Nicholas Crafts

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Nicholas Crafts, a British economist born in Nottingham on the 9th of March 1949, spent his career trying to put numbers on one of the most famous turning points in history. The Industrial Revolution is usually told through steam, factories and fortunes. Crafts wanted to know how much the British economy actually grew, and in which industries. That sounds like a dry question, but the answer reshaped how historians talk about the period. This documentary asks what his measurements showed, how they changed the argument about Britain's place among industrial nations, and what kind of scholar spent decades pursuing them.

  13

• 2. Counting the Revolution

  ›

  In the 1980s, Crafts and a fellow historian named Knick Harley produced a reinterpretation of the British Industrial Revolution that became very influential. Their method was to measure the growth rates of individual industries and of the different sectors of the economy, then use those figures to estimate growth overall.

  The result surprised many readers. Overall growth turned out to be much lower than earlier historians had believed. It was also heavily concentrated in just two industries, cotton and iron.

  A few historians took these figures further than their authors did. They suggested that the phrase "industrial revolution" was no longer appropriate for the period. Crafts himself did not draw that conclusion.

  Most scholars landed somewhere in between. They accepted that growth had been slower and steadier than previously imagined, yet argued that the idea of an industrial revolution still held up. The same decade also gave Crafts a second, broader argument about how Britain compared with the rest of the world.

  567

• 3. Britain in the Race

  ›

  During the 1980s, Crafts argued that Britain looked unusual among industrial economies. Compared with countries that industrialised later, an abnormally high share of the British economy had come to be devoted to industry and to international trade.

  He also argued that the British economy always tended to grow slowly. That claim cut against the picture of an early, dazzling surge followed by decline.

  The late nineteenth century is where the argument bites hardest. Britain was overtaken then by Germany and the United States, and both were larger countries. Crafts held that this did not happen because British performance had slowed down.

  In his reading, the pace of growth had been modest all along. The two rivals simply had more people and more resources to draw on, so passing Britain was a matter of scale rather than of British failure.

  56

• 4. A Wide Field of Inquiry

  ›

  Crafts did not confine himself to one century or one country. His main interests included the British economy over the last 200 years, European economic growth, and historical data on the British economy. He also studied international income distribution, especially in relation to the Human Development Index.

  His audience was wider than academic journals. He produced a substantial body of papers for those journals, for the British government, and for international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund.

  Several titles mark the path. In 1985 came "British Economic Growth during the Industrial Revolution", and in 1987 he wrote the entry "Economic History" for The New Palgrave: A Dictionary of Economics.

  In 1996 he edited, with Gianni Toniolo, Economic Growth in Europe since 1945, published by Cambridge University Press. That volume carried his questions about growth well past the nineteenth century and into the postwar era.

  25

• 5. Life in Universities

  ›

  Crafts began at Brunts Grammar School in Mansfield. He then went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated with a BA in economics in 1970.

  His teaching career opened with a lectureship in economic history at the University of Exeter from 1971 to 1972. From 1974 to 1976 he was a visiting assistant professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley.

  Oxford followed. From 1977 to 1986 he was a fellow and praelector in economics at University College. Then came a year or so of professorships in quick succession: Leeds from 1987 to 1988, and Warwick from 1988 to 1995.

  From 1995 to 2005 he was professor of economic history at the London School of Economics. In 2005 he returned to Warwick, where he held a chair in economics and economic history until 2019.

  His final post was Professor of Economic History at the University of Sussex Business School, which he held from 2019 until his death. In the 2014 Birthday Honours he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire, known as a CBE, for services to economics.

  Crafts died from sepsis on the 6th of October 2023, at the age of 74. His Sussex chair was still his, and the revised picture of the Industrial Revolution remained the work most often tied to his name.

  1234