Should-Read: Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda: Adam Smith, Watch Prices, and the Industrial Revolution

Should-Read: Morgan Kelly and Cormac Ó Gráda (2016): Adam Smith, Watch Prices, and the Industrial Revolution: “Watches were the first mass-produced consumer durable…

…and were Adam Smith’s preeminent example of technological progress…. Smith makes the notable claim that watch prices may have fallen by up to 95% over the preceding century…. We look at changes in the reported value of over 3,200 stolen watches from criminal trials in the Old Bailey in London from 1685 to 1810… the real price of watches in nearly all categories falls steadily by 1.3% a year… showing that sustained innovation in the production of a highly complex artifact had already appeared in one important sector of the British economy by the early eighteenth century….

Against the view of a narrowly based Industrial Revolution, our results on watchmaking support the view of a more broadly based advance across many manufacturing sectors proposed by Berg and Hudson (1992) and Temin (1997) , among others…. What distinguishes watches… is that, except for scientific instruments, watches were the most complex artifacts of their time. That is what makes their productivity growth so interesting…. Our results support the view that the roots of the Industrial Revolution stretch back further than the mid-eighteenth century. The beginnings of growth in the seventeenth century are consistent with the findings of Broadberry et al. (2015) on English GDP…. As Bailey and Barker (1969) demonstrate, the origins of watchmaking in Lancashire lie in the area’s tradition of brass making that dates back to the late sixteenth century…