The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [191]
p. 226 ‘the Calico Act’. Friedel, R. 2007. A Culture of Improvement. MIT Press; Rivoli, P. 2005. The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy. John Wiley.
p. 226 ‘enclosure actually increased paid employment for farm labourers’. Here is how Landes puts it: ‘For a long time, the most accepted view has been that propounded by Marx and repeated and embellished by generations of socialist and even non-socialist historians. This position explains the accomplishment of so enormous a social change – the creation of an industrial proletariat in the face of tenacious resistance – by postulating an act of forcible expropriation: the enclosures uprooted the cottager and small peasant and drove them into the mills. Recent empirical research has invalidated this hypothesis; the data indicate that the agricultural revolution associated with the enclosures increased the demand for farm labour, and that indeed those rural areas that saw the most enclosure saw the largest increase in resident population. From 1750 to 1830 Britain’s agricultural counties doubled their inhabitants. Whether objective evidence of this kind will suffice, however, to do away with what has become an article of faith is doubtful.’ Landes, D.S. 2003. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press, pp. 114–15.
p. 227 ‘The historian Edward Baines noted in 1835’. Baines, E. 1835. History of the Cotton Manufacture in Great Britain. Quoted in Rivoli, P. 2005. The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy. John Wiley.
p. 227 ‘reflected Joseph Schumpeter’. Schumpeter, J.A. 1943. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy. Allen & Unwin.
p. 227 ‘As the twentieth-century economist Colin Clark put it’. Clark, C. 1970. Starvation or Plenty? Secker and Warburg.
p. 228 ‘by 1800 the jenny was already obsolete’. Landes, D.S. 2003. The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present. 2nd edition. Cambridge University Press.
p. 228 ‘price of a pound of fine-spun cotton yarn fell’. Friedel, R. 2007. A Culture of Improvement. MIT Press.
p. 228 ‘Cotton accounted for half of all American exports by value between 1815 and 1860.’ Slavery delivered cheapness through increasing quantity of output, not by undercutting prices. Indian production did not decline in the nineteenth century: it expanded, but not as fast as American. Fogel, R.W. and Engerman, S.L. 1995. Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery. Reissue edition. W.W. Norton and Company.
p. 228 ‘As the economist Pietra Rivoli puts it’. Rivoli, P. 2005. The Travels of a T-shirt in the Global Economy. John Wiley.
p. 229 ‘There was never going to be enough wind, water or wood in England to power the factories, let alone in the right place.’ Rolt, L.T.C. 1965. Tools for the Job. Batsford Press. Incidentally, coked coal was used to make iron (by Abraham Darby at Coalbrookdale in Shropshire) as early as 1709, but only inferior cast iron.
p. 230 ‘the country’s demographic and economic centre of gravity shifted south to the Yangtze valley’. Pomeranz, K. 2000. The Great Divergence. Princeton University Press.
p. 230 ‘Coal’s cost per tonne at the pithead in Newcastle rose slightly between the 1740s and 1860s’. Clark, G. and Jacks, D. 2006. Coal and the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1869. Working Paper #06-15, Department of Economics, University of California, Davis.
p. 231 ‘The wages of a coal hewer in the North-east of England were twice as high, and rising twice as fast, as those of a farm worker in the nineteenth century.’ Clark, G. and Jacks, D. 2006. Coal and the Industrial Revolution, 1700–1869. Working Paper #06-15, Department of Economics, University of California, Davis. As one young English woman (my ancestor), the daughter of a judge, wrote to her mother after moving north from Bedfordshire to Northumberland in 1841: ‘The more I see of the poor people