Published by EH.Net (August 2022).

Eric L. Jones. *Barriers to Growth. English Economic Development from the
Norman Conquest to Industrialisation*. Palgrave Macmillan: Palgrave Studies
in Economic History, 2020. xii + 153pp. £79.99 (hardback), ISBN
978-3-030-44273-6.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Mark Bailey, University of East Anglia.



The causes of the Industrial Revolution are one of the great debates in
economic history. What were the forces that transformed human society from
centuries of low productivity and organic economic activity to sustained
growth, increased wealth per head, and technologically adaptive modernity?
In this short, stimulating, and highly readable monograph, Eric Jones
offers a fresh perspective on the reasons why the Industrial Revolution
occurred so quickly and comprehensively in eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century Britain. He considers how manifold minor and subtle
institutional changes over the previous eight centuries slowly but
inexorably eroded the inefficient customs and practices that had acted as
obstacles, impediments and barriers to growth: the net result was to
diminish the economy’s susceptibility to shocks (such as disease and
extreme weather events), to improve the allocation and productivity of its
resources, and hence to enhance its receptiveness to immense and widespread
changes from the eighteenth century. He is not concerned with synthesising
or critiquing the vast debate on the causes of industrialisation, and pays
scant attention to other major debates on the earlier Great Divergence
(whereby economic development in Europe pulled ahead of Asia) and the
Little Divergence (whereby parts of northwest Europe pulled ahead of the
rest of the Continent). He does not rehearse the standard explanations for
‘take off’, such as various prime mover models (e.g., the Protestant work
ethic, falling interest rates) or the new technical innovations (e.g.,
steam power, railways), but instead maintains an unerring focus on
elucidating the merits of his alternative line of argument with admirable
clarity.

Shifting the focus of the debate away from the various engines driving
economic growth to consider instead the gradual evaporation of the
‘deadweight costs of old practices and big blockages inch by inch one after
the other’ (p. 144) is inspired. The modern mindset tends to associate
economic growth with innovations that increase productivity and social
product, but here we are asked to contemplate what had *prevented* growth
and, by extension, how the removal of such impediments in turn stimulated
growth. By addressing a familiar debate by posing a different question,
Jones re-illuminates it with a searing shaft of light. He forces us to
consider how, for example, extravagant and unproductive expenditure on the
likes of castles and cathedrals had placed a burden on the productive
sectors of the medieval economy ‘by tying up capital in structures designed
to intimidate’ (p. 13), and how a reduction in that expenditure released
capital for more productive purposes.

Jones argues that the slow reform of institutions and the erosion of
customary forms of governance resulted in the better allocation of
resources, improved technology and materials, and greater societal
resilience to shocks. In the centuries before industrialisation, prolonged,
varied, and minor institutional changes occurred at a glacial pace to
reduce inexorably deadweight expenditure, to shift assets to people more
likely to exploit them productively, to eliminate destructive domestic
conflict through civil war, and to enable the exploitation of previously
un- or under-utilised resources. These processes were not always
linear—some intended improvements could end up choking advancement—and
their benefits were sometimes inadvertent, although by the nineteenth
century the waning of resistance to change, and the speed of institutional
change, were startling. In all of this, Jones captures a common-sensical
view that institutions evolve more slowly than technology changes, exerting
a drag or brake on productivity gains, and their reform could take decades
or centuries (p. 61). He is unquestionably correct to point out that
prejudice and the want of a decent education meant that the productivity
capacity of women and most of the lower orders of society remained low
until the modern era.

Jones elucidates his arguments through eight short, sharp case studies of
how various impediments to growth were gradually eroded in the pre-modern
era. The first section of the book considers the erosion of obstacles, the
second section coping with shocks. The chapters deal in turn with (section
one) military and ecclesiastical building; the dissolution of the
monasteries; civil war; communal farming and underused land; tithes;
archaic institutions; obstructive infrastructure; and maladministration.
Then section two consider disease; “insults to agriculture”; storms and
adverse seasons; floods; and, finally, fire. The book is topped and tailed
with an introduction and conclusion. All of the chapters are short, and
each one is accessibly and clearly written. Referencing is light, seldom
more than a dozen footnotes per chapter, and Jones’ earlier work features
prominently among the citations. Quotable and telling lines jump out of the
pages. Communal field systems are ‘a device for preserving equality in
principle and poverty in practice’ (p. 53), and the voices and zeal of
nineteenth-century social reformers ‘relegated the lifestyle of the Regency
bucks to dark corners’ (p. 82).

While there is no synthesis or critique of the manifold other theories
about and approaches to the causes of the Industrial Revolution, Jones is
undoubtedly well informed about them. Nor does he attempt to measure the
growth of the English economy over time to identify key phases for his
readers, and so Broadberry, et al.’s monumental* British Economic Growth
1270 to 1870* (2015) does not warrant a footnote. He is respectful of, but
unimpressed by, overarching explanations for the Industrial Revolution
based on an identified prime mover. He recognises that they provide a
powerful conceptual framework to ‘put inchoate events into some type of
order’ (p. 32) and render comprehensible the ‘bewildering surface of
manifold events’, while exposing their limitations: taking predetermined
abstractions as given, cherry-picking examples that fit the theory while
overlooking detailed historical experience that does not, and confusing
correlation with causation. Equally, Jones is fully aware that localised
history can fail to identify key patterns, or segregate the significant
from the insignificant, and can be too susceptible to *ad hoc* interpretations.
So we are offered neither a new prime mover theory nor a fresh empirical
study, but an alternative pathway for exploring an old conundrum. To
illustrate his approach, Jones mines a succession of local examples from
obscure local history journals and publications, and from the disused works
of great historians, such as Hoskins, Willan, and Trevelyan. As he states,
‘local evidence sometimes alters one’s mind about relative significance and
I do not always discern the world of my ancestors in the abstractions of my
profession’ (p. 3).

