The intellectual roots of the Industrial Revolution

Economic historians like to explain economic phenomena with other economic phe­nomena. The Industrial Revolution, it was felt for many decades, should be explained by economic factors.

The answer has to be sought in the intellectual changes that occurred in Europe before the Industrial Revolution. These changes affected the sphere of propositional knowl­edge, and its interaction with the world of technology. As economic historians have known for many years, it is difficult to argue that the scientific revolution of the sev­enteenth century that we associate with Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and the like had a direct impact on the Industrial Revolution [McKendrick (1973) and Hall (1974)]. Few important inventions, both before and after 1800, can be directly attributed to great scientific discoveries or were dependent in any direct way on scientific expertise. The advances in physics, chemistry, biology, medicine, and other areas occurred too late to have an effect on the industrial changes of the last third of the eighteenth century.^[52] The scientific advances of the seventeenth century, crucial as they were to the understanding of nature, had more to do with the movement of heavenly bodies, optics, magnetism, and the classification of plants than with the motions of machines.

All the same, the scientific revolution was in many ways the prelude to the intellec­tual developments at the base of the Industrial Revolution. The culture of science that evolved in the seventeenth century meant that observation and experience were placed in the public domain. Betty Jo Dobbs (1990), William Eamon (1990, 1994), and more recently Paul David (2004) have pointed to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century as the period in which “open science” emerged, when knowledge about the nat­ural world became increasingly nonproprietary and scientific advances and discoveries were freely shared with the public at large. Thus scientific knowledge became a pub­lic good, communicated freely rather than confined to a secretive exclusive few as had been the custom in medieval Europe. The sharing of knowledge within “open science” required systematic reporting of methods and materials using a common vocabulary and consensus standards, and should be regarded as an exogenous decline in access costs, which made the propositional knowledge, such as it was, available to those who might find a use for it. Those who added to useful knowledge would be rewarded by honor, peer recognition, and fame - not a monetary reward that was in any fashion propor­tional to their contribution.

The rhetorical conventions in scientific discourse changed in the seventeenth cen­tury, with the rules of persuasions continuously shifting away from “authority” toward empirics. It increasingly demanded that empirical knowledge be tested so that useful knowledge could be both accessible and trusted.^[55] Verification meant that a deliberate effort was made to make useful knowledge tighter and thus more likely to be used. It meant a willingness, rarely observed before, to discard old and venerable interpretations and theories when they could be shown to be in conflict with the evidence. Scientific method meant that in the age of Enlightenment a class of experts evolved who would often decide which technique worked best.^[56]

The other crucial transformation that the Industrial Revolution inherited from the seventeenth century was the growing change in the very purpose and objective of propo­sitional knowledge. Rather than proving some religious point, such as illustrating the wisdom of the creator, or the satisfaction of that most creative of human characteristics, curiosity, natural philosophers in the eighteenth century came increasingly under the influence of the idea that the main purpose of knowledge was to improve mankind’s ma­terial condition - that is, find to technological applications. Bacon in 1620 had famously defined technology by declaring that the control of humans over things depended on the accumulated knowledge about how nature works, since “she was only to be commanded by obeying her”. This idea was of course not entirely new, and traces of it can be found in medieval thought and even in Plato’s Timaeus, which proposed a rationalist view of the Universe and was widely read by twelfth-century intellectuals. In the seventeenth cen­tury, however, the practice of science became increasingly permeated by the Baconian motive of material progress and constant improvement, attained by the accumulation of knowledge.^[57] The founding members of the Royal Society justified their activities by their putative usefulness to the realm.

