Stone Inequality & Social Policy Seminar: James Robinson

The Breakdown of the English Society of Orders: The Role of the Industrial Revolution

James Robinson, The Reverend Dr. Richard L. Pearson Professor of Global Conflict Studies and University Professor, University of Chicago; Institute Director, The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts

Abstract: We study the role of the English Industrial Revolution in promoting social mobility and ending the society of orders: one based on rigid social categories and regulated by ascriptive inherited characteristics. We combine two new datasets on individual wealth holdings before and after the Industrial Revolution. Our main finding is that noble and gentry titles and inherited surnames explain significantly less of the variation in wealth after the Industrial Revolution. Moreover, these declines are larger in the parts of England most impacted by the Revolution. We also explore the extent to which different characteristics predict being rich finding that the explanatory power of having an occupational last name disappears after the Industrial Revolution while people with Irish names do worse, particularly in areas relatively influenced by the Revolution. We then study a key facet of this increased social mobility - geographical mobility. We show that people with last names that were more mobile tended to be in the north and working in manufacturing. Moreover, areas that experienced greater outward mobility were those that were; more urbanized; less agrarian; had institutionalized markets; initially more nobles and gentry; were more politically competitive and had fewer Catholics.

James Robinson is an economist and political scientist who has conducted influential research in the field of political and economic development and the relationships between political power and institutions and prosperity. His work explores the underlying causes of economic and political divergence both historically and today and uses both the mathematical and quantitative methods of economics along with the case study, qualitative and fieldwork methodologies used in other social sciences.

Robinson has a particular interest in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and is a Fellow at the Institute of African Studies at the University of Nigeria at Nsukka. He taught a summer school at the University of the Andes in Bogotá between 1994 and 2022. He has conducted fieldwork and collected data in Bolivia, Colombia, Haiti, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. He has published three books co-authored with Daron Acemoglu, an Institute Professor of Economics at MIT. The first, Economic Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, proposed a theory of the emergence of and stability of democracy and dictatorship. Their second book, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (translated into 41 languages since its publication in 2012), pulled together much of their joint research on comparative development and proposed a theory of why some countries have flourished economically while others have fallen into poverty. Their most recent book, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty, examines the incessant and inevitable struggle between states and society, and gives an account of the deep historical processes that have shaped the modern world.

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