Kelly, Mokyr & Ó Gráda (2014) — Precocious Albion

Citation. Kelly, Morgan, Joel Mokyr, and Cormac Ó Gráda. “Precocious Albion: A New Interpretation of the British Industrial Revolution.” Annual Review of Economics 6, 2014: 363–389.

Summary

A synthetic argument that British industrialization was driven by the superior quality of British labour — not by Allen’s high wages relative to capital and energy. The paper assembles evidence on British physical stature, life expectancy, mechanical-skill formation, apprenticeship completion, and literacy, and argues that British workers around 1750 were substantially ahead of continental counterparts on these dimensions, in ways that made British labour disproportionately productive per worker. What Allen reads as “high British wages” — implying labour was expensive — Kelly, Mokyr, and Ó Gráda re-read as “high British wages per worker because British workers were unusually capable” — implying labour was highly productive, not expensive.

The causes of British labour quality, in their reading, are stacked: better nutrition (more meat, more dairy than continental diets); the institutional protection against malnutrition provided by the Poor Law; the unusually open and productive British apprenticeship system that produced skilled mechanics in larger numbers and at higher levels of training than continental craft-guild systems; and a centuries-long accumulation of Britain-specific skill stock. The argument is at once a critique of Allen and a positive case for the upper-tail human-capital position, of which it has become the canonical reference.

Key claims

• British workers in 1750 were physically larger, healthier, more literate, and more mechanically skilled than their continental counterparts.
• These advantages had institutional roots — particularly in the British Poor Law (which protected against extreme poverty and its physical consequences) and in the British apprenticeship system (which was relatively open and produced skilled mechanics at scale).
• What Allen interpreted as “high wages” reflects, at least in part, high human capital per worker, not expensive labour. The standard real-wage figures need to be adjusted for skill content per worker.
• The Industrial Revolution’s signature innovations were artisan-mechanic inventions; the bench of skilled craftsmen needed to produce them was disproportionately British because of the long-run human-capital accumulation.
• Britain was “ready for revolution” by 1750 because the human-capital substrate was already in place; the late-18th-century inventions cashed in this substrate.