Clare Distinguished Lecture in Economics and Public Policy "The Holy Land of Industrialism” Rethinking the Industrial Revolution by Joel Mokyr.

Mon 28 October 2019

Memorial Court, Clare College

The literature on Industrial Revolution may appear to be a thrice-squeezed orange, but the exact causes of Britain’s precocity have been a subject of fierce debate and are still not fully understood. Rather that locational advantages or the superiority of its institutions, in this lecture Professor Mokyr proposes a novel explanation, which is not only consistent with the views of contemporaries and quantitative evidence but also explains the subsequent loss of British technological leadership.

Joel Mokyr conducts research on the economic history of Europe, and specializes in the period 1750-1914. His current research is concerned with the understanding of the economic and intellectual roots of technological progress and the growth of useful knowledge in European societies, as well as the impact that industrialization and economic progress have had on economic welfare.

He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Econometric Society, and the Cliometric Society as well as the British Academy, the Italian Accademia dei Lincei and the Dutch Royal Academy. He has been the President of the Economic History Association, editor in chief of the Oxford Encyclopedia of Economic History, and a co-editor of the Journal of Economic History. He was the 2006 winner of the biennial Heineken Award for History offered by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the winner of the 2015 Balzan International Prize for economic history.

Cost: Free