Share this page!

Enter URL or ID to Unroll

You can paste full URL like: https://x.com/threadreaderapp/status/1644127596119195649
or just the ID like: 1644127596119195649

How to get URL link on X (Twitter) App

  1. On the Twitter thread, click on or icon on the bottom
  2. Click again on or Share Via icon
  3. Click on Copy Link to Tweet
  4. Paste it above and click "Unroll Thread"!
  5. More info at Twitter Help
Davis Kedrosky Profile picture
@dkedrosky
Aug 18, 2021 • 8 tweets • 4 min read • Read on X
Scrolly
THREAD+NEWSLETTER: Urban demand, NOT agrarian capitalism, drove city growth in early modern Britain. 1/

If you enjoy this, please share! I rely primarily on word of mouth for spreading the good word. daviskedrosky.substack.com/p/london-calli… #EconTwitter #econhist
A classic view of British industrialization, dating back to Marx, holds that autonomous change in agriculture—enclosures, private property, large farms—increased worker productivity, supplying the growing cities with labor, food, and raw materials 2/
Crafts and Harley (2004), for example, find that French-style peasant farming would have had a significant "deindustrializing" effect by lowering urban employment.

The implication: capitalist farming permits city growth and explains British structural transformation. 3/
But the evidence is lacking. Enclosures barely increased farm output, especially when turning arable to pasture, and many workers—as evidenced by a widening rural-urban wage gap—were not released, but rather remained unemployed in the countryside. 4/
Causation ran the other way. Urban demand from Britain's high-wage cities raised agricultural goods prices. Favorable terms of trade led farmers to cultivate intensively and specialize by comparative advantage (a la @antonhowes), buying manufactures rather than making them. 5/
Simulations by Allen (2003) show that enclosures had next to no effect on urbanization and that external trade and manufacturing productivity drove most British city growth up to 1800. 6/
To explain why Britain moved out of agriculture so early, then, we must explain her exceptional success in trade and various urban industries, viewing agricultural change as generally a response to these developments. 7/
Once again, if you find this newsletter valuable, please do send it to anyone who might be interested (and subscribe yourself!). You are collectively my sole means of getting this before a wide audience. #econhist #EconTwitter

daviskedrosky.substack.com/p/london-calli…

And, as ever, thanks! 8/

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
　

Keep Current with Davis Kedrosky

Davis Kedrosky Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @dkedrosky

Davis Kedrosky Profile picture
Jan 1, 2023
Listened to the Mercatus panel on *How the World Became Rich.* Quick thoughts:

1) The Mokyr remark about the Spanish armada was taken out of context -- whether he believes it strongly or not, the suggestion was just a slightly flippant part of a broader point about the ...
... contingency of the Great Enrichment in the face of shocks. This leads us to

1b) Mokyr's argument that modern economic growth is sustained by increased resiliency to shocks, as a result of its dependence on knowledge, which is hard to kill via persecution and book-burning.
But it still seems that economic and political factors are really good at suppressing the generation/implementation of ideas over long spells. Why murder scientists if you can just cut their funding and silence them? Many states today aren't innovative even when they try to be.
Read 12 tweets
Davis Kedrosky Profile picture
Dec 31, 2022
My ten favorite books read in 2022, in chronological order ...

1) Dreadnought, by Robert K. Massie. A moving portrait of the politicians and diplomats who sleepwalked into the First World War, framed within the narrative of the Anglo-German naval arms race.
2) Apologies, one more military history. Meyer's *A World Undone* applies the grace, poignancy, and raw excitement of Barbara Tuchman to the entirety of World War I. Listened to as an audiobook, which is brilliantly narrated by Robin Sachs.
3) Finally got around to reading this after @oliverwkim pestered me for months. Most of you are familiar with the bellicist theory of state formation, so I'll just note that Tilly's explication of how the relative initial power of the landed and mercantile classes is fascinating.
Read 11 tweets
Davis Kedrosky Profile picture
Dec 30, 2022
Did not realize that Adam Tooze has a 2007 JEH article on economic growth in fin-de-siecle Bulgaria whose main argument is that Bulgarian agriculture, demographic transition, and mass literacy emerged under the liberal market economy of the interwar era, but there you have it. ImageImage
Indeed, the spread of literacy was remarkably rapid. Image
The broader argument is that neither Nazi nor Soviet planning may have been necessary to produce economic transformation on the European periphery. Labor productivity in agriculture looks pretty disappointing up to 1945, but it's possible that early estimates were too high.
Read 8 tweets
Davis Kedrosky Profile picture
Dec 10, 2022
For weird technical reasons, I can't reply to Pseudo directly, but I think Inikori's first formulation of the "endogenize everything to trade" thesis is this 1987 essay responding to the Brenner/CT debate.

Trade, not property rights, is the real manna from heaven!
In the 'rude state of nature' without foreign trade, pop. growth stagnates, but with it, pop. growth and demand for land increase; falling land abundance => development of private property rights + creation of a landless wage laboring class. Agrarian capitalism is owed to trade.
By the end of the 16th c., surplus labor (hence Pseudo's Lewis reference) was such that only with increased opportunities outside ag. could pop. growth, and thus the expansion of the domestic market, continue.
Read 6 tweets
Davis Kedrosky Profile picture
Nov 12, 2022
Eleven of my favorite books on the First World War, in no particular order.

We start with overall histories. G. J. Meyer's *A World Undone* is a fabulous, sad, and gripping narrative account, sweeping from the July Crisis to the Armistice, and from the Somme to the Balkans. 1/ Image
For a relatively rigorous perspective on the war's geopolitics, tactics, and grand strategy, John Keegan's *The First World War* is an exemplar of tight prose and studied analysis. Especially good on the opening battlefield moves in August 1914 and on the tragedy in Gallipoli. 2/ Image
For the war at sea, neglected in standard histories—which understandably focus on the trenches—Robert K. Massie's *Castles of Steel* is essential. No other book captures the exhilaration and awe of a high-speed battlecruiser chase or the horror of an exploding gun turret. 3/ Image
Read 11 tweets
Davis Kedrosky Profile picture
Sep 27, 2022
Just realized that I never noted the passing of Sir E. A. Wrigley, the legendary British demographer and economic historian, on February 24. Here's a short thread on someone whose research and writing made a big difference to the way that I think about the Industrial Revolution. Image
For over five decades, Wrigley was a titan among economic historians of Britain's Industrial Revolution—an area where it's hard to stand out. He was a pioneer of quantitative methods in Britain, at a time when the cliometric revolution was mostly an American phenomenon.
Wrigley's early work focused on demographic change during British industrialization. This culminated in *The Population History of England 1541-1871* (1981) with R. Schofield, a mammoth tome laying out novel methods for converting parish register data into population statistics. ImageImage
Read 14 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!

This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

Send Email!

:(