And yet, the central intellectual change in Europe before the Industrial Revolution has been oddly neglected by economic historians: the Enlightenment. Historically it bridges the Scientific and the Industrial Revolutions. Definitions of this amorphous and often contradictory historical phenomenon are many, but for the purposes of explaining the Industrial Revolution we only to examine a slice of it, which I have termed the Industrial Enlightenment. To be sure, some historians have noted the importance of the Enlight­enment as a culture of rationality, progress, and growth through knowledge.^[58] Perhaps the most widely diffused Enlightenment view involved the notion that long-term social improvement was possible although not all Enlightenment philosophers believed that progress was either desirable or inevitable. Above all was the pervasive cultural belief in the Baconian notion that we can attain material progress (that is, economic growth) through controlling nature and that we can only harness nature by understanding her. Francis Bacon, indeed, is a pivotal figure in understanding the Industrial Enlightenment and its impact. His influence helped create the attitudes, institutions, and mechanisms by which new useful knowledge was generated, spread, and put to good use. Modern scholars seem agreed: Bacon was the first to regard knowledge as subject to constant growth, an entity that continuously expands and adds to itself rather than concerned with retrieving, preserving and interpreting old knowledge [Farrington (1979) and Vickers (1992, esp. pp. 496-497)].^[59] The understanding of nature was a social project in which the division of knowledge was similar to Adam Smith’s idea of the division of labor, another enlightenment notion.^[60] Bacon’s idea of bringing this about was through what he called a “House of Salomon” - a research academy in which teams of specialists collect data and experiment, and a higher level of scientists try to distill these into gen­eral regularities and laws.

Nothing of the sort, I submit, can be detected in the Ottoman Empire, India, Africa, or China. It touched only ever so lightly (and with a substantial delay) upon Iberia, Russia, and South America but in many of these areas it encountered powerful resis­tance and retreated. Invention, as many scholars have rightly stressed, had never been a European monopoly, and much of its technological creativity started with adopting ideas and techniques the Europeans had observed elsewhere [Mokyr (1990)]. The En­lightenment, however, provided the ideological foundation of invention, namely a belief that the understanding of nature was the key to growing control of the physical environ­ment. Moreover, it laid out an agenda on how to achieve this control by demanding that this understanding take the form of general and widely applicable principles. With the success of this program came rising living standards, comfort and wealth. The histori­cal result, then, was that eighteenth century Europe created the ability to break out of the ineluctable concavity and negative feedback that the limitations of knowledge and institutions had set hitherto on practically all economies. The stationary state was re­placed by the steady state. It is this phenomenon rather than coal or the ghost acreage of colonies that answers Pomeranz’s (2000, p. 48) query why Chinese science and tech­nology - which did not “stagnate” - “did not revolutionize the Chinese economy”.

The Industrial Enlightenment can be viewed in part as a movement that insisted on asking not just “which techniques work” but also “why techniques work” - realizing that such questions held the key to continuing progress.

The other side of the Industrial Enlightenment had to do with the diffusion of and access to existing knowledge. The philosophes realized that, in terms of the frame­work outlined above, access costs were crucial and that useful knowledge should not be confined to a select few but should be disseminated as widely as possible.^[65] Diffu­sion needed help, however, and much of the Industrial Enlightenment was dedicated to making access to useful knowledge easier and cheaper.^[66] From the widely-felt need to rationalize and standardize weights and measures, the insistence on writing in vernac­ular language, to the launching of scientific societies and academies (functioning as de facto clearing houses of useful knowledge), to that most paradigmatic Enlightenment triumph, the Grande Encyclopedie, the notion of diffusion found itself at the center of attention among intellectuals.^[67] Precisely because the Industrial Enlightenment was not a national or local phenomenon, it became increasingly felt that differences in language and standards became an impediment and increased access costs. Watt, James Keir, and the Derby clockmaker John Whitehurst, worked on a system of universal terms and standards, that would make French and British experiments “speak the same lan­guage” [Uglow (2002, p. 357)]. Books on science and technology were translated rather quickly, even when ostensibly Britain and France were at war with one another.

Access costs depended in great measure on knowing what was known, and for that search engines were needed. The ultimate search engine of the eighteenth century was the encyclopedia. Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedie did not augur the Industrial Revolution, it did not predict factories, and had nothing to say about mechanical cot­ton spinning equipment or steam engines. It catered primarily to the landowning elite and the bourgeoisie of the ancien regime (notaries, lawyers, local officials) rather than specifically to an innovative industrial bourgeoisie, such as it was. It was, in many ways, a conservative document [Darnton (1979, p. 286)]. But the Industrial Enlightenment, as embodied in the Encyclopedie and similar works that were published in the eighteenth century implied a very different way of looking at technological knowledge: instead of intuition came systematic analysis; instead of mere dexterity, an attempt to attain an un­derstanding of the principles at work; instead of secrets learned from a master, an open and accessible system of training and learning. It was also a comparatively user-friendly compilation, arranged in an accessible way, and while its subscribers may not have been mostly artisans and small manufacturers, the knowledge contained in it dripped down through a variety of leaks to those who could make use of it.^[68] Encyclopedias and “dic­tionaries” were supplemented by a variety of textbooks, manuals, and compilations of techniques and devices that were somewhere in use. The biggest one was probably the massive Descriptions des arts et metiers produced by the French Academie Royale des Sciences.^[69] Many other specialist compilations of technical and engineering data ap­peared.^[70] In agriculture, meticulously compiled data collections looking at such topics as yields, crops, and cultivation methods were common.^[71]

