The dissolution of English monasteries, the rise of the gentry, and the Industrial Revolution

There are many theories that purport to explain why England experienced the Industrial Revolution first (rather than France, say, or China). For example, the CORE Economics textbook, which I use in my ECONS101 class, focuses on changes in the relative price of coal and labour (alongside the availability of cheap resources arising from colonial conquest and slavery). It's an interesting theory, and has support from data, but probably isn't the whole story.

Another theory posits that the Dissolution of the English Monasteries in the 1530s freed up land from feudal tenure and created a rising class of gentry, who had stronger incentives for investment, innovation, and commercialisation. This theory is attributed to the historian Richard Tawney, and is the theory that is tested in this 2021 article by Leander Heldring (Northwestern University),  James Robinson (University of Chicago), and Sebastian Vollmer (University of Göttingen), published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics (ungated earlier version here).

Specifically, Heldring et al. use a variety of data at the Parish level before and after the Dissolution, and compare parishes that had monastery-owned land ('monastic parishes') with those that didn't ('non-monastic parishes'). They find a number of important results that are consistent with Tawney's theory, including:

...we first use data on the presence of markets in 1600 and the survival of perpetual copyhold into the nineteenth century. We find that former monastic parishes are more likely to have a recurring market, and are less likely to be unencumbered by feudal copyhold tenure, consistent with our interpretation of the shock...

We use a unique census from 1700 that records the number of gentry in each town and village in England and Wales to measure the presence of the gentry... We find, consistent with Tawney, that gentry are more likely to be present on formerly monastic lands. We also find that monastic lands experienced more rapid conversion and thus subsequently had fewer Catholics...

Using census data, we show that monastic parishes employ a smaller share of the working-age male population in agriculture in 1831 and a commensurately larger share in commercialized sectors, like trade and handicraft. Moreover, using data on all textile mills in England in 1838, we find that monastic parishes are more industrialized than non-monastic parishes...

We find that the presence of formerly monastic properties in a parish is positively and significantly correlated with patenting, enclosure, investment, and agricultural yield.

To summarise, monastic parishes were more likely to have markets, were less likely to have feudal tenure of land, had more gentry (and fewer Catholics), were more commercialised, had more textile mills, and had more patenting and agricultural investment, than non-monastic parishes. Heldring et al. note that:

Our results suggest that the end of monastic restrictions on the marketability of one-third of the land in England and relative incidence of customary tenure, itself directly linked to feudalism, were important for fundamental economic change. The lagged abolition of feudal land tenure in France and Germany may be behind why England pulled ahead on the world stage in the eighteenth century.

This is a really interesting and thorough paper, using a variety of the best available data. It doesn't provide the whole story for why England experienced the Industrial Revolution before other countries, but it does provide good evidence of some of the precursors that likely contributed to it.

[HT: The Dangerous Economist, last year]