BRITISH ECONOMIC GROWTH SINCE 1270: THE ROLE OF EDUCATION
Jakob B. Madsen a and Fabrice Murtinb
a Department of Economics, Monash University
b OECD and Sciences-Po Paris
ONLINE APPENDIX.
Content
A1. Historical Evidence on the Origin of Education and Science and the International Technology Transmission
References to A1
A2. Further Tests and Discussion
A3. Data Appendix
A1. HISTORICAL EVIDENCE ON THE OROIGIN OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE AND THE INTERNATIONAL TECHNOLOGY TRANSMISSION
Content:
A1.1 The origin and the expansion of Britain’s education
A1.2 Education, science and technology
A1.3 Transmission of technology to Britain
A1.4 The Glorious Revolution and the North and Weingast Hypothesis
A1.1 The origin and the expansion of Britain’s education
This section gives a very brief overview of the origins and expansion of education since approximately 1210. Oxford University already existed and Cambridge started shortly afterwards, so elementary and grammar school education must have been available at least to some. Orme (1973) provides an extensive history of English medieval schools from the 12th Century. He notes that while religious orders educated many for religious life, it was the rise in secular education that had the greatest impact on British society. Orme finds that medieval education was expanding from the 12th century, and by the 13th century, he locates increasing numbers of secular, usually fee-paying, schools distributed all over England.
According to Moran (1985), in the aftermath of the plague of 1348/49, a shortage of priests to pray for the dead led to the need to educate more clergy and this in turn led to more educational opportunities for lay people and hence increasing lay literacy. She further notes that from about this period, the ability of Lollards of even the lower classes to read the Bible is evidence of the spread of education in the later part of the 14th and the 15th centuries, (see Moran, 1985, and references therein). In Moran’s study of the schools in the Diocese of York, she finds that there were nearly twice as many schools by 1500 than at the end of the 14th century and there were double that again by 1548. This concurs with Orme’s (2006) finding for England that the two centuries leading up to the Reformation saw a remarkable increase in the number of schools. The dissolution of the Chantries, which had been a major source of endowment funding for schools (see below for a brief overview of endowments) probably set education back somewhat, however, there is much evidence to indicate that most schools were re-endowed, and the rising literacy rates and book production would indicate the education was still widely available, (Spufford, 1979; Simmons, 2002).
What’s more, as noted by Moran (1985), the re-organization and changes in curriculum following the Reformation probably increased the quality of education in many schools. Stone (1964) also give evidence of a flourishing education system following the Reformation, citing the large numbers of students enrolling at the universities and Inns of Court between approximately 1560 and 1640. De Montmorency (1904) states that 2,500 charity and endowed schools were founded between 1660 and 1730. By 1760, 3,000 charity schools had opened. Although it is widely accepted that secondary and tertiary education suffered during this period, the numbers of elementary schools continued to grow. And from early in the 19th century, despite widespread use of child labor that prevented a large proportion of poor children from accessing education, the National School and British and Foreign school systems sprang up and gradually spread, starting elementary schools all over the country. However, despite education from age 5 to 11 being made compulsory in 1867 (though not being widely enforced before 1870), free access to elementary education for all was not made available until 1891. Even so, the numbers receiving some form of elementary education had increased dramatically over the century. However, although grammar schools had been reorganized and improved from about 1870 and other forms of secondary and technical training institutions had arisen, access for all to secondary and further education lagged well behind.
As the brief overview above demonstrates, despite there being many perceived benefits from having an educated and literate society, the British government was very slow, compared to some other European countries, to fund universal free education – only starting slowly by beginning with limited funding for school building in 1833 and not providing for free elementary education for all until 1891. Hence, for the entire period considered in this paper up until then, funding of all secular education was either i.) paid for privately, ii) funded by charitable donations or endowments, iii) financed by subscriptions - which could take the form of local people donating money, i.e., subscribing, for the cost of a local school or salary for a school master, etc., or subscriptions from wealthier people donating funds to the charity school movement, which, starting in the late 1600s, raised funds to establish schools to provide mainly elementary education to the poor, or iv) paid for by town corporations through rates etc.
The most important source of funding for schools prior to the 20th century was from individuals who donated money to endow schools. According to Orme (2006), the endowment ‘movement’ began in about the 1440s with founders either establishing a new school or endowing an existing one. Endowments were often stipulated in someone’s will and usually took the form of money left to purchase a piece of land or to be otherwise invested and the rent or other returns used to provide for the salary of a school master in a certain place. Often provision was also made for a school building and a house for the school master, and the founder would usually make some stipulations such as the number of children to be taught free, often restricted to a certain number of poor children from the local area, and what was to be taught, e.g. Latin (grammar), English, reading, writing, casting accounts, etc., depending on the type of school. Hence, once a school was endowed, except in a few periods of great political upheaval or where an endowment was illegally misappropriated, it tended to continue because endowments were a permanent source of income that could only be used for the specific purposes as set out by the endower (Orme, 2006). As mentioned above, following the Reformation, interest in providing education for children increased, and the numbers of people will to donate funds to endow of schools.
