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What if the Industrial Revolution wasn’t sparked by the steam engine, but by a quiet legal revolution in how England handled property rights? Ben Southwood of Works in Progress argues that the Glorious Revolution of the 1680s unleashed British growth by empowering a Parliament composed of landowners who simplified their own tangled, inefficient property rights. Through thousands of case-by-case acts, they freed up land for investment, consolidated inefficient farm ownership, and enabled a boom in privately built roads, canals, and navigable rivers that created national markets. Along the way, you’ll learn why roads once moved at 1.5 miles per hour, and how these centuries-old lessons about buying off holdouts might solve today’s housing and infrastructure gridlock.
Resources
Ben Southwood on Substack
“The secret cause of the industrial revolution” by Ben Southwood at The Works in Progress Newsletter
Walter Williams on Life, Liberty and Economics
Governing the Commons by Elinor Ostrom (Cambridge University Press 1990)
Joel Mokyr on Econlib
Age of Invention, Anton Howes’ Substack
David Ricardo on Econlib
“Chapter III of The Wealth of Nations: That the division of labor is limited by the extent of the market” by Adam Smith at Adam Smith Works
“Artisanal Skills, Watchmaking, and the Industrial Revolution: Prescot and Beyond” by Neil Cummins and Cormac Ó Gráda in Northern History. 2022
“Graduated Density Zoning” by Donald Shoup in Journal of Planning Education and Research. 2008
“Land Assembly Districts” by Michael Heller and Rick Hills in Harvard Law Review. April 2008.
Kara Dimitruk’s Website
About the Speakers
Russ Roberts is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution. In 2006, he founded the award-winning weekly podcast EconTalk, which has featured guests including Milton Friedman, Martha Nussbaum, Christopher Hitchens, Agnes Callard, Bill James, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Amor Towles, and Emily Oster. All 875+ episodes remain available free of charge at EconTalk.org and reach an audience of more than 125,000 listeners in 200 countries.
Ben Southwood is a founding editor of Works in Progress. He has been head of research at Create Streets, head of housing at Policy Exchange, part of three successful Emergent Ventures grants, and worked as a public sector consultant for KPMG. He edited the Adam Smith Institute’s research for almost five years, producing dozens of impactful reports, including Beyond the Call of Duty: Why we should abolish Stamp Duty Land Tax and Patently Good: A Defence of Intellectual Property, and writing several of his own, including the award-winning research paper Is the rate of scientific progress slowing down? co-authored with Dr. Tyler Cowen.