This website is for students of economic history of Europe, their teachers,
all the academics in the field, and all the people that share an interest in the economic history of Europe.
It aims to provide tools and materials for the study of the economic history of Europe.
New research will
fundamentally change the old views.
The view that pre-industrial Europe was characterized by poverty and stagnation
is challenged by new research.
In the coming year we hope to present new results from the ongoing research
projects on national income in various parts of Europe.
Karl Gunnar Persson opens this discussion by an overview of new, still
tentative, estimates on per capita income in the first and second millennium and
he offers a method of checking the plausibility of conflicting estimates.
Read more about
Why was the Industrial Revolution British?
Robert Allen, Tawney Lecture 2009
Britain had a unique wage and price structure in the eighteenth century, and
that structure is the key to explaining the inventions of the industrial
revolution.
British wages were very high by international standards, and energy was very
cheap.
This configuration led British firms to invent technologies that substituted
capital and energy for labour. High wages also increased the supply of
technology by enabling Brits to acquire education and training.
Britain’s wage and price structure was the result of the country’s success in
international trade, and that owed much to mercantilism and imperialism.
