I write in praise of Joel Mokyr. He is the non-economist’s economist. In a series of books he has linked the Industrial Revolution in the West (or rather, first of all, in England) to the scientific revolution and an intellectual culture of curiosity and progress. Where other economists tend to assume (or indeed explicitly assume) that economic outputs are determined by economic inputs, Mokyr very sensibly grasps that economic outputs are also determined by beliefs, values, hopes and aspirations. The result is an explanation of economic growth in England, and everywhere else where growth occurs, which is powerful and convincing.

I would have thought it was fairly obvious that, in a world dominated by subsistence agriculture, one in which growth barely occurs, the stability of inputs over long periods of time makes it very unlikely that purely economic factors will bring about rapid economic development. And, in a world of hand production, there are strict limits to the extent to which the mere division of labour, on an Adam Smithian model, can produce major gains in productivity. Economic revolution requires, indeed must be preceded by, cultural transformation.

Mokyr is not the first economist to be able to think like an historian. Douglass North won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1983 for his work on the institutional factors leading to economic growth in England, and only last year Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson won for their account of how institutions foster development and de-development. Notably, Mokyr published an essay in 2008, ‘The Institutional Origins of the Industrial Revolution’, which draws out the differences between their work and his. But it is rather obvious that growing economies need institutional stability and reliability – if contracts are not enforced, if bills are not paid, if money is not lent and borrowed, the economy will not grow. Closer perhaps to Mokyr is the work of the great economic historian Carlo Cipolla, whose Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400-1700 (1965) explained how a limited number of technological advances – muskets, cannon, square rigged ships – gave Europeans irresistible military domination over the whole globe by the early 18th century.

Mokyr’s contribution is bolder and more interesting than that of the institutional historians because the key factors in his account are ideas and cultures. It is deeper and more satisfactory than Cipolla’s because Cipolla offers a fine description of the emergence of the over-mighty West (a much broader phenomenon than the Industrial Revolution, as several European powers developed similar capacities more or less simultaneously), but a poor explanation. It is easy to see, if difficult to demonstrate, that new science might produce new industry; it is harder to find a cultural cause of guns and sails. The Renaissance will not do, and it is difficult to know what will, though the contrast with Japan, which stepped back from gunpowder warfare is clearly instructive.

What makes Mokyr’s argument particularly challenging is that his account of the Industrial Revolution brings him into direct conflict with the mainstream of history of science. I happen to think that Mokyr is a better historian than the historians of science (most of whom are, at best, sociologists). According to the historians of science there was no scientific revolution in the 17th century, and science, as we understand the term, is a 19th-century creation that followed, and thus cannot have caused, the Industrial Revolution. They happily argue that the key technologies of the Industrial Revolution – starting with the steam engine – were not the result of new theories or of new experimental techniques, but of tinkering and of what the French call bricolage.

Mokyr’s account of the Industrial Revolution, on the other hand, requires a new, educated class of skilled mechanics, familiar with the principles of Newtonian experimentation and with Boyle’s work on air pressure and vacuum pumps. The public lectures and demonstrations that spread Newtonian science, and the books that summarised those lectures, such as John Thomas Desaguliers’ Course of Experimental Philosophy (1734), created a new intellectual culture that led to breakthroughs such as James Watt’s improved steam engine (1764). Mokyr is not only better at the history of science than the mainstream of contemporary history of science (dominated by the Harvard and Cambridge schools), he is better at the sociology. For an example of the contempt with which orthodox historians of science hold people like Mokyr, and me, see here.

This is the core story of Mokyr’s three best books: The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (1990); Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (2002); The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850 (2009).

This story invites comparative enquiry. Plenty of countries (India, the Ottomans, China) had sophisticated mathematics in what we call the Middle Ages. Joseph Needham’s Science and Civilization in China (1954 ) made it extremely difficult to understand why China could achieve so much technological progress (the three technologies that Francis Bacon thought ushered in the modern world – gunpowder, the printing press, and the mariner’s compass – were all Chinese) and yet fail to break through into an industrial revolution. Here I found Mokyr’s A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy (2016) a little less satisfactory. His argument is that Europe is different because (a) it was politically divided, which created competition between elites and fostered innovation and (b) innovation was shared through a republic of letters, an open, open-minded, and transnational intellectual elite.

Both these explanations are promising, but I was not entirely satisfied by Mokyr’s capacity to push back beyond them. Why did Europe remain divided? Why did no single power achieve military hegemony? The Romans were able to do it, so why not the Vikings? Or, with the inflow of wealth from the New World, the Spanish? Or Louis XIV? Or, indeed, Napoleon? What was peculiar about European warfare that prevented extensive and enduring victories? I think it ought to be possible to answer that question. Walter Scheidel’s Escape from Rome  (2021), which appears in a series edited by Mokyr, attempts to answer it, but he concentrates on the early failure to rebuild empire in the sixth century (labelled the First Great Divergence), when the failure is evidently a recurring one. The arguments of Scheidel and, for example, Peter Turchin (for his review of Scheidel see here) might work for the great age of cavalry, but they hardly explain the failure of empires within Europe in the post-gunpowder age. To argue that polycentrism was self-reinforcing (see Mark Koyama, in another review essay) runs the risk of circularity: Europe was polycentric because it was polycentric. Polycentrism looked like a very unstable equilibrium in the 17th century.

