Industrialisation in Britain and France - week 8

For Week 8 you should choose your own topic, but here are a couple of suggestions if you don't feel inspired.

1. Education and human capital

Craft skills and physical health may have given Britain an advantage in the 18th century. That is the topic of a recent article by Kelly et al. A frequently-cited recent article by Squicciarini and Voigtländer looks instead at the role of educated elites in France. In the nineteenth century, mass primary education is introduced and eventually made both free and compulsory. A new paper I haven't read by Montalbo looks at this in France. There is huge literature on education and literacy (which tend to be persistent over time), which feature in "unified growth theory" models too. These are just a few suggestions to get you thinking.

Kelly, Morgan, Joel Mokyr, and Cormac O Grada, "Precocious Albion: A New Interpretation of the British Industrial Revolution," Annual Review of Economics, vol. 6 (2014), pp. 363-89.

Squicciarini, Mara, and Nico Voigtländer, "Human Capital and Industrialization: Evidence from the Age of Enlightenment," Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 130, no. 4 (Nov. 2015), pp. 1825-83.

Montalbo, Adrien, "Industrial activities and primary schooling in early nineteenth‐century France," Cliometrica, vol. 14 (2020, forthcoming), pp. 325-65.

2. Banking

There is a large literature (mostly pertaining to periods later than ours) on banks and their role in promoting industrialisation, and/or in financial crises. France has been seen as "underbanked" at least up until the mid-nineteenth century. A recent book by Hoffman et al. shows that in fact France had an extremely well-developed network of credit intermediaries that matched up borrowers and lenders: notaries. The book is the culmination of years of research, so you will find various other publications by the same authors on the same issues. In 1852 the famous Crédit Mobilier was founded by the Pereire brothers in Paris. Inspired by the Saint-Simonian movement, this bank had the goal of gathering funds from ordinary savers to finance major industrial and infrastructural investments, so it was an early - and much-copied - investment bank, and step on the way to continental Europe's "universal banks." I don't have a specific recent source to recommend, but you won't have any trouble finding something. For Britain in the eighteenth century Temin and Voth's recent book (again preceded by various journal articles) is an interesting starting point. There is a well developed literature on most aspects of English banking in the nineteenth century and legislation restricting the formation of large joint stock banks. (Another interesting topic is minimally-regulated "free banking" in Scotland.)

Hoffman, Philip, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal. Dark Matter Credit: The Development of Peer-to-Peer Lending and Banking in France. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2019.

Temin, Peter, and Hans-Joachim Voth. Prometheus Shackled: Goldsmith Banks and England's Financial Revolution after 1700. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013.

3. Novels

In Capital in the 21st Century, Thomas Piketty describes a nineteenth century world dominated by wealth. He points out that Balzac in French and Austen in English were acute observers of this world, and their characters are sometimes obsessed with, always knowledgable about wealth. They know immediately that X in wealth yields Y in annual income. I would love to read more on this. And more generally, any use of literary material as a primary source for economic history (Blake is said to have written "Dark Satanic Mills" after a huge flour mill in London burned down; Dickens anyone? Hugo?) would be fascinating for me to read about, and perhaps for you to write.