The Industrial Enlightenment realized instinctively that one of the great sources of technological stagnation was a social divide between those who knew things (“savants”) and those who made things (“fabricants”). To construct pipelines through which those two groups could communicate was at the very heart of the movement.⁴⁰ The rela­tionship between those who possessed useful knowledge and those who might find a productive use for it was changing in eighteenth-century Europe and points to a reduc­tion in access costs. They also served as a mechanism through which practical people with specific technical problems to solve could air their needs and thus influence the research agenda of the scientists, while at the same time absorbing what best-practice knowledge had to offer. The movement of knowledge was thus bi-directional, as seems natural to us in the twenty-first century. In early eighteenth-century Europe, however, such exchanges were still quite novel.

An interesting illustration can be found in the chemical industry. Pre-Lavoisier chem­istry, despite its limitations, is an excellent example of how some knowledge, no matter how partial or erroneous, was believed to be of use in mapping into new techniques.⁴¹ The pre-eminent figure in this field was probably William Cullen, a Scottish physi­cian and chemist. His work “exemplifies all the virtues that eighteenth-century chemists believed would flow from the marriage of philosophy and practice” [Donovan (1975, p. 84)]. Ironically, this marriage remained barren for many decades. Inchemistry the ex­pansion of the epistemic base and the flurry of new techniques it generated did not occur fully until the mid-nineteenth century [Fox (1998)]. Cullen’s prediction that chemical theory would yield the principles that would direct innovations in the practical arts re­mained, in the words of the leading expert on eighteenth-century chemistry, “more in the nature of a promissory note than a cashed-in achievement” [Golinski (1992, p. 29)]. Manufacturers needed to know why colors faded, why certain fabrics took dyes more

some systematic analysis of the principles at work. One of those was Francis Home’s Principles OfAgriculture and Vegetation (1757). One of the great private data collection projects of the time were Arthur Young’s famed Tours of various parts of England and William Marshall’s series on Rural Economy [Goddard (1989)]. They collected hundreds of observations on farm practice in Britain and the continent. However, at times Young’s conclusions were contrary to what his own data indicated [see Allen and O Grada (1988)].

⁴⁰ This point was first made by Zilsel (1942) who placed the beginning of this movement in the middle of the sixteenth century. While this may be too early for the movement to have much economic effect, the insight that technological progress occurs when intellectuals communicate with producers is central to its historical explanation.

⁴¹ Cullen lectured (in English) to his medical students, but many outsiders connected with the chemical in­dustry audited his lectures. Cullen believed that as a philosophical chemist he had the knowledge needed to rationalize the processes of production [Donovan (1975, p. 78)]. He argued that pharmacy, agriculture, and metallurgy were all “illuminated by the principles of philosophical chemistry” and added that “wherever any art [that is, technology] requires a matter endued with any peculiar physical properties, it is chemical philoso­phy which informs us of the natural bodies possessed of these bodies” [cited by Brock (1992, pp. 272-273)]. He and his colleagues worked, among others, on the problem of purifying salt (needed for the Scottish fish­preservation industry), and that of bleaching with lime, a common if problematic technique in the days before chlorine.

readily than others, and so on, but as late as 1790 best-practice chemistry was inca­pable of helping them much [Keyser (1990, p. 222)]. Before the Lavoisier revolution in chemistry, it just could not be done, no matter how suitable the social climate: the minimum epistemic base simply did not exist. All the same, Cullen personifies a so­cial demand for propositional knowledge for economic purposes. Whether or not the supply was there, his patrons and audience in the culture of the Scottish Enlightenment believed that there was a chance he could [Golinski (1988)] and put their money be­hind their beliefs. At times, clever and ingenious people, especially could contribute to the solution of problems. The greatest British mathematician of the eighteenth century, Colin MacLaurin, was reputed to be at hand to resolve “whatever difficulty occurred concerning the construction or perfection of machines, the working of mines, the im­provement of manufactures, or the conveying of water” [Murdoch (1750, p. xxiv)]. The great French physicist Rene Reaumur (1683-1757) studied in great detail the properties of Chinese porcelain and the physics of iron and steel, and produced over 200 copper plates depicting the operation of workshops, machines, and tools of a range of trades [Gillispie (1980, pp. 346-347)]. But most of this promise was not realized till after 1800.

