A Culture of Growth. The Origins of the Modern Economy

Throughout his long and distinguished career, Mokyr has been fascinated by the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution launched an unprecedented fast-forward movement in the welfare of mankind, a shift from “Smithian” to “Schumpeterian” growth. In influential and widely read previous books, Mokyr identified technology as the key element in that shift; now he is seeking to uncover the cultural roots of the new technology. Why, he asks in this book, did Europe manage to upgrade its technological culture from producing haphazard results in, say, 1500, to one of permanent improvement from around 1700?Given that he is an economist, you might expect Mokyr to look for “incentives,” but instead he concentrates on “attitudes,” more specifically, ideas about harnessing nature to serve human needs. In five short chapters, Mokyr lays out the theoretical foundations for his inquiry. Borrowing from a range of social sciences as well as biology, he chooses an evolutionary approach in which ideas, not people, are the object of selection. He then adds “choice” as a variable; despite all kinds of constraints, people under the right conditions can choose between competing ideas. Those ideas come from geniuses that Mokyr calls “cultural entrepreneurs,” running parallel with Schumpeter’s innovating businessmen.New ideas emerge randomly at all times and in all regions. How they become accepted as mainstream knowledge is the topic of the core set of chapters about “innovation, competition and pluralism in Europe” in which Mokyr creates a novel and highly successful combination of two usually unrelated research fields. Political historians have often argued that what set medieval and early modern Europe apart from other world civilizations was its political fragmentation. Division may have caused considerable warfare, but it also created competition. Mokyr posits that this competition between states and their rulers also created a “market for ideas.” The “producers” in this market—that is, the scientists and scholars—had their own informal institution to keep ideas flowing across borders and other conflict zones. This institution, already known to contemporaries, was the Republic of Letters.Mokyr argues, convincingly, that the linguistic unity (Latin) within the Republic of Letters, combined with the openness of exchange (letters, books, and journals) and emerging “rules of the game” (evidence and reputation), created a dynamic that established scientific discovery as an ongoing process in which novelty and improvement were at a premium and ultimately destined to have an enormous economic impact. This dynamic is essentially what economic geographers call “cluster effects,” another theory that would further strengthen the book’s argument but that Mokyr somehow seems to have missed.Having identified the general story, two puzzles remain. The first concerns England. As the cradle of almost every invention that mattered for the Industrial Revolution, did England have a particular advantage over its European competitors? Mokyr hesitates, because Puritanism was, as a religion, unusually pro-science, and scientists like Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton became almost popular heroes. Moreover, the Royal Academy displayed a strong interest in promoting dialogue between scientists and practitioners. But because Mokyr is also aware of the pan-European roots of the Enlightenment, as well as of the fact that most English inventors were not scientists, he surmises that “the roots of British leadership in the Industrial Revolution have to be sought elsewhere” (244).In the last part of the book, Mokyr asks why the Chinese had no equivalent to the Enlightenment. Readers who have come this far will not be surprised that the answer lies in the absence of competition or anything like a Republic of Letters in China. The second, even more interesting, puzzle that this book conjures is how, given its liabilities, did China manage to produce such impressive science? Mokyr credits Song and Ming state sponsorship. Unfortunately, the Qing state that followed had much less faith in classical Chinese science. Nonetheless, even if the Qing had continued the support of its predecessors, the requisite “culture of growth” would not have emerged, for the reasons listed above.This book is a convincing example of the added value of combining two normally unrelated fields of inquiry. Quantitative economic historians will want more tests of the book’s core ideas, and cultural historians will balk at seeing ideas reduced to “commodities.” Yet the new and exciting vistas for both global economic history and the history of science that this book opens makes it required reading for everyone engaged in the debate about the “great divergence” and the early modern world more generally.