Did the outbreak of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars influence technical change during the Industrial Revolution? We address this question by investigating an instance of state intervention into the market for inventions from 1793-1820: the introduction of a new proviso into British...

The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the research on the role played by patent systems in the industrialization process (with a special focus on the British case). Perhaps surprisingly, no consensus has been reached yet as to whether the emergence of modern patent systems exerted a...

Using historical data, we test the validity of Wagner's law of increasing state activity at different stages of economic development for five industrialized European countries: the United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Italy. In order to investigate the coherence between Wagner's law and...

Did the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars contribute to the Industrial Revolution? Recent scholarship argues warfare was an important factor in explaining Britain's industrialisation, by encouraging the invention and diffusion of key technologies with military applications. I re-examine...