Mokyr (2009) — The Enlightened Economy

Citation. Mokyr, Joel. The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700–1850. Yale University Press / Penguin, 2009.

Summary

The book-length development of the Industrial Enlightenment thesis, applied to the British IR. Mokyr argues that the decisive cause of British industrialization was the confluence of several intellectual and institutional conditions: a culture of open-knowledge sharing (the Republic of Letters, the Royal Society, the provincial Lit & Phil societies), a deep bench of skilled artisans and mechanics (upper-tail human capital), a normative commitment to “useful knowledge,” and an institutional environment that let private knowledge-producers capture some of the social returns from their work. Factor prices and coal are acknowledged as permissive conditions but not as the main engine.

The book is both the most systematic modern synthesis of the IR debate (it engages every major position in depth) and a partisan brief for the ideational/epistemic account.

Key claims

• The IR is best understood as the payoff of a century of cultural and institutional change — the Industrial Enlightenment — that preceded and enabled it.
• The critical transformation was epistemic: open-knowledge norms, networks of savants and artisans, a rising status of “useful knowledge” against ornamental learning.
• Britain was not uniquely endowed with knowledge, but was uniquely positioned to apply Enlightenment knowledge through its skilled labor force, its Parliamentary institutions, and its market integration.
• Factor-price, coal, and institutional explanations are each partially correct but individually insufficient; the ideational/epistemic piece is load-bearing and under-credited.