Friday, 6 October 2017: 3:15 PM
In this paper, we argue that the industrial revolution in 18th century Great Britain had its origins in Calvinism as expressed by/in the 100,000--140,000 French Protestant refugees that landed on the shores of England and Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries. Unlike most theories that are essentially unidimensional (Moykr's "Republic of Letters'' and McCloskey's "Bourgeois Dignity''), ours is multidimensional, involving both pull and push factors. The pull factor was migration, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, of thousands of Huguenot merchants to England and Ireland. The latter arrived with the intention of plying their trade within a new, expanded network, namely that of late 17th century Britain augmented by what John F. Bosher refers to as Protestant International, the trade network that resulted from the diaspora of Huguenots throughout the world. This, we argue, increased the demand for tradeables, which in turn spurred invention and innovation both among Huguenot refugees (push factor) and their descendants as well as in the local, predominantly Calvinist population. Our theory provides a structuring framework for the many competing hypotheses of the origins of the industrial revolution, rationalizing them as parts of a greater whole.
The paper is organized as follows. To begin with, we present evidence of the role of Huguenots and their descendants in 16th, 17th and 18th century Great Britain. This is then followed by a formal aggregate supply–aggregate demand (AS-AD) model in which the Huguenots enter via shift variables. We then examine the evidence, both qualitative and quantitative. A case study of two prominent Huguenot merchants/industrialists, Samuel Touchet and Louis Crommelin, is then presented. Lastly, our findings are compared to those of Heinz Schilling for Germany.