Economic growth

The Industrial Revolution – the Great Discontinuity, to use R.M. Hartwell’s happy phrase-had snatched Great Britain at the end of the eighteenth century from a traditional economy, in which the growth of total production was slow and irregular, and that of production per head at best very small. It substituted an era of modern economic growth, which was relatively fast and sustained, and which affected not only total production but also (much more important) production per head of population ¹ This growth, whose pace had probably doubled during the last twenty or thirty years of the eighteenth century, continued throughout the nineteenth, and it is important to measure it. For a long time, historians were content to use a few isolated indicators (like the production of coal or pig-iron, consumption of raw cotton, value of exports), but their high rate of increase led people to overestimate the growth of the British economy. More recently several economists and statisticians, applying modern national accounting methods to past periods, have worked out some national income series for Great Britain or the United Kingdom which give a more satisfactory picture of total growth. But the primary statistical data available for these calculations, although they are more abundant and reliable than for other countries, are still not as complete or certain as one could wish. Consequently, the series which we present must be treated with caution, especially for the first decades of the nineteenth century. They are approximations, including an element of speculation and sizeable margins of error in spite of the ingenuity and care with which they were calculated; for their authors were obliged, for want of data, to make many adjustments, interpolations and extrapolations. So one should not attach too much importance to decimals. Nevertheless the calculations give orders of magnitude which we consider valid, all the more so because the different scholars who carried out these exercises have arrived at results which correspond fairly closely.