Entrepreneurship and a Probabilistic View of the British Industrial Revolution

response. First, it is not at all clear that the argument that non-conformists played a vital role in innovation is acceptable. Payne has pointed out that there are very serious difficulties in the way of establishing this proposition in terms of differential survival of records.' Second, it is clear that it is not acceptable to use patent statistics as comparative indices of inventive activity, or of the elasticity of entrepreneurial innovational response, given the well-known (different) deficiencies of patent legislation in England and France in the eighteenth century. However, as Roehl has argued,2 it does seem primafacie that biases in the patent data would be in the direction of overstating English inventiveness and understating French inventiveness, and hence it is quite possible that one could argue for greater French inventiveness at least prior to I 760. Third, my article was concerned with the achievement of the decisive innovations that led to structural change in the form of the Industrial Revolution. It is not obvious that the greater innovational zeal which Rostow alleges was present in late-eighteenth-century England reflected a greater likelihood of coming up with and using spectacular and strategic improvements, any more than Germany was guaranteed the invention of the Gilchrist-Thomas process a century later. In any event, assertions, however widely made, about the quality of entrepreneurship, are notoriously unreliable. It may be revealing, therefore, to ask whether this innovational quality was reflected in a rapid acceleration of the rate of growth of total factor productivity in the mid-eighteenth century. On the best, admittedly imperfect, figures available it appears that of the 0 4 per cent rise in the growth-rate of the English economy in the period I 740-80 as compared with I7I0-40, only o o6 per cent came from an increase in total factor productivity growth.3 The great innovational zeal which Rostow sees in the British 1 P. L. Payne, British Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth Century (1974), p. 25. 2 R. Roehl, 'French Industrialization: A Reconsideration', Explorations in Economic History, xiii (I976), 250-I. 3 N. F. R. Crafts, 'The Eighteenth Century: An Overview', in the work on modern English economic history to be edited by R. C. Floud and D. N. McCloskey (Cambridge, forthcoming)

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• French Inventions of the Eighteenth Century

  Dirk J Struik, Shelby T Mccloy•The William and Mary Quarterly•1953

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