The Past Speaks

—— EH.NET BOOK REVIEW ——
Title: The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain, 1700-1850

Published by EH.NET (December 2010)

Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain,
1700-1850 Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. xii + 564 pp. $45
(hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-300-12455-2.

Reviewed for EH.Net by C. Knick Harley, Department of Economics, University
of Oxford.

In this big book Joel Mokyr provides a masterful summary of our current
understanding of events from the Glorious Revolution to the Great Exhibition
that led to the emergence of modern economic growth in Britain. The book
advances the thesis that “the Industrial Revolution … that placed
technology in the position of the main engine of economic change” (p. 5)
was driven by “the changing set of beliefs we associate with the
Enlightenment” (p. 478). Although there is little new primary research in
the book, its broad summary of relevant topics and recent research (the
references run to 43 pages) make it both an unrivaled introduction to this
important historical topic and a masterful synthesis that experts will need
to internalize.

The coverage of the literature, both in breadth and depth, is close to
comprehensive. As one would expect from Mokyr’s recent work, there is
extensive discussion of the social basis of knowledge, technology and the
nature of inventors and the sources of their training and inspiration. There
are admirable and balanced discussions of eighteenth-century British society.
Issues of the nature of the political structure, its evolution and its impact
on incentives to economic action are presented in a comprehensive and
balanced manner. There are excellent chapters on gender and the family and
civil society, as well as more expected chapters on agriculture,
international trade, commerce and finance. The book does not use estimates of
aggregate output and its composition as the center of its focus but these
issues are well-discussed as part of a wider narrative. The development of
industry and industrial technology receives rather less attention than one
might have expected and the cotton textile industry does not take a point at
the center of the focus. Nonetheless, the reader will have a good overview of
the relevant developments in industrial technology.

Mokyr is happy to keep the Industrial Revolution as the focus of his
narrative, although it is perhaps significant that the phrase does not appear
in the title. Just what he means by the Industrial Revolution is at times
somewhat unclear. Overall, the volume consciously takes the entirety of the
years from 1700 to 1850 as its focus. Nonetheless, from time to time, the
shorter Industrial Revolution (implicitly, say, 1770 to 1830) appears as
pivotal in the transformation, although reasons why the impact of these years
took time to materialize are stressed. Overall, however, the book emphasizes
what distinguished the Industrial Revolution from other episodes of
technological preciosity was not so much the accomplishments of a short
period of technological effervescence but the emergence of a society in which
knowledge and technological progress continued to improve. This was a social
process that emerged over a long historical process.

But what of the idea of the Industrial Enlightenment? This idea serves as
Mokyr’s organizing principal throughout the book (in the book’s twenty
chapters, the word Enlightenment or Enlightened — with a capital letter —
appears in five chapter titles, in the first sentence of an additional three
and elsewhere in the first paragraph of another four) and is seen as a prime
mover in social change that caused the Industrial Revolution at a fundamental
level. Unfortunately, the meaning of Enlightenment in this context remains
somewhat elusive. It is clearly intended to allude to the eighteenth century
Age of Enlightenment but Mokyr stresses he does not have in mind direct
causation from the world of ideas that characterized the salons of the
Enlightenment, although ideas did permeate. The Industrial Enlightenment in
Mokyr’s usage means a society in which there predominated a frame of mind
that believed in progress attained through useful knowledge gained by
observation and experimentation — and incorporated into social and political
ideas of rational reform. His book persuasively demonstrates that these ideas
were central to economic change in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Britain. The reader cannot, however, help wondering if causation from
Enlightenment, as an intellectual stance, to economic change actually
existed. The so-called Industrial Enlightenment seems almost to describe the
nature of successful change at least as much as its cause. The world of ideas
and the world of practical knowledge probably reinforced one another and both
reflected some underlying characteristics of the society. Making the
Enlightenment, however, so dominantly the central organizing theme of the
discussion of economic change is not always persuasive and is intrusive at
times.

The book is not fully persuasive in its argument that an Industrial
Enlightenment that was particular to Britain should take pride of place in
understanding the emergence of modern economic growth in the eighteenth
century, but it makes a strong case for the view that an understanding of
that change requires a long perspective and that the history of ideas and
their place in society needs to be at the core of the story. Persistent
change depended on continued technological advance which in turn depended on
knowledge and the process by which it developed.

Overall this is an important book. It will provide students with an
unexcelled overview of the state of the literature at the moment.
Specialists will admire its sweep of scholarship and find many insights to
ponder.

C. Knick Harley has written extensively about the Industrial Revolution and
the nature of technical change. Harley is currently a fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford.