Crafts & Harley (1992) — Output Growth and the British Industrial Revolution

Citation. Crafts, N.F.R., and C.K. Harley. “Output Growth and the British Industrial Revolution: A Restatement of the Crafts–Harley View.” Economic History Review 45(4), 1992, 703–730.

Summary

The canonical paper-length statement of the Crafts–Harley quantitative revisionist program. Building on Crafts’s 1985 book and on a series of earlier papers, the paper restates and defends a substantially downward-revised estimate of aggregate British real-GDP-per-capita growth during the Industrial Revolution: approximately 0.3–0.5% per year through 1760–1830, accelerating to ~1.2–1.5% only after 1830. The numbers are lower than the older Deane–Cole series (which gave the IR a 1960s-vintage “take-off” appearance) and much lower than popular intuitions about a revolutionary transformation.

The paper reshaped the debate. After Crafts–Harley, no serious discussion of the IR could ignore the gradualism of aggregate growth, and the explanatory target shifted from “why was there a growth explosion” to “why did sustained (if modest) growth begin, and why did it eventually accelerate into the 19th century.”

Key claims

• British aggregate per-capita growth was modest through most of the “revolutionary” period (~0.3–0.5%/yr, 1760–1830).
• Growth accelerated sharply only after 1830, driven by the maturation of the cotton and iron sectors and by the rise of railways and the factory system.
• The “revolutionary” sectors (cotton, iron, engineering) were small shares of employment and output for most of the period, even as they grew rapidly internally.
• The old Deane–Cole GDP series substantially overstated 18th-century British growth.
• The “Industrial Revolution” is a real but quantitatively modest transition; the language of “revolution” overstates the discontinuity and imposes a Whig periodization.