History lessons & courses

Revised estimates put British growth during the classic Industrial Revolution far lower than the name implies, and real wages barely moved for half a century while output per worker rose sharply. This lesson works through the numbers, explains why a transformative technology can take decades to show up in the statistics, and separates what is measured from what is inferred.

Before the factory, textile work was done in houses by people who set their own hours. This lesson follows the bottleneck that moved between spinning and weaving as each was mechanised, explains the two reasons work was gathered into buildings, and looks at what the Luddites were actually objecting to.

The steam engine began as a fix for one problem, flooded coal mines, and was so inefficient that it made sense only where fuel was nearly free. This lesson traces how a device that wasted 99.5 percent of its fuel became the first source of power that could be put anywhere, and why each improvement targeted the constraint that limited the last one.

Mechanised industry appeared in one place before anywhere else, and explaining that is one of the most contested questions in economic history. This lesson sets out what actually needs explaining, works through the wage-and-coal argument, the useful-knowledge argument and the institutional one, and is explicit about which parts are established and which remain in dispute.

Mapping the single points of failure in semiconductor production, why building fabs elsewhere is necessary but nowhere near sufficient, the real toolkit of resilience strategies with their costs, and a transferable method for analyzing any concentrated supply chain.

The legal machinery of technology export controls, explained structurally: control lists and licensing, the Entity List, the Foreign Direct Product rule's extraterritorial reach, node thresholds, multilateral coordination, and the enforcement limits every control system carries.

How chips are printed with light, why extreme ultraviolet lithography took three decades and a continent-wide supplier tree to build, and how one company's machines became the deepest technical moat, and sharpest policy lever, in the semiconductor chain.

Why the semiconductor industry separated into fabless designers and a handful of contract manufacturers, the capital economics that drive relentless concentration, and the map of who actually makes the world's chips.

The geographic and corporate concentration of the chip supply chain expressed as engineering risk — single points of failure, the cost of redundancy, hedging strategies, and the customer-side concentration that mirrors the supply side. Structural analysis, not prediction.

The structural ingredients required to move a national or corporate semiconductor capability up the node ladder — capital, equipment access, process know-how, and talent — and the historical examples (Korea, Taiwan) of how earlier catchup campaigns played out.

How the US, Dutch, and Japanese export-control regimes for advanced semiconductors actually function — the legal instruments, the parameter thresholds in published regulations, the extraterritorial Foreign Direct Product Rule, and the licensing-and-enforcement mechanics.

Beyond lithography, a fab depends on etch, deposition, implantation, metrology, photoresist, wafers, and specialty gases. Each of these markets concentrated independently, and most show the same compounding-R&D pattern as lithography at smaller scale.

Why chip resolution is bounded by light wavelength, how the industry moved from 193 nm DUV to 13.5 nm EUV, and what makes lithography one of the most concentrated single-vendor markets in modern manufacturing.

The three business models in chip manufacturing — fabless designer, pure-play foundry, integrated device manufacturer — and the capex, yield, and learning-curve forces that drove the leading edge into a small handful of firms.

A descriptive overview of how the People's Republic of China is organized: the role of the Communist Party of China, the Politburo Standing Committee, the National People's Congress, the State Council, the Central Military Commission, and the People's Political Consultative Conference. Focus is on institutions and how they fit together.