by Stephen Broadberry

By 1870 the British economy was the most industrialised in the world. Nick’s radically different views of its rate of growth and its implications were far-reaching.

I first met Nick Crafts at The University of Warwick in my second year as an undergraduate in Economics and Economic History. He had just returned from Berkeley where he had been observing the Cliometrics Revolution up close. His lectures on British Economic History 1750-1870 had a big effect on me. They provided an inspiring overview of British economic development as he incorporated his own ideas at a time when he was just beginning to chip away at Deane and Cole’s estimates of British economic growth. This would lead eventually to his most important and far-reaching work. This was his radical reinterpretation of the First Industrial Revolution, which occurred in Britain between the mid 18th and 19th centuries and marks the first transition to sustained economic growth.

Nick had moved on to Oxford during my third year at Warwick. Before he left, Nick encouraged me to apply to Oxford where he continued to mentor me during my graduate study, acting as my dissertation supervisor. By this point, Nick’s path-breaking book, British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution, was in preparation. It was published in 1985 and has been reprinted numerous times. The book presented a radically different view of the Industrial Revolution as a more gradual process than previously believed. Nick demonstrated convincingly that earlier writers had exaggerated the growth rate of industrial production and hence of total national output during the Industrial Revolution. This had a number of implications, which have influenced much of my work ever since.

One implication is that although by 1870 the British economy was the most industrialised economy in the world, it was in a more vulnerable position than was widely perceived. This was due to its relatively slow productivity growth during the Industrial Revolution and its specialisation in the labour-intensive old staple industries.

Nick and I began working together between 1988 and 1995 teaching British economic history since 1870 and publishing joint papers which made international comparisons of productivity during the late 19th and 20th centuries.

The general theme of this work was that Britain’s long run relative decline was rooted in the legacy of the early start, exacerbated by a move away from the intensely competitive environment of the pre-1914 period to a more corporatist approach to business and economic policy. Our 1992 Journal of Economic History paper emphasised the neglected factors of human capital and the interwar retreat from competition in explaining the growing Anglo-American productivity gap in the 1930s.

Our following work on the postWorld War II settlement highlighted an acceleration in the pace of Britain’s relative economic decline. Firms and trade unions colluded in an equilibrium of low effort for workers and a quiet life for managers, underwritten by governments intervening to protect failing firms, preserving union power and supporting rather than controlling anti-competitive behaviour.

I learned valuable lessons during this period, watching the master craftsman at work from close quarters. Nick had an encyclopaedic command of the literature and had always read everything that could possibly have been relevant. In addition, he always took the trouble to make sure that arguments were grounded in a theoretical framework that was both sophisticated and yet presented in an accessible way.

And years ahead of the Impact agenda, Nick always had an eye for policy relevance, which he went on to embed at Warwick as the founding Director of CAGE.

In the long run, though, perhaps the most important way in which Nick’s work influenced my research agenda was at the other end of the Industrial Revolution. The slow growth view of the Industrial Revolution implied that the British economy must have been richer and more developed in 1700 than previously thought, casting an entirely new light on earlier periods of economic history.

If Britain was already quite developed on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, then this opened the possibility of earlier episodes of growth and development. It is this that inspired me to begin a project undertaken together with Bruce Campbell, Alex Klein, Mark Overton and Bas van Leeuwen, which resulted in our 2015 book British Economic Growth 1270-1870. Although Nick left Warwick to go to the London School of Economics during the 1990s, he had returned to Warwick by the time this project started, and he continued to offer very helpful advice and guidance.

So far I have focused on Nick’s fantastic scholarship and intellectual achievements but I want to end by saying a bit about what extraordinary fun it was to work with Nick. As a DPhil supervisor at Oxford, Nick was wonderful; he had a wicked sense of humour and seminar nights were a real experience.

Let me end with a gesture which I know Nick would have approved of. That is a toast to Nick Crafts, the most important economic historian of his generation.

About the author

Stephen Broadberry is Professor of Economic History at Nuffield College, Oxford and a CAGE Theme Leader

References

Broadberry, S.N. and Crafts, N.F.R. (1990), “Explaining Anglo-American Productivity Differences in the MidTwentieth Century”, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 52, 375-402.

Broadberry, S.N. and Crafts, N.F.R. (1992), “Britain’s Productivity Gap in the 1930s: Some Neglected Factors”, Journal of Economic History, 52, 531-558.

Broadberry, S.N. and Crafts, N.F.R. (1996), “British Economic Policy and Industrial Performance in the Early Postwar Period”, Business History, 38, 65-91.

Broadberry, S.N. and Crafts, N.F.R. (1998), “The Post-War Settlement: Not Such a Good Bargain After All”, Business History, 40, 73-79.

Broadberry, S.N. and Crafts, N.F.R. (2003), “UK Productivity Performance from 1950 to 1979: A Restatement of the Broadberry-Crafts View”, Economic History Review, 56, 718-735.

Broadberry, S.N., Campbell, B., Klein, A., Overton, M. and van Leeuwen, B. (2015), British Economic Growth, 1270-1870, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Crafts, N.F.R. (1985), British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Deane, P. and Cole, W.A. (1967), British Economic Growth, 1688-1959: Trends and Structure, 2nd edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.