To dwell on one more example, consider the development of steam power. The ambi­guities of the relations between James Watt and his mentor, the Scottish scientist Joseph Black are well known. Whether or not Watt’s crucial insight of the separate condenser was due to Black’s theory of latent heat, there can be little doubt that the give-and-take between the scientific community in Glasgow and the creativity of men like Watt was essential in smoothing the path of technological progress.^[72] The same was true in the South of Britain. Richard Trevithick, the Cornish inventor of the high pressure engine, posed sharp questions to his scientist acquaintance Davies Gilbert (later President of the Royal Society), and received answers that supported and encouraged his work [Burton (2000, pp. 59-60)].

The physics of energy remains one of the most striking illustrations of the interactions between propositional and prescriptive knowledge. Only in the decades after 1824 did the understanding that steam was a heat engine and not a device run by pressure break through. The work of Mancunians Joule and Rankine on thermodynamics led to the development of the two cylinder compound marine steam engine and the re-introduction of steam-jacketing. It led to a different way of looking at thermal efficiency that drove home the insight that no matter how one improved a steam engine, its efficiency would always be low - thus pointing the way to internal combustion engines as a solution. Most important, the widening of the epistemic base pointed to what could not be done, and thus prevented inventors and engineers from walking into blind alleys and working on projects that were infeasible. John Ericsson’s “regenerative” engine of 1853 was still an attempt to “recycle” heat over and over again, before the ineluctable energy-accounting truths of thermodynamics had fully sunk in [Bryant (1973)]. Such advances were slow and not always monotonic. At times a little knowledge could be a dangerous thing, such as theory of latent heat which made many engineers experiment with alternative fluids whose physical properties were thought to contain less latent heat.^[73]

Some of the most interesting enlightenment figures made a career out of specializing in building bridges between propositional and prescriptive knowledge. Among these facilitators was William Nicholson, the founder and editor of the first truly scientific journal, namely Journal of Natural Philosophy, Chemistry, and the Arts (more gener­ally known at the time as Nicholson’s Journal), which commenced publication in 1797. It published the works of most of the leading scientists of the time, and played the role of today’s Nature or Science, that is, to announce important discoveries in short commu­nications. Init, leading scientists including JohnDalton, Berzelius, Davy, Rumford, and George Cayley communicated their findings and opinions.^[74] Anotherwas John Coakley Lettsom, famous for being one of London’s most successful and prosperous physicians and for liberating his family’s slaves in the Caribbean. He corresponded with many other Enlightenment figures including Benjamin Franklin, Erasmus Darwin and the noted Swiss physiologist Albrecht von Haller. He wrote about the Natural History of Tea and was a tireless advocate of the introduction of mangel wurzel into British agriculture [Porter (2000, pp. 145-147)]. A third Briton who fits this description as a mediator be­tween the world of propositional knowledge and that of technology was Joseph Banks, one of the most distinguished and respected botanists of his time. Banks, a co-founder (with Rumford) of the Royal Institution in 1799, was a friend to George III and pres­ident of the Royal Society for 42 years, every inch an enlightenment figure, devoting his time and wealth to advance learning and to use the learning to create wealth, “an awfully English philosophe" in Roy Porter’s (2000, p. 149) memorable phrase.

As might be expected, in some cases the bridge between propositional and prescrip­tive knowledge occurred within the same mind: the very same people who also were contributing to science also made some critical inventions (even if the exact connec­tion between their science and their ingenuity is not always clear). The importance of such dual or “hybrid” careers, as Eda Kranakis (1992) has termed them, is that ac­cess to the propositional knowledge that could underlie an invention is immediate, as is the feedback from technological advances to propositional knowledge. In most cases the technology shaped the propositional research as much as the other way around. The idea that those contributing to propositional knowledge should specialize in re­search and leave its “mapping” into technology to others had not yet ripened. Among the inventions made by people whose main fame rests on their scientific accomplish­ments were the chlorine bleaching process invented by the chemist Claude Berthollet, the invention of carbonated (sparkling) water and rubber erasers by Joseph Priestley, and the mining safety lamp invented by the leading scientist of his age, Humphry Davy (who also, incidentally, wrote a textbook on agricultural chemistry and discovered that a tropical plant named catechu was a useful additive to tanning).^[75]

