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- Title
No Random Walk: A Comment on "Why was England First?".
- Authors
Rostow, W.W.
- Abstract
This article comments on the article "Why was England First?" by N.F.R. Crafts, published in a previous issue. The author says that it was after 1760 that the French government became most ardent in trying to acquire British technology. The French became conscious that they were falling behind in this particular respect. Present evidence suggests that British society diverted more talents to these tasks of invention and refinement than France. A serious case for a stochastic theory of the British Industrial Revolution must address itself, therefore, to the scale of inventive activity not merely to aggregate data of pre-modern economic expansion, or to the allegation that Frenchmen just missed hitting on the spinning-jenny and water frame. The author concludes that there were, indeed, factors which made the probability of the onset of the Industrial Revolution higher in Britain than, in trance. Until new and serious research upsets the received findings, the evidence is that the levels of inventive and private innovational activity over a wide front were higher in Britain than in France during the critical quarter-century that preceded the coming of the first Industrial Revolution.
- Subjects
FRANCE; UNITED Kingdom; INDUSTRIAL revolution; BUSINESS expansion; CRAFTS, N. F. R.; ECONOMIC expansion; TECHNOLOGICAL innovations
- Publication
Economic History Review, 1978, Vol 31, Issue 4, p610
- ISSN
0013-0117
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.2307/2595752