2011/19 | LEM Working Paper Series | |
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The Spinning Jenny and the Guillotine: Technological Diffusion at the Time of Revolutions |
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Ugo Gragnolati, Daniele Moschella, Emanuele Pugliese |
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Keywords | ||
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Industrial Revolution, income distribution, economies of scale, choice of technique, spinning jenny
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JEL Classifications | ||
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N00, N01, N70
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Abstract | ||
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Why was England the cradle of the Industrial Revolution? The present
work shows that scale economies and demand, combined with the
conditions of the relative prices of input factors, allow to provide a
purely economic answer to this question. The labor-saving innovations
of the Industrial Revolution were profitable only if, after their
adoption, sales expanded enough to cover the upfront cost of
capital. For some time, England was the only country in which sales
exceeded the minimum threshold required to make adoption
profitable. This fact is illustrated here by means of a detailed case
study centered on the cotton industry and on the adoption of the
spinning jenny in England and in France at the dawn of the Industrial
Revolution. By then, the sufficiently large and relatively well-off
English middle class could guarantee to cotton spinners a level of
sales that was not viable in France, where income was lower and more
concentrated in the hands of the upper classes.
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