The emergence of modern economic growth in Britain is among the most important developments in history. Recent scholarship has drawn attention to the importance of imperialism, trade, and slavery in this process. However, a lack of comprehensive data make it difficult to evaluate the role of international trade (including the slave trade) in the development of Britain's state and economy. We build a dataset on Britain's trade by product, port, and year, from 1670-1870, to study: (i) empire's role in expanding trade; (ii) trade's contribution to fiscal development; and, (iii) the link between trade and the industrial revolution.
We first aim to evaluate the “power and plenty” hypothesis (Findlay and O'Rourke, 2007): testing for causal links among military conflict, expanded trade geographically linked to conflict, and expanded tax revenues arising from growth in trade. We will exploit variation in battle (and war) outcomes to quantitatively and systematically study how military capacity and success stimulated trade in the age of mercantilism. We can then study the effects of expanded trade on fiscal development and industrial development.
Second, we will re-evaluate the traditional depiction of the Atlantic Slave Trade as occurring within a “Triangular Trade” among Africa the Caribbean, and British North America. This more generally contributes to the history of capitalism literature (Beckert, 2015; Berg and Hudson, 2023) by introducing the role of Asia in the development of European capitalism.
Third, we will quantitatively evaluate the causal effects of British policies (such as the Calico Acts and Navigation Laws) on trade and industrial development. This paper will apply an event study design to examine whether the introduction of protective policies induced export growth in the relevant sectors. This paper will be the first to quantitatively evaluate whether this was the original case of an infant industry developing from government protection.
Funded by the Leverhulme Trust
