economic-history

For decades economists found no trace of the printing press in growth statistics. Learn how city-level data and distance from Mainz were used to estimate print's effect on city growth and on the spread of Protestantism, what competition between printers did, and where these estimates can go wrong.

What Gutenberg actually invented, why printing was a capital-hungry business from day one, and how the press spread from Mainz to about two hundred European cities within fifty years while the real price of books fell by roughly two-thirds.

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.

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.