sustained modern economic growth, was facilitated by the blossoming in eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain of the world’s first infrastructure for commercial R&D, composed of a network of ‘Knowledge Access Institutions’ (KAIs): scientific societies, ‘mechanics institutes’, public libraries, masonic lodges and other organisations. This infrastructure lowered the cost of access to knowledge for scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs, raising the productivity of R&D and encouraging a sustained increase in R&D effort. This contributed to the acceleration in technological innovation that lay behind the transition to modern economic growth. First, I define the concept of KAIs and explain how they affected the rate of economic growth. Second, I present detailed data on the KAI infrastructure and estimate its effect on the rate of technological innovation during the British Industrial Revolution, using newly constructed spatial datasets on British patents between 1700 and 1852 and exhibits at the Great Exhibition of 1851. Third, I argue that KAIs were largely exogenous to industrialisation, rooted instead in the intellectual developments of the Scientific Revolution and European Enlightenment. Fourth, I show that the prevalence of Knowledge Access Institutions was correlated with the emergence of modern economic growth across countries in the late nineteenth century and that the cost of access to knowledge was a binding constraint to economic progress shared by many countries during this period. Finally, based on the case of late nineteenth century US manufacturing, I investigate the extent to which the emergence of modern economic growth depended on the incentives to innovate rather than the capabilities lent by access to knowledge and other factors. The thesis suggests that the sharp fall in the cost of access to knowledge that we are currently experiencing may give rise to an acceleration in the rate of technological innovation in the coming decades and that policymakers should direct some effort towards mitigating the potentially harmful effects of rapid technological change. 4 Contents List of Tables and Figures ......................................................................................................... 6 Introduction. Access to Knowledge and the British Industrial Revolution ............................... 9 Chapter 1. The Debate: Capabilities versus Incentives ........................................................... 25 Chapter 2. Knowledge Access Institutions and the British Industrial Revolution .................. 34 Chapter 3. Did Knowledge Access Institutions Facilitate Modern Economic Growth? An Empirical Investigation ............................................................................................................ 96 Chapter 4. Why did Britain Build its Knowledge Access Institutions? ‘The Enlightenment Subsidy’ ................................................................................................................................. 145 Chapter 5. The Railway Transport Revolution and Access to Knowledge in the Late Nineteenth Century………………………………………………….………………….......194 Chapter 6. The Demand for Technology and the Emergence of Modern Economic Growth ................................................................................................................................................ 224 Conclusion. Access to Knowledge in the Twenty-First Century ........................................... 249 Bibliography .......................................................................................................................... 252 5 Figures Page 2.1: Core KAIs in Great Britain, 1700-1851 45 2.2: Core KAIs per 100,000 Capita by British region, 176, 1801 & 1851 45 2.3: Core KAIs: Histogram of lectures per year across KAIs, 1851 46 2.4: Core KAIs: histogram of library books across KAIs in 1851 46 2.5: Masonic Lodges in Great Britain, 1700-1853, London and Provincial 47 2.6: Masonic Lodges per 100,000 Capita by British Region, 1761, 1801 & 1851 48 2.7: Pub. and Priv. Libraries in GB, Yr of Foundation/First Mention, 1700-1850 51 2.8: Pub. and Priv. Libraries in GB per 100K Cap, Yr of Foundation/1st Mention, 1700 1850 51 2.9: Public Libraries by 100,000 Capita British Region, 1761, 1801, 1851 52 2.10: Real price of books 1650-1850 53 2.11: Booksellers in Great Britain, 1500-1850, London Edinburgh and Provincial 54 2.12: Booksellers per 100,000 Capita by British Region, 1761, 1801, 1851 54 2.13: KAIs Per Capita 1761 55 2.14: KAIs Per Capita 1801 56 2.15: KAIs Per Capita 1851 57 2.16: Core KAIs per Capita versus Peripheral KAIs per Capita, 1851 (z-scores) 65 2.17: Mechanism of the Effect of KAIs on Economic Growth 75 2.18: Papers read at the Royal Philosophical Society of Glasgow, 1841-42 80 2.19: Two consecutive papers read at the Royal Phil Soc of Glasgow 1841 82 2.20: Royal Society Article Citations by Books, Journals and Other 84 2.21: Royal Society Article Citations by Language 84 2.22: Royal Society Fellowships, Average Age at Election and Death, 1660-2013 85 2.23: Number of Freemasons who were Fellows of Royal Society 88 2.24: % of Fellows of the Royal Society elected during previous 10 years who were Freemasons 88 2.25: Share of joint patents whose co-patentees live in different counties (London patents excluded) 89 2.26: Letter from Erasmus Darwin to Matthew Boulton, 1783/03/04 90 3.1: Partial correlation across countries in 2006 of resident patent filings and R&D spen 102 3.2: English Patent Applications by British Residents, by Year 1617-1852 104 3.3: The distribution of continuous-weighted Woodcroft Reference Index 104 3.4: Patents per Capita by County (centred decade) 107 3.5: High and Low Quality Patents 1750-1800 109 3.6: High and Low Quality Patents 1800-1830 109 3.7: Log relative innovation density 1750-1800 and 1810-1830. 111 3.8: Log Patents per Capita versus Log Core KAIs per Capita in 1851, by County 117 3.9: Change in log of Learned Societies vs change in log of patents, 1817 to 51, by English reg. dis. 117 3.10: Core KAI membership per capita and Exhibits at the Great Exhibition in 1851. 123 3.11: Scatterplot of log of KAI members in 1851 against log of 1851 Great Exhibition exhibitors 124 3.12: Scatterplot of log of KAI members per cap 1851 against log of 1851 exhibitors per cap 124 3.13: Locations of the Great Exhibition 1851 Local Committees 127 3.14: US Agricultural Societies, Absolute and Per 100,000 Capita, 1776-1876 135 3.15: US Agricultural Societies Founded in Each Year, 1785-1876 135 3.16: Decennial % Growth in US Agricultural Value Added Per Gainful Worker 136 3.17: US Agricultural Society Members per 10,000 Rural Population in 1870 137 6 3.18: US Agricultural Patents, 1790-1873 138 4.1: KAIs versus Secondary Sector Employment Ratio by British Registration District 168 4.2: KAI members per Working Population versus Secondary Sector Employment Ratio 169 4.3: KAIs versus Population Density by British Registration District 169 4.4: KAI Members per Working Age Population versus Population Density 169 4.5: Congregations founded in England that would eventually become formally Unitarian 183 4.6: English Dissent in 1729, by English hundreds 185 4.7: Kaplan-Meier survival rates for learned society adoption, by regional dissenting status in 1729 186 4.8: Predicted survival curves for learned society adoption, by regional dissenting status in 1729 188 4.9: The Five Mile Act 1665 189 4.9: Land Area of England Covered by the Five-Mile Act of 1665 190 5.1: Core KAIs per Million Population 1876 196 5.2: (Log) Core KAIs per Capita 1870 vs (Log) GDP per capita 1913 196 5.3: GDP Growth 1870-1913 vs KAI per Capita 1870,