The history of England’s institutions has long informed research on comparative economic development. Yet to date there exists no quantitative evidence on a core aspect of England’s institutional evolution, that embodied in the accumulated decisions of English courts. Focusing on the two...

We generate and analyze data pertinent to the role of caselaw in England's economic development during the Industrial Revolution. Applying topic modeling to a corpus of 67,455 reports on English court cases, we construct annual time series of caselaw developments between 1765 and 1865. We then...