¹ More precisely, Wrigley argues that growth in income per head was only sustainable at very low rates since inhabitants of England and Wales in 1700 were (on average) almost certainly wealthier than their counterparts three centuries earlier.

² Gregory Clark and David Jacks offer conjectural evidence that horse winders might have been a viable second-best solution to Newcomen's in ‘Coal and the industrial revolution, 1700–1869’, European Review of Economic History, 11 (2007), pp. 39–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Even this article, however, concludes that steam power by the early eighteenth century was at least 25 per cent cheaper than horse power. Wrigley cites estimated output per miner of 200 tons in the late seventeenth century, rising to 300 tons in 1851, and falling back to 260 tons in 1913, Energy and the English industrial revolution, pp. 46, 206.

³ The English hundreds consisted of 610 county divisions of varying geographical size which provide the smallest disaggregated units of population currently available for demographic analysis.

⁴ Wrigley, E. A., ‘The supply of raw materials in the industrial revolution’, Economic History Review, 15 (1962), pp. 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, ‘A simple model of London's importance in changing English society and economy, 1650–1750’, Past and Present, 37 (1967), pp. 44–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵ de Vries, Jan and van de Woude, A. M., The first modern economy: success, failure, and perseverance of the Dutch economy, 1500–1815 (Cambridge, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Eckhaus, R. S., ‘The factor proportions problem in underdeveloped areas’, American Economic Review, 45 (1955), pp. 539–65Google Scholar.

⁷ Florence (more accurately, Florence spliced with Milan) and Vienna are representative of a larger body of data analysed by Allen in his 2001 article that provides additional information on methods and sources, Allen, Robert C., ‘The great divergence in European wages and prices: from the middle ages to the First World War’, Explorations in Economic History, 38 (2001), pp. 411–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Comparisons with Delhi and Beijing are based on less complete data and in consequence larger margins of error attach to them.

⁹ Todaro, M. P. and Harris, J., ‘Migration, unemployment and development: a two sectors analysis’, American Economic Review, 60 (1970), pp. 126–42Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Nordhaus, W. D., ‘The allocation of energy resources’, Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 3 (1973)Google Scholar.

¹¹ The discussion of early modern chimneys and hearths resembles Allen's earlier analysis of chimney stacks and blast furnaces of the later nineteenth-century iron and steel industry, Allen, Robert C., ‘Collective invention’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 4 (1983), pp. 1–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹² Aside from one publication dated 1483, the first appearances of the chimney and its variants in Early English Books Online occur during the early sixteenth century, with the first cluster appearing in the 1530s.

¹³ Gauger, Nicholas translated by Desagulier, John T., Fires improv'd: being a new method of building chimneys, so as to prevent their smoaking (London, 1715).Google Scholar

¹⁴ A search for specialist literature on this topic proved elusive but the following provide useful perspectives: Dresbeck, LeRoy, ‘The chimney and social change in medieval England’, Albion, 3 (1971), pp. 21–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Danachair, Caoimhín Ó, ‘Hearth and chimney in the Irish house’, Béaloideas, 11 (1946), pp. 91–104CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Egerton, Samuel Y., ‘Heating stoves in eighteenth-century Philadelphia’, Bulletin of the Association of Preservation Technology, 3 (1971), pp. 15–104Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Mokyr, Joel, The lever of riches: technological creativity and economic progress (Oxford, 1990), pp. 291–7Google Scholar. On gas illumination, see Falkus, M. E., ‘The early development of the British gas industry 1790–1815’, Economic History Review, 35 (1982), pp. 217–34Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Crafts, N. F. R., ‘Industrial revolution in England and France: some thoughts on the question “Why was England first?”’, Economic History Review, 29 (1976), pp. 226–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁷ Hughes, Jonathan R. T., The vital few: the entrepreneur and American economic progress (Boston, MA, 1966)Google Scholar. For correctives, see Merton, Robert K., ‘Singletons and multiples in scientific discovery: a chapter in the sociology of science’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 105 (1961), pp. 470–86Google Scholar; Simonton, Dean K., ‘Independent discovery in science and technology’, Social Studies of Science, 8 (1978), pp. 521–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁸ Comparable earnings of 7s to 8s are reported for Lancashire for the 1760s and 1770s, Custer, Paul A., ‘Reconfiguring Jemima: gender, work, and politics in Lancashire, 1770–1820’, Past and Present, 107 (2007), p. 128Google Scholar.

