C. Knick Harley
Canadian-American economic historian at Western Ontario and (latterly) Oxford. Best known as Nicholas Crafts’s principal collaborator in the quantitative downward-revision of British IR growth estimates: the 1992 Economic History Review paper “Output Growth and the British Industrial Revolution” is their joint statement. Independently, Harley’s work on shipping and freight rates, on cotton-industry productivity, and on price indexes has been substantial — particularly his sectoral output reconstructions that fed into the broader Crafts framework. His longstanding methodological position is that quantitative claims about the IR have to be tied to defensible disaggregated output series, not to aggregate guesses anchored in cotton and iron alone.
Associated positions
Section titled “Associated positions”- Meta: no revolution / gradualism — core to the quantitative-revisionist program.
Key works
Section titled “Key works”- With Nicholas Crafts: “Output Growth and the British Industrial Revolution: A Restatement of the Crafts–Harley View” (Economic History Review, 1992).
- “British Industrialization Before 1841: Evidence of Slower Growth During the Industrial Revolution” (Journal of Economic History, 1982).
- “Ocean Freight Rates and Productivity, 1740–1913” (Journal of Economic History, 1988).
- Various papers on cotton-textile productivity and trade history.