The British industrial revolution created an industrial economy. While casual discourse conflates industrialization and economic growth, Britain was remarkable primarily for the pronounced structural change that occurred rather than for rapid economic growth. Uniquely the British labour force...

The “Golden Age” of post-war European economic growth has witnessedextraordinary changes not only in the economic, but also in the social andcultural outlook of Western European societies. Eric Hobsbawm’s statementthat “[h]istorians of the twentieth century in the third millennium will...

In early modern north-western Europe, real wages declined while GDP per capita was on the increase. In contrast, wage growth in Tokugawa Japan went hand in hand with output growth. Based on this finding, the paper revisits Thomas Smith’s thesis on ‘Pre-modern Economic Growth: Japan and the...