This is the title of the new book by Professor Robert Allen of Nuffield College, Oxford, and a fascinating assessment it is of the progress of industrial development in Britain compared to other leading economies of the 18th and 19th centuries. One of the fundamental questions of course is why Britain? And why the late 18th century? As Prof Allen notes, there have been many kinds of explanation – cultural, sociological, technological. Not surprisingly, the economic historian turns to a different set of explanatory variables.

His hypothesis in The British Indutrial Revolution in Global Perspective is that relative factor endowments played into a context of slowly but steadily rising consumer demand. In the preceding hundred years or so literacy rates had risen, consumerism was on the march, a growing urban population wanted to buy new goods (books, clocks) and imported luxuries (sugar, tea). Allen writes: “In England, the proportion of the population who could sign their name rose from about 6% in 1500 to 53% in 1800. A reading public of this size was unprecedented in world history and led to new ways of thinking in many areas.” (p12).

The upshot was that wage rates in Britain were relatively high by the end of the 18th century, while extensive coal reserves meant than energy was relatively cheap. These relative endowments and factor costs stimulated capital investment and innovation in Britain, whereas in other leading countries innovation and investment were not profitable. (And the book does refer to Britain's position vis a vis China as well as other western economies.)

History is over-determined and so of course cultural and social factors played a part too, along with the co-evolution of technological innovation with the financial and legal framework that rewarded it. Still, I find the factor cost explanation wonderfully elegant and persuasive. There is ample evidence in many contexts that the profitability of existing methods of production can indeed inhibit the adoption of new technical (or managerial) innovations. And of course this fascinating book documents the evidence thoroughly for the era and technologies of the Industrial Revolution. This includes for example cost breakdowns for cotton manufacture and comparative real energy prices in London, Antwerp and Canton. Great stuff – I was much teased by my husband for calling out 'What a great table!' as I read this.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the interaction between human capital and the adoption of the innovations, the links between the Enlightenment, the Scientific Revolution and the industrial application of knowledge through entrepreneurship. Allen looks at the individual inventors and their connections with scientific research – one of the interesting aspects is how widespead the array of invention was, not just steam and cotton and coal but also ceramics, chemicals, instrumentation and machine tools. These had geographical specificity too – although some of these such as metals (West Country Quakers) and textiles (Manchester men of action) had the fewest connections with the leading edge scientific world. This material complements the lovely Lunar Men by Jenny Uglow and another recent cultural history of the period of scientific discovery by Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder.

Anyway, I'm an Industrial Revolution and Enlightenment groupie, but even allowing for that, Professor Allen's book is a must-read for anyone interested in economic history and the long-term trajectory of Britain's role in the world. It makes an important contribution to the scholarly debate about long-term comparative economic performance.

On another note, this will be my last post for the next week as I'm off on holiday, leaving behind laptop and dongle.

I've just read a fascinating essay by primatologist Frans de Waal, Primates and Philosophers. (It's the Archbishop of Canterbury who leaps to my mind on hearing the phrase 'primate morality', but of course the title refers to the kinds of hairy primates who are our evolutionary ancestors rather than the kind who run the church.)

De Waal wants to have a go at those who argue that human morality is a cultural overlay on a nature which is amoral – he calls this 'veneer theory' and links it to TH Huxley amongst others. Part of the book consists of replies by angry veneer theorists (not that they accept the description). However, the philosophical spat is less interesting than de Waal's observations on the behaviour of the primates – chimps and capuchin monkeys – he has observed carefully for years. I found his argument that human morality ihas evolved from our inherent nature as social apes very persuasive. It's consistent with other work on the evolution of reciprocal altruism eg Axelrod's Evolution of Cooperation. To me it suggests a way of reconciling the assumption of self-interest common to economics and evolutionary studies with observations about how people in fact behave: self-interest in this sense does not equate to selfishness.

One of the other features of the essay that fascinated me is de Waal's frequent reference to Adam Smith and my hero David Hume, whose theorising about human nature and the moral sentiments which characterise it he sees as consistent with the findings of primatologists. There has always been much mutual borrowing between economics and evolutionary theory. Darwin read Malthus as well as Hume and Smith, Marx and Veblen borrowed from Darwin; more recently John Maynard Smith's evolutionarily stable strategy concept came from game theory. Paul Krugman years ago gave a terrific speech on this interchange. Long may it continue. Both are natural sciences which seek to explain human behaviour and ultimately I think they'll converge, and cognitive science along with them.

No doubt there are 'nudges', to use the term for psychological tricks to guide behaviour popularised by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, that would get more people buying more books in more bookstores. But alas, I can only offer here links to two articles which treat these two ubjects separately.

One is a review of Nudge  by Laurence Mead. Sadly the reviewer uses it as an economist-bashing opportunity rather than a consideration of the idea of nudging, although he does in fact point out the limitations of the evidence about its effectiveness.

The other is an interesting article in today's FT by the excellent Jonathan Guthrie, about the resilience of bookselling despite the recession and the slow spread of e-books. (The FT has made me sign up every time I try to go to the website – I can never remember by login and password – so you might need to register to read this, but it's free.) I've had an interest in bookselling ever since being on the Competition Commission inquiry into the merger of Waterstones and Ottakars; this column chimes with my anecdotal impression about the health of the independent bookstores I visit, such as the marvellous Daunt Books, Stanfords in Convent Garden, and the extraordinary institution of Foyles. I'm not sure about the appeal of e-books though – especially as I head off for a week's holiday by a swimming pool. Do they survive being splashed and having sunscreen dribbled onto them?

A rich question coming from an economist, one might think. It's prompted by a book I've been dipping into which is in theory fascinating (to me, at any rate), a sociological history of economics in the US, UK and France from the 1890s to 1990s. Yes, sad anorak that I am, I was looking forward to reading Economists and Societies by Marion Fourcade but am going to have to give up.

The reason it was interesting to me in the first place was that it sets the work we do as economists in the context of our wider cultural and intellectual and institutional environment. It must be true that economics reflects these currents, and yet too many economists can't distinguish between the proper application of scientific method in their empirical work (good) and the idea that economics as it is now is universally and perpetually true (both bad and wrong). As I know well all three countries in this comparative study, I expected illumination.

Oh no! It turns out to be written by an academic sociologist for others in the same discipline. The descriptive country chapters are indeed quite interesting, but the introductory and concluding chapters that surround them have acted more powerfully than a nice mug of Horlicks each evening and sent me straight to sleep. So I can't tell what conclusions to draw from the descriptive accounts. If I were being charitable, I'd blame my own unfamiliarity with the jargon – but I'm not inclined to do so. For the language of sociology does bear far too much similarity to the pretensions so admirably and effectively mocked by Alan Sokal in his spoof of critical theory (see an account of his hoax here). Perhaps someone can point me to the sociologists who don't write so atrociously, but there seem to be few of them. (An honourable exception: Eric Klinenberg's Heatwave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.)

My other beef about the book is that it doesn't mention (unless I slept through it) the overwhelmingly obvious sociological fact about economics, which is its domination by men. We await the sociology of our subject's extraordinary gender bias.