The drawback with this approach, and with Jones’ predilection for citing
his own work in a threadbare system of referencing, is that
occasionally—but only occasionally—an important and relevant scholarly
contribution is overlooked, an opportunity is missed, or a point is
stretched too far. As an example of the latter, Jones states that the
transition from wooden to stone bridges awaited the late eighteenth
century, and cites lengthy disputes over their upkeep, as examples of
obstructive infrastructure (pp. 70-1) in the pre-modern era, yet the work
that he cites (Harrison, 2004) actually states that such disputes were not
the norm and that most bridges were built of stone by 1700. As an example
of the former, a whole chapter is devoted to the theory developed by
Leander Heldring, James A. Robinson, and Sebastian Vollmer (2015) that the
dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s created a land market and
harnessed the entrepreneurial zeal of the gentry, which combined to remove
a dead weight from the economy and catapulted England and Wales to
industrial growth. Jones deploys their essay skilfully to illustrate the
benefits of his own approach while gently highlighting the limitations of
such an overarching monocausal theory constructed by economists with
limited grasp of the historical reality and scholarship. Yet the prominent
and influential work of Bruce Campbell (2005, 2008) is omitted from the
analysis, even though it reveals that the landed estates of religious
houses comprised no more than 5% of the arable area of England, over half
of which by the 1530s was in the hands of tenants in the form of leases or
other forms of tenure. Thus we have a splendid example of economists and
early modern historians overlooking important work in medieval history
(they are not alone…medieval historians are also guilty of not engaging
with economists and early modernists!), which has established that
religious houses had direct control of less than 2% of the arable land of
England. In which case, how can their dissolution have had such a
transformative effect on the land market and the productive capacity of
English agriculture, or, indeed, how can their dissolution have removed a
significant obstacle to economic growth?

These observations do not detract from Jones’ fundamental argument, they
simply underline the need for more careful formulation and exemplification.
Jones selects various cogent examples of customary practices that impeded
growth—such as tithe payments to the church, which were not removed until a
parliamentary act in the nineteenth century—and, following his lead, other
economic historians will be stimulated to contribute grist to his mill from
their own areas of expertise. One example would be the history of tenures,
whose structure evolved significantly between the thirteenth and
seventeenth centuries. The peculiar institutional structure of land tenure
before the Black Death of 1348-9 meant that the pressure of rising
population caused land holdings to splinter, mean holding size to plummet
and immiseration to spread, and therefore it acted as a major barrier to
the growth of the medieval economy. In the decades after the Black Death
this archaic structure was gradually dismantled through the adoption of
more contractual and monetarised tenures, and the shift of a higher
proportion of land from the seigniorial to the (hands on) peasant sector,
both of which enabled more productive use of landed resources in the early
modern period.

Another topic worthy of closer scrutiny is the development of the law,
which in general receives bad press from Jones. He portrays property law as
cumbersome and expensive until the introduction of a comprehensive system
of land registration, and depicts the legal system more widely as corrupt,
self-serving, protecting the interests of elites, and raising transaction
costs for producers (e.g., pp. 36, 56, 138). While the English legal system
was certainly neither equitable nor fair, it was better than the
alternative. The development of a system of common law from the late
twelfth century under the auspices of royal justices and officials, and the
permeation of its principles and processes into the operation of many other
local tribunals such as manorial and market courts, had profound,
far-reaching, and inadvertent consequences in removing barriers to growth.
It created a culture of decision-making and dispute resolution based on
written proofs, precedents, formal modes of representation, and consistent
treatment of similar wrongs. It was hostile to personal discretion and
arbitrary judgements in social relations, and—to some extent—held the elite
to account. It enabled land to be treated as an asset transferable for
money rather than a gift in exchange for services, and its title to be
defensible and heritable, therefore creating a liquid asset capable of
acting as security for loans. It offered cheap, accessible, independent and
(relatively) fair resolution in petty disputes over debt, trespass and
breach of contract. In short, the development and spread of a legal system
and culture reduced risks and transaction costs in commercial activities,
providing a major incentive to the growth of factor and commodity markets.
Indeed, Jones himself acknowledges that the presence of an independent
legal tradition in Western Europe was a key element in the Little
Divergence (p. 89).

This is a stimulating, enlightening, engaging, wise and learned book,
packed with common sense and sharp analysis, and characterised by a lucid
writing style gloriously free from jargon. Jones is a leading scholar at
the top of his game, and provides a new perspective and a framework for
analysing economic growth that will advance one of the great debates in
economic history.



Mark Bailey is Professor of Late Medieval History, University of East
Anglia. He is the author of *The Decline of Serfdom in Late Medieval
England* (2014) and in 2019 was the James Ford Lecturer in British History
at the University of Oxford; the Ford Lectures have been published as *After
the Black Death. Economy, Society and the Law in Fourteenth-Century England*
 (2021).

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