Typical of the “dual career” phenomenon was Benjamin Thompson (later Count Rumford, 1753-1814), an American-born mechanical genius who was on the loyal­ist side during the War of Independence and later lived in exile in Bavaria, London, and Paris; he is most famous for the scientific proof that heat is not a liquid (known at the time as caloric) that flows in and out of substances. Yet Rumford was deeply in­terested in technology, helped establish the first steam engines in Bavaria, and invented (among other things) the drip percolator coffeemaker, a smokeless-chimney stove, and an improved oil lamp. He developed a photometer designed to measure light inten­sity and wrote about science’s ability to improve cooking and nutrition [Brown (1999, pp. 95-110)]. Rumford is as good a personification of the Industrial Enlightenment as one can find. Indifferent to national identity and culture, Rumford was a “Westerner” whose world spanned the entire northern Atlantic area (despite being an exile from the United States, he left much of his estate to establish a professorship at Harvard). In that respect he resembled his older compatriot inventor Benjamin Franklin, who was as celebrated in Britain and France as he was in his native Philadelphia. Rumford could map from his knowledge of natural phenomena and regularities to create things he deemed useful for mankind [Sparrow (1964, p. 162)].^[76] Like Franklin and Davy, he refused to take out a patent on any of his inventions - as a true child of the Enlight­enment he was committed to the concept of open and free knowledge.^[77] Instead, he felt that honor and prestige were often a sufficient incentive for people to contribute to useful knowledge. He established the Rumford medal, to be awarded by the Royal Society “in recognition of an outstandingly important recent discovery in the field of thermal or optical properties of matter made by a scientist working in Europe, noting that Rumford was concerned to see recognised discoveries that tended to promote the good of mankind”. Not all scientists eschewed such profits: the brilliant Scottish aris­tocrat Archibald Cochrane (Earl of Dundonald) made a huge effort to render the coal tar process he patented profitable, but failed and ended up losing his fortune. Incentives were, as always, central to the actions of the figures of the Industrial Enlightenment, but we should not assume that these incentives were homogeneous and the same for all.

The other institutional mechanism emerging during the Industrial Enlightenment to connect between those who possessed prescriptive knowledge and those who wanted to apply it was the emergence of meeting places where men of industry interacted with natural philosophers. So-called scientific societies, often known confusingly as literary and philosophical societies, sprung up everywhere in Europe. They organized lectures, symposia, public experiments, and discussion groups, in which the topics of choice were the best pumps to drain mines, or the advantages of growing clover and grass.^[78] Most of them published some form of “proceedings”, as often meant to popularize and diffuse existing knowledge as it was to display new discoveries. Before 1780 most of these societies were informal and ad hoc, but they eventually became more formal. The British Society of Arts, founded in 1754, was a classic example of an organization that embodied many of the ideals of the Industrial Enlightenment. Its purpose was “to embolden enterprise, to enlarge science, to refine art, to improve manufacture and to extend our commerce”. Its activities included an active program of awards and prizes for successful inventors: over 6,200 prizes were granted between 1754 and 1784.^[79] The society took the view that patents were a monopoly, and that no one should be excluded from useful knowledge. It therefore ruled out (until 1845) all persons who had taken out a patent from being considered for a prize and even toyed with the idea of requiring every prize-winner to commit to never take out a patent.^[80] It served as a communications network and clearing house for technological information, reflecting the feverish growth of supply and demand for useful knowledge.

What was true for Britain was equally true for Continental countries affected by the Enlightenment. In the Netherlands, rich but increasingly technologically backward, heroic efforts were made to set up organizations that could infuse the economy with more innovativeness.⁵¹ In Germany, provincial academies to promote industrial, agri­cultural, and political progress through science were founded in all the significant German states in the eighteenth century. The Berlin Academy was founded in 1700 by the great Leibniz, and among its achievements was the discovery that sugar could be extracted from beets (1747). Around 200 societies appeared during the half-century spanning from the Seven-Years War to the climax of the Napoleonic occupation of Ger­many, such as the Patriotic Society founded at Hamburg in 1765 [Lowood (1991, pp. 26-27)]. These societies, too, emphasized the welfare of the population at large and the country over private profit. Local societies supplemented and expanded the work of learned national academies.⁵² Publishing played an important role in the work of societies bent on the encouragement of invention, innovation and improvement. This reflected the emergence of open knowledge, a recognition that knowledge was a non- rivalrous good, the diffusion of which was constrained by access costs.

