History & policy databaseEmpires and economic growth during the Industrial Revolution
Professor Emma Griffin (Queen Mary University of London)
Tuesday 12 March 2024, 1pm
The British industrial revolution has long, and rightly, been regarded as a turning point in world history, and the question of why it all began in Britain has produced a large and lively literature. In the past twenty years, our understanding has been considerably enhanced by the repositioning of events in eighteenth-century Britain within global history frameworks. Yet this has resulted in some unwieldy comparisons between Britain, a small island, on the one hand and very large, continental land masses – India, China, and North America – on the other. Not only do these comparisons involve a significant switch in scale, there is the added complication that some of these regions were themselves bound in complex colonial relationships with Britain. By looking at European nations, similar in size, existing outside Britain’s empire, and indeed in some instances with imperial holdings and ambitions of their own, it is possible to shed new light on the complex and contested relationship between empire and industrialisation, and offer new answers as to why Britain industrialised first.
US growth and the second industrial revolution
Professor Brad DeLong (University of California, Berkeley)
Wednesday 17 Apri 2024, 3pm
In the early 1870s John Stuart Mill reiterated his belief that hitherto all the mechanical inventions ever made had done little more than “enable a larger population to live the same life of drudgery and imprisonment”. Was he right then? And why was he so definitely wrong for the years after 1870?
Growth in interwar Britain
Dr Cristiano Ristuccia (University of Cambridge)
Thursday 16 May, 1pm
Britain had a short and mild Great Depression. By Britain’s long-term standards the recovery phase was also characterised by fast and sustained aggregate growth. This talk revisits the question of policy versus technology in light of recent research on policy-market interactions, price expectations, and technological diffusion.
The German wirtschaftwunder
Dr Armin Grünbacher (University of Birmingham)
Tuesday 11 June, 1pm
West Germany’s ‘economic miracle’ is often seen as the prime example of economic recovery after a devastating conflict or natural disaster, a phoenix rising from the ashes. Within the post-war German narrative, it has almost mythical status. This paper will try to debunk the myth and explain what the real economic drivers for the quick economic recovery were. Neither the Marshall Plan (the FRG received about half the aid the UK received) nor the famed currency reform 1948 were the key reasons, nor was it the ‘social market economy’ (which in the 1950s was neither market nor social). Instead, the origins lie much more in the country’s industrial infrastructure, the labour supply (including people fleeing from the GDR) and, after 1953, growing direct foreign investment. The success was not based on domestic consumption, but based on an export boom which was part of the global trade expansion of the ‘golden 50s’.
South Korean growth
Dr Seung-Woo Kim (Kyungpook National University)
Wednesday 17 July, 1pm
This talk scrutinises the link between the periods of exceptional growth in South Korea and its indebtedness. Against the perennial lack of capital formation, in addition to the limited funding from the Cold War allies, it was imperative for the developing country to raise foreign capital to finance its ambitious heavy-chemical industrialisation. This talk attributes the central planning by technocrats under the military government in the flotation of international loans, allocation of foreign capital, and close monitoring and control of industries to the successful management of external indebtedness. In this way, South Korea eschewed the 1982 debt crisis and bolstered the legitimacy of authoritarian rule. Drawing on multi-archival sources, it questions the notion of military leadership in South Korea’s economic miracle.
