PRECOCIOUS BRITISH INDUSTRIALIZATION.pdfVIP

Working Paper No. 67/02 Precocious British Industrialization: A General Equilibrium Perspective N. F. R. Crafts and C. Knick Harley © N. F. R. Crafts and C. Knick Harley Department of Economic History London School of Economics August 2002 Department of Economic History London School of Economics Houghton Street London, WC2A 2AE Tel: +44 (0)20 7955 6399 Fax: +44 (0)20 7955 7730 Additional copies of this working paper are available at a cost of £2.50. Cheques should be made payable to ‘Department of Economic History, LSE’ and sent to the Economic History Department Secretary. LSE, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK. Precocious British Industrialization: 1 A General Equilibrium Perspective N. F. R. Crafts (London School of Economics) and C. Knick Harley (University of Western Ontario) 1. Introduction 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 became highly industrialized even prior to the move to free trade in the 1840s. On the eve of the abolition of the Corn Laws the share of agriculture in employment had already declined to levels that were not reached in France and Germany until the 1950s. Table 1 reports levels of agricultural employment in other European countries at d