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What if they gave an Industrial Revolution and nobody came? (2023)
The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, by Robert Allen
You carry with you plans for a steam engine, and you present them to the emperor, explaining how the machine could be used to drain water out of mines, pump bellows for blast furnaces, turn grindstones and lumber saws, etc. Incidentally, although it isn’t central to (and IMO actually runs somewhat counter to) Allen’s main argument, I have to highlight this fascinating bit about how textile mechanization depended on precision gearing from the watch industry: … a combination of Allen and Mokyr’s claims might produce the hypothesis that [technological development] resulted from the responsiveness of agents, which was augmented by the Enlightenment, to the wage and price configuration that underpinned the profitability of innovative effort in the eighteenth century.
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