Short answers, pulled from the story.
Robert Carson Allen, born on the 10th of January 1947 in Salem, Massachusetts, is Professor of Economic History at New York University Abu Dhabi. He is best known for his high-wage theory of the British Industrial Revolution, his concept of 'Engels' pause,' and his comparative research on global wage levels and living standards from the 17th to 19th centuries.
Allen argues that Britain's industrial takeoff was driven by a combination of relatively high wages and cheap, abundant coal. This price environment gave manufacturers strong incentives to invest in labor-saving, coal-burning machinery such as the steam engine and spinning jenny, making mechanization economically rational in Britain in a way it was not elsewhere.
Engels' pause refers to the period from approximately 1790 to 1840 when British working-class real wages stagnated even as output per capita grew rapidly during the Industrial Revolution. Bob Allen coined the term, naming it after Friedrich Engels, who documented the harsh conditions of industrial workers during that era.
Published in 1992, Enclosure and the Yeoman argued that most gains in English agricultural productivity came before the classic age of 18th-century enclosure, driven by small-scale yeoman farmers. Allen also reversed the standard causal story, contending that urban and industrial growth stimulated agricultural change rather than agricultural revolution enabling industrialization.
Allen was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1994 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 2003. He received the Ranki Prize of the Economic History Association for his 1992 and 2003 books, the Arthur H. Cole Prize for the 1979-1980 period, and the Explorations Prize for the 2001-2003 and 2009 periods.
Farm to Factory (2003) argued that Soviet central planning was economically effective at achieving industrialization, up to a point, by shifting millions of workers from agriculture to heavy industry. Allen challenged earlier assessments by suggesting this forced mobilization of resources produced genuine industrial output, even though it came at great human cost and proved unsustainable in the long run.