The exact reasons for the expansion of education in Britain following the Reformation are not clear, but generally, the voluntary contributions that financed schools, the Protestant reformation, an increasing fraction of the population with an evolutionary advantage, and the Renaissance humanism are stressed by researchers as being key drivers of the educational expansion in Britain, and the West more generally, starting in the 16th century (Craig, 1981; Boli et al., 1985; Green, 1990).[1]
From the time of the reformation, most of the British population converted to Protestantism – a characteristic which is stressed by Weber (1905) as being crucial for the British Industrial Revolution. It is well-established that mass education expanded most rapidly in the Protestant areas, particularly those with large numbers of Puritans or Calvinists (Craig, 1981; Boli et al., 1985; Becker and Woessmann, 2009, Woodberry, 2012). Protestantism emphasized literacy as an important means to understanding personally the word of God and there was a strong link between individualism and Protestantism (Sandberg, 1979; Boli et al., 1985). Crucially, the interaction between the earlier invention of the metal font movable printer and the strong encouragement of Protestants to learn to read so they could read the Bible were fundamental drivers of literacy in the British society (Woodberry, 2012). By contrast, in China, Korea and Japan, where the printer was invented in the 6th-8th centuries, substantially earlier than Gutenberg’s invention in around 1450, printing did not supplement handwritten manuscripts, mass produced books and newspapers did not emerge, and literacy remained very much the prerogative of elite men before the arrival of Protestant missionaries in the 19th century. Similarly, the printing press was, as a result of strong opposition by Muslim legal scholars, prohibited the in Ottoman Empire over the period 1483-1729 (Watson, 1968).
In an influential paper, Boli et al. (1985) stress political egalitarian individualism as central to the educational expansion in Britain and give evidence that education precedes the adaption of formal state rules about education. More specifically, Boli et al. (1985) argue that education is an outcome of religious and political processes that secularize the organizational and ideological rules of individuals. Thus, the establishment of a national church stressing the ultimate authority of the individual, like the Protestant church in Britain, enhances educational development. Boli et al. (1985) state that “in this process, mass education is assigned a central role, linking beliefs in the efficacy of organized socialization and the importance of childhood learning experiences for adult capacities to the optimistic assumption that reconstituted individuals will further national development and progress” (p. 164). In this context religion played an important role for the educational development. Religious organizations that emphasized worships and church mediation between the individual and God tended to inhibit education and feudal political institutions where intermediate groups (states, syndicates and families) are considered primary elements of society. Similarly, Boli et al. (1985) argues that education is inhibited in countries where policies are heavily influenced by traditional elements such as tribalism and other ethnic voting blocks. The political egalitarian individualism that characterized British religious and political processes was, consequently, a leading force behind the British expansion of education (Boli et al., 1985).
Renaissance humanism that transformed classical education into an object of conspicuous consumption was another development that was influential for the expansion of education in Britain in the 16th and 17th centuries according to (Craig, 1981).
Finally, Galor and Moav (2002) argue that the parents who valued education highly gained an evolutionary advantage and, gradually increased their share of the population prior to the British Industrial Revolution. This hypothesis gains empirical support from the study of Clark and Hamilton (2006). Based on data constructed from wills written in England in the period 1585-1638, Clark and Hamilton (2006) find a positive and statistically significant effect of literacy and wealth on the number of surviving offspring and that the richest testators left twice as many children as the poorest. These results lend support to the Galor-Moav hypothesis that children born to parents with high quality-bias had an evolutionary advantage during this period and this is likely to have been another important driver of the early British educational expansion.
A1.2 Education, science and technology
In his account of the history of the Royal Society of London, Thomson (1812) notes that the numerous scientific societies and academies that formed in Europe contributed much to the rapid progress of science from the mid-1600s. He also points out that these societies played a very important role in disseminating knowledge around the world, quickly and efficiently by publishing “periodically, all the discoveries which came to their knowledge” (p. 5).
Sullivan (1984) demonstrates how scientific knowledge was disseminated to the agricultural sector through technical farming manuals/books starting with John Fitzherbert’s, The Boke of Husbandry, published in 1523, which marks a new era in the history of the role of agricultural technological literature in the development of farming techniques in England. Subjects that were considered in the technical farming manuals include agricultural chemistry, botany, grasses and weeds, drainage improvements, weights and measures, and entomology.