In France, great institutions were created under royal patronage, above all the Academie Royale des Sciences, created by Colbert and Louis XIV in 1666 to dissem­inate information and resources.⁵³ Yet the phenomenon was nationwide: 33 official learned societies were functioning in the French provinces during the eighteenth century counting over 6,400 members. Overall, McClellan (1981, p. 547) estimates that during

⁵¹ The first of these was established in Haarlem in 1752, and within a few decades the phenomenon spread (much like in England) to the provincial towns. The Scientific Society of Rotterdam known oddly as the Batavic Association for Experimental Philosophy was the most applied of all, and advocated the use of steam engines (which were purchased in the 1770s but without success). The Amsterdam Society was known as Felix Meritis and carried out experiments in physics and chemistry. These societies stimulated interest in physical and experimental sciences in the Netherlands, and they organized prize-essay contests on useful applications of natural philosophy. For decades a physicist named Benjamin Bosma gave lectures on math­ematics, geography, and applied physics in Amsterdam. A Dutch Society of Chemistry founded in the early 1790s helped to convert the Dutch to the new chemistry proposed by Lavoisier [Snelders (1992)]. The Dutch high schools, known as Athenea taught mathematics, physics, astronomy, and at times counted distinguished scientists among their staff.

⁵² The German local societies were private institutions, unlike state-controlled academies, which enabled them to be more open, with few conditions of entry, unlike the selective, elitist academies. They broke down social barriers, for the established structures of Old Regime society might impede useful work requiring a mixed contribution from the membership of practical experience, scientific knowledge, and political power. Unlike the more scientifically-inclined academies, they invited anyone to join, such as farmers, peasants, artisans, craftsmen, foresters, and gardeners, and attempted to improve the productivity of these occupations and solve the economic problems of all classes. Prizes rewarded tangible accomplishments, primarily in the agricultural or technical spheres. Their goal was not to advance learning like earlier academies, but to apply useful results of human knowledge, discovery and invention to practical and civic life [Lowood (1991)].

⁵³ It was one of the oldest and financially best supported scientific societies of the eighteenth century, with a membership which included d’Alembert, Buffon, Clairaut, Condorcet, Fontenelle, Laplace, Lavoisier and Reaumur. It published the most prestigious and substantive scientific series of the century in its annual pro­ceedings Histoire etMemoires and sponsored scientific prize contests such as the Meslay prizes. It recognized achievement and rewarded success for individual discoveries and enhanced the social status of scientists, granting salaries and pensions. A broad range of scientific disciplines were covered, with mathematics and astronomy particularly well represented, as well as botany and medicine. the century perhaps between 10,000 and 12,000 men belonged to learned societies that dealt at least in part with science. The Academie Royale exercised a fair amount of con­trol over the direction of French scientific development and acted as technical advisor to the monarchy. By determining what was published and exercising control over patents, the Academie became a powerful administrative body, providing scientific and techni­cal advice to government bureaus. France, of course, had a somewhat different objective than Britain: it is often argued that the Academie linked the aspirations of the scientific community to the utilitarian concerns of the government thus creating not a Baconian society open to all comers and all disciplines but a closed academy limited primarily to Parisian scholars [McClellan (1981)]. Yet the difference between France and Britain was one of emphasis and nuance, not of essence: they shared a utilitarian optimism of mankind’s ability to create wealth through knowledge. In other parts of Europe, such as Italy, scientific societies were active in the eighteenth century [Inkster (1991, p. 35) and Cochrane (1961)]. Atthe level of the creation of propositional knowledge, at least, there is little evidence that the ancien regime was incapable of generating sustained progress.

To summarize, then, the Industrial Revolution had intellectual preconditions that needed to be met if sustained economic growth could take place just as it had to sat­isfy economic and social conditions. The importance of property rights, incentives, factor markets, natural resources, law and order, market integration, and many other economic elements is not in question. But we need to realize that without understanding the changes in attitudes and beliefs of the key players in the growth of useful knowledge, the technological elements will remain inside a black box.

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