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Economic Growth in England Before the Industrial Revolution: Some Methodological Issues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Richard M. Hartwell
Richard M. Hartwell
Affiliation:
Nuffield College, Oxford
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Extract

This paper, as presented at the Fourth Congress of the International Economic History Association, is the first of four concerned with economic growth in England before the industrial revolution, in what, for purposes of brevity and analytical distinction, I propose to call “preindustrial England.” It might be prudent for this period to talk of “economic change” (“the movement of economic processes over time”) rather than “economic growth” (“the growth of output per head of population”), because change does not necessarily imply growth, and because, for the thousand years which preceded English industrialization, the historians are uncertain about the direction and duration of the secular trend of the economy over long periods, although they seem to have identified some periods of growth as well as some periods of decline.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 29 , Issue 1 , March 1969 , pp. 13 - 31
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1969

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References

1 The other papers are entitled: “Economic Growth in England, 1550-1750”; “Capitalism: A Critical and Historiographical Survey”; and “The Use of Economic Theory in the Economic History of Preindustrial Economy.”

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39 Eric Jones has suggested to me that whereas subsistence needs (food, shelter, and clothing) had been satisfied by small-scale industries in which technical change was slow and in which the economies of scale were relatively unimportant, the more sophisticated and complex demands of the second half of the eighteenth century could be satisfied only by the development of new techniques, and, in some cases, by a larger scale of industrial unit.

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