The invention of the moving printing press meant that large quantities of books with new scientific discoveries could be produced and distributed. Since approximately 21% and 65% of husbandmen and yeomen, respectively, were reading and writing literate in 1591 and increasing thereafter (Sullivan, 1984), and an even larger fraction of could read it is likely that a large fraction of farmers was able to follow the new trends in methods and technology through book reading. Furthermore, Sullivan (1984) argues that farming books were at least as good as patents as indicators of advancement in agrarian technology since they contained a lot more innovative ideas compared to patents. The number of technical agricultural book titles listed by Sullivan (1984) increased markedly from 1571, indicating that scientific knowledge was making important inroads into the production sphere and that farmers’ high literacy rates made the dissemination of technology feasible. Based on Sullivan’s data, Ang et al. (2013) show that the number agricultural book titles was a significant determinant of agricultural productivity in the period 1620-1850. From this evidence it can be concluded that science and education already played a role for technological progress from at least the 16th century.
A1.3 Transmission of technology to Britain
It is not entirely clear how technology was transmitted from the European continent. A potential channel is immigrant skilled workers. There was, for example, a significant flow of skilled artisan and merchant refugees from France and Belgium to Britain following the persecutions of Walloons and Huguenots during the 16th and 17th centuries (Harris, 1998, p. 564). Landes (1983) remarks that French industry was “crippled by the exodus of some of its best practitioners fleeing a wave of anti-Protestant bigotry and persecution” (p. 219). Musson and Robinson (1969/1994, p. 64) suggest that these people were particularly attracted by the British patent system, greater availability of capital, and greater freedom for private enterprise.
Although, there is strong evidence that technologies were mostly transmitted from Britain to the European continent during the First and Second Industrial Revolution, and not the other way around, (see, e.g., Mokyr, 2005a, 2005b; Squicciarini and Voigtländer, 2015), some authors, particularly Musson and Robinson, 1969/1994, argue that Britain was a big user of technologies and scientific results created in the European continent. In the smelting and refining of metallic ores, for example, German skills and capital, applied by Hochstetter and others, were extremely important for British technological advances (Musson and Robinson, 1969/1994, p. 60). Printing, the paper mill, wire-drawing machines, the Saxony spinning wheel, and the Dutch swivel loom were also inventions with important technological consequences imported into Britain from the continent (Musson and Robinson, 1969/1994). Foreign influences can also be traced to other industries such as silk, pottery, glass-making, sugar refining, tinplate manufacture, and brewing (Musson and Robinson, 1969/1994, pp. 60-61). Based on in-depth case studies of French espionage in Britain, Harris (1998, particularly in Ch. 20), for example, advocates industrial espionage as an import channel of technological transfer to Britain from the continent and, especially, from France during the 19th century. The importance of this channel of transmission, however, is difficult to assess based on the cases presented by Harris (1998). Studying technology transfer from Britain to the US in the 19th century, Jeremy (1973), for example, shows that machines and models not accompanied by skilled mechanics were rarely successfully employed in the US. Furthermore, technological knowledge was, according to Jeremy (1973), extremely tacit in nature, again suggesting that espionage may not have been as important as advocated by Harris (1998).
A1.4 The Glorious Revolution and the North and Weingast Hypothesis
North and Weingast (1989) make a strong economic case for the argument that changes in political representation following the Glorious Revolution 1688-1689 set the English economy on a unique growth path leading to the Industrial Revolution. They argue that the parliament rendered government behavior more predictable by making it impossible for the Crown to change the rules of economic activity ad libitum, which in turn lead to a financial revolution that entailed a reduction in the required returns on private and government debt, because of an increase in the perceived commitment by the government to honor its debts.
However, the thesis that the Glorious Revolution was a milestone in the British economic development has recently been challenged.Temin and Voth (2013) show that government debt crowded out private credit provision because private borrowers were credit constrained by lenders. In fact, the ceiling on banks’ lending rates was reduced in 1714 and private bank lending and the length of loans to maturity were reduced (Temin and Voth, 2013, p. 182). Furthermore, analyzing the gap between interest rates on government debt in England, the Continental monarchies and the urban-based republics, Epstein (2000) fails to find support for the neo-institutionalist hypothesis that interest rates are linked to property right institutions. He finds that the lowest interest rates were enjoyed by the urban-based republics in Continental Europe, signifying a greater supply of capital and financial specialization and that the reduction in the British interest rates, rather than being a result of British institutional reforms, were driven by a convergence towards the Continent’s interest rates.
According to Epstein (2000), what the Glorious Revolution did was to increase the efficiency of the state and the capacity to raise taxes and Britain went from being a marginal player in Europe to a world leader after 1700. Coffman et al. (2013) argue that British institutions in many cases became weaker after the Glorious Revolution as rent-seeking monopolies were allowed to grow in some sectors of the economy that were earlier constrained under the more autocratic leadership. Furthermore, English governments became more extractive and rent-seeking in order to finance wars after William III became king in 1689. Finally, Hoppit (2011) argues that parliamentary supremacy did not better secure property rights and demonstrates that property was heavily taxed and frequently expropriated. In summary, the institutional improvement following the Glorious Revolution is highly controversial and the indicator for constraints on executive constructed here may well exaggerate the positive effects.