At this point one might want to turn back to Cipolla: at the exact moment when a new land-based empire seemed inevitable, the new oceanic powers of Holland and Britain developed sufficiently to block that development – just as, centuries later, Hitler might well have succeeded had American power not intervened. Guns without sails were the basis for an empire; guns and sails reinforced polycentrism.

But to the second question, how come a republic of letters? There is, I think, a fairly simple answer, once one accepts political division, which prevented the imposition of a stifling conformity, as a given. What made Europe different from China was not that it had paper, printing, or movable type: the Chinese had all three. It was that Europe combined these with the alphabet, and this had two fundamental consequences: it made education to competent literacy much easier; and it made printing much more efficient. The combination of the two meant that a new type of culture could emerge, based on widespread – and not merely elite – literacy, and mass produced, uniform texts. This opened the way to the scientific and industrial revolutions.

Indeed, I would want to argue that the printing revolution changed our very idea of what knowledge is. Classical Greek and Latin had no word corresponding to our modern word ‘fact’. I doubt that any culture without alphabetic printing did. ‘Facts’ require checking, testing and comparing, activities which radically change in character when information becomes mass produced and is identical in every product. They are an invention of the 17th century.

The print run for Newton’s Principia was only about 600 copies; but every later edition contained the same identical text and exceptionally similar diagrams, plus a growing corpus of annotations. Small print runs can thus multiply into large quantities of effectively identical exemplars. Checking, testing and comparing claims becomes much easier with ‘print’ (i.e. alphabet, paper, movable type); the result is the emergence of stable agreements on which statements about the world are reliable and which are not. Facts, and their cultural consequences, are by-products of alphabetic printing in a commercial society. So, for example, are indexes which allow one to find one’s way around large quantities of information: the French, who came late to experimental science, have yet to grasp the power of the index.

My Invention of Science appeared the year before Mokyr’s Culture – just in time for him to have read it. Mokyr discussed facts, but he did not, I believe, fully understand where they came from and how important they are. When I tried to make this point in a review he wrote in accusing me of reviewing his book without reading it, which I thought odd. My claim is simple: Mokyr, the great historian of technological innovation, underestimates the printing press as the founding technology of modern intellectual and economic development. That technology, it has to be said, was the product of tinkering, not scientific enquiry.

Mokyr returns to the question of the divergent outcomes of China and Europe in a co-authored book (with Avner Greif and Guido Tabellini), which comes out next month. They argue, according to the publisher’s description, that the key difference is that Europe developed corporations while China relied on clans: it will be interesting to see the argument laid out in detail.

I have conscientiously read Mokyr on England, a subject which he came to relatively late. His first text was on the failure of industrialisation in the Netherlands (1976), his second on the Irish famine (1983). An article, ‘Industrialization and Poverty in Ireland and the Netherlands’ provided a bridge between the two. I confess to not having read the first two, but I have read the bridging article. Reviewing the second book on first publication in the Journal of Economic and Social History, Líam Kennedy said: ‘It is difficult to think of a more stimulating work in the field of modern Irish history.’ Important then, but not Nobel Prize-winning. And his attempts to employ econometrics to resistant topics were a little late to be pioneering: Fogel and Engerman’s Time on the Cross, on plantation slavery, had appeared in 1974. (Fogel won a Nobel Prize in the same year as North.)

Between 1983 and 1990, Mokyr reinvented himself. There is a moment in his ‘Ireland and the Netherlands’ essay where he acknowledges that ‘culture’ (he does not yet use the word) might matter. Different societies might have different attitudes to risk, or place differing values on leisure. ‘Unfortunately, since utility functions are not directly observed in any form, such hypotheses must remain speculative at this time.’ Where the numbers stop, he stops.

The Lever of Riches represents a new beginning, for he now engages seriously with ideas, beliefs, values. But one thing unites young Mokyr and mature Mokyr, and that is a strong belief in the benefits of economic progress. The Netherlands also suffered a famine in 1848-50; countries which had industrialised did not. The Industrial Revolution did not always bring significant improvements in living standards for the poor; it did bring resilience in the face of subsistence crises. Mokyr has thus always had a strong belief in the importance of economic progress, but the exposition of that belief has changed radically over time.

Between 1983 and 1990, a very large number of historians made, along with Mokyr, what is sometimes called ‘the cultural turn’. Clifford Geertz’s The Interpretation of Cultures had been published in 1973. It got 300 citations in 1986, 570 in 1990, 1,000 in 1995. But if Mokyr was far from alone in making the cultural turn, he was a lonely figure among economists, and even among economic historians. It was 2008 before Lever (1990) got more than 200 citations in a year (that year, Geertz’s Interpretation got 2,650; Mokyr’s Athena got 175). Economists do not read books; they prefer articles. And by and large they do not read history books, even economic history books. It is thus a matter for unconditional celebration that the author of three brilliant history books has won a Nobel in economics. And, if there was a Nobel in history, he would have been a deserving winner of that too.