¹⁹ This assumption is likewise criticized in Crafts, Nicholas, ‘Explaining the first industrial revolution: two views’, European Review of Economic History, 15 (2011), pp. 153–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Crafts similarly concludes that as working time rises, the IRR increases leading the jenny to become profitable in a widening range of locations and at different time periods.

²⁰ Benhamou, Reed, ‘From curiosité to utilité: the automaton in eighteenth-century France’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 17 (1987), pp. 91–105Google Scholar.

²¹ Mokyr, Joel in The enlightened economy: an economic history of Britain, 1700–1850 (New Haven, CT, 2010), pp. 30–62Google Scholar.

²² Sullivan, R. J., ‘The revolution of ideas: widespread patenting and invention during the English industrial revolution’, Journal of Economic History, 50 (1990), p. 354CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Sullivan's data are for 1839–41 and 1849–51.

²³ A well-known exploration of these themes is David, Paul, ‘The dynamo and the computer: an historical perspective on the modern productivity paradox’, American Economic Review, 80 (1990), pp. 355–61Google Scholar.

²⁴ More detail is contained in Allen, Robert C., ‘Progress and poverty in early modern Europe’, Economic History Review, 56 (2003), pp. 403–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁵ The X-axis of the charts (measuring time) are also concertinaed with intervals of a 100 years up to 1700 and fifty years thereafter.

²⁶ Humphries reports that between 8 and 18 per cent of fathers became separated from or abandoned their families (p. 136). She also records that the percentage of missing fathers among subjects born between 1627 and 1799 was 28 per cent by age fourteen compared with an expected mortality rate of fathers of only 17 per cent by this age (p. 65).

²⁷ This approach is termed social control theory and is closely associated with Hirschi, Travis, The causes of delinquency (Berkeley, CA, 1969)Google Scholar.

²⁸ Csikszentmihalkyi, Mihaly and Beattie, O. V., ‘Life themes: a theoretical and empirical exploration of their origin and effects’, Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 19 (1979), pp. 45–63Google Scholar.

²⁹ John Clare, for example, recalled ‘I believe I was not older than 10 when my father took me to receive the scanty rewards of industry.’ In contrast, William Arnold recollected with more precision that he commenced work aged six years and two months (p. 173). Provided such errors are distributed randomly across reported ages, however, the regression results are not necessarily invalidated.

³⁰ The finding that overall starting ages fell is consistent with analysis of family budgets reported in Horrell, Sara and Humphries, Jane, ‘“The exploitation of little children”: child labour and the family economy in the industrial revolution’, Explorations in Economic History, 32 (1995), pp. 485–516CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This article concluded that child participation rates rose during industrialization while children also worked at younger ages. Paternal occupation, however, influenced both measures and a lack of data earlier than 1787 ruled out pre-industrial comparisons.

³¹ The practice of author coded data is illustrated by Allen's classification of regimes as either absolutist or non-absolutist. In this case, the coding scheme is binary (1=absolutist states, 0=other states). The author selects and applies criteria in order to code (classify) the designated variable.

³² CAMSIS is an acronym standing for ‘Cambridge social interaction and stratification’ scale. The scale has a minimum value of 1 and a maximum of 99, with a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 15. Different historical occupations are assigned scores based on a hierarchy of interaction captured by marriage data: see Humphries, Childhood and child labour, p. 89.

³³ The error term in the regression equation captures unobservable factors influencing occupational outcome, including ability.

³⁴ This is a simplified exposition of a complicated estimating technique. A more detailed account is available in Wooldridge, Jeffrey M., Introductory econometrics: a modern approach (4th edn; Mason, OH, 2009), pp. 506–45Google Scholar.