Week 5 suggested essay topic:

Did popular resistance to mechanisation - machine breaking - have a greater impact in Britain or France? As usual, feel free to improvise your own topic related to technical change, or economically-motivated protests. You will find interesting material on "bread riots" and the specifically French episode of the "Flour War" of 1775.

or

Were intellectual property rights crucial to technical progress in Britain and France?

1. Machine breaking and popular protest.

Caprettini, Bruno, and Hans-Joachim Voth, "Rage Against the Machines: Labour-Saving Technology and Unrest in England, 1830-32," CEPR Discussion Paper DP11800 (2017).

Hobsbawm, Eric and George Rude, Captain Swing. London: Penguin, 1969.

Horn, Jeff, "Machine-Breaking in England and France during the Age of Revolution," Labour / Le Travail, vol. 55 (2005), pp. 143-66.

--- , "'A Beautiful Madness': Privilege, the Machine Question and Industrial Development in Normandy in 1789," Past and Present, no. 217 (Nov. 2012), pp. 149-85.

--- , "Avoiding Revolution: the French Path to Industrialization," Ch. 5 in Reconceptualizing the Industrial Revolution, J. Horn, N. Rosenband, and M. Roe Smith, eds. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2011), pp. 87-106.

--- , The Path not Taken. French Industrialization in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1830. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2006.

Jarrige, François, and Sian Reynolds, "Gender and machine-breaking," Clio. Women, Gender, History, no. 38 (2013), pp. 15-37.

Nuvolari, Alessandro, "The 'Machine Breakers' and the Industrial Revolution," Journal of European Economic History, vol. 31 no. 1 (2002), pp. 393-426.

Reilly, Tim, " 'The cropper lads': Rural Luddism and the 'end of negotiation' in the West Riding of Yorkshire 1812-1813," University of Oxford BA thesis, 2019. Nice maps, good references, interesting story. Available from me if not in library.

Roberts, Matthew, "Rural Luddism and the Makeshift Economy of of the Nottinghamshire framework knitters," Social History, vol. 42, no. 3 (2017), pp. 365-98. Useful references here to local and social history on Luddism.

Rude, George, The Crowd in History. London: Wiley and Sons, 2005 [orig. 1964]. The chapter structure should make this easy to use. There have been a number of editions, all ok. Rude has other relevant books, such as The Crowd in the French Revolution or Captain Swing.

Thompson, E.P., "The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century," Past and Present, vol. 50 (1971), pp. 76-136. A classic, about bread riots rather than machine-breaking, but potentially relevant if you choose your own topic.

--- , The Making of the English Working Class. London: Penguin, 1991 [orig. 1963]. Another classic. A massive volume useful as a reference, accessible via its index.

A further, more technical paper on the Captain Swing riots is:

Aidt, Toke, Gabriel Leon, and Max Satchell, "The Social Dynamics of Collective Action: Evidence from the Captain Swing Riots, 1830-31," Cambridge Working Paper Economics, no. 1751 (Nov. 2017).

2. Patents

Allen, Robert, "Collective Invention," Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, vol. 4 (1983), pp. 1-24.

Bottomley, Sean, "The returns to invention during the British industrial revolution," Economic History Review, vol. 72, no. 2 (2019), pp. 510-30.

Cox, Gary, "Patent disclosure and England’s early industrial revolution," European Review of Economic History, vol. 24, no. 3 (August 2020), pp. 447-67.

Dutton, H. I. The Patent System and Inventive Activity During the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1852. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984.

Griffiths, Trevor, Philip Hunt and Patrick O'Brien, "Inventive Activity in the British Textile Industry, 1700-1800," JEH, vol. 52 (1992), pp. 881-906.

Khan, Zorina, "An Economic History of Patent Institutions" EH.net Encyclopaedia. http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/khan.patents.

Moser, Petra, "How Do Patent Laws Influence Innovation? Evidence from Nineteenth Century World Fairs," The American Economic Review, vol. 95 (2005), pp. 1214-1236. Moser has at least two other papers on this theme. They are all good.

Nuvolari, Alessandro, "Collective invention during the British Industrial Revolution: the case of the Cornish pumping engine," Cambridge Journal of Economics, vol. 28 (2004), pp. 347-63.

Nuvolari, A., G. Tortorici, and M. Vasta, "British-French Technology Transfer from The Revolution To Louis Philippe (1791-1844): Evidence from Patent Data", CEPR discussion paper no. 15620 (Dec. 2020).

O'Brien, Patrick, Trevor Griffiths and Philip Hunt, "Technological Change During the First Industrial Revolution: the Paradigm Case of Cotton Textiles, 1688-1851" Ch. 9 in R. Fox (ed.), Technological Change (Routledge, 1998), pp. 155-176.

Selgin, George, and John Turner, "Strong Steam, Weak Patents, or the Myth of Watt's Innovation-Blocking Monopoly, Exploded," Journal of Law and Economics, vol. 54 no. 4 (Nov. 2011), pp. 841-61.

Sullivan, Richard, "England's 'Age of Invention': The Acceleration of Patents and Patentable Invention during the Industrial Revolution," Explorations in Economic History, vol. 26 (1989), pp. 424-52.