British Economic Growth, 1270–1870

Abstract

This is a definitive new account of Britain's economic evolution from a backwater of Europe in 1270 to the hub of the global economy in 1870. A team of leading economic historians reconstruct Britain's national accounts for the first time right back into the thirteenth century to show what really happened quantitatively during the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution. Contrary to traditional views of the earlier period as one of Malthusian stagnation, they reveal how the transition to modern economic growth built on the earlier foundations of a persistent upward trend in GDP per capita which doubled between 1270 and 1700. Featuring comprehensive estimates of population, land use, agricultural production, industrial and service-sector production and GDP per capita, as well as analysis of their implications, this will be an essential reference for anyone interested in British economic history and the origins of modern economic growth more generally.

India and the great divergence: An Anglo-Indian comparison of GDP per capita, 1600–1871

“…Projecting back from Maddison's (2010) estimates of GDP per capita for 1871 in 1990 international dollars, which are widely accepted as giving an accurate picture of living standards for the period after 1870, we arrive at a per capita income in 1600 of $682, well above the bare bones subsistence level of $400, or a little over a dollar a day. This is consistent with the recent revisionist work on Europe, which suggests that Maddison (2010) has substantially underestimated living standards in the pre-modern world (Broadberry et al, 2011). Third, the disaggregated results suggest that there was an absolute fall in Indian industrial production during the first three decades of the nineteenth century, rather than just a reduction in the share of industry in economic activity, although the scale of the fall was less than suggested by some nationalist authors (Bagchi, 1976).…”

“…In this section we derive estimates of Indian GDP by sector, following the latest methods of historical national accounting, incorporating demand effects into agriculture and urbanisation effects into services (Broadberry et al, 2011;. The starting point is the estimation of the population, which is used to derive the domestic demand for goods and services, as well as to provide the denominator for the series on GDP per capita.…”

“…For the case of India, it is not possible to estimate directly on a high-frequency basis an output-based series for agriculture such as that provided by Broadberry et al, (2011) for Britain, or Bassino et al, (2012 for Japan. However, it is possible to reconstruct the acreage and yields of all the main crops in 1600 and 1910, to cross-check the long run increase in output.…”

“…However, recent work on the long run development of the European economy suggests that service sector output growth moves more closely in line with the urban population (Broadberry et al, 2011). This approach began with Wrigley (1985), and has recently been combined with the demand approach to agriculture to provide indirect estimates of GDP in a number of European countries during the early modern period (Malanima, 2011; Álvarez-Nogal and Prados de la Escosura, 2013).…”

“…Recently, there has been much progress in reconstructing the historical national accounts of a number of European countries during the early modern and even the late medieval periods (Broadberry et al, 2011;Broadberry et al, 2013;van Zanden and van Leeuwen, 2012;Malanima, 2011;Álvarez-Nogal and Prados de la Escosura, 2013). This paper applies similar methods to Asia, providing estimates of Indian GDP for the period before 1871.…”