This project will investigate the composition and evolution of British trade flows over the years 1700 to 1899. It will do so by constructing a new and highly detailed database of disaggregated imports and exports by commodity and trading partner at ten-year intervals over two centuries, based on a decadal sampling of British customs records. It will then use the data to study the evolution of comparative advantage and its relationship to the long-run economic growth of Britain and its trading partners.
INTELLECTUAL MERIT The project will assemble an original data set. The customs records have hitherto been used at a highly aggregate level (sectoral groups) and only for selected (infrequent) sample years. They have never been coded electronically. The data will be more detailed and higher frequency, and this will be vital for systematic empirical analysis of trade and growth models by future researchers. The project will confront open questions about mercantilism in the 18th century. The period of world trade before the Pax Britannica remains shrouded in mystery, especially given the dearth of data. This project will enable researchers to see in more detail shifts in the direction, level, and composition of trade flows, and to see how well modern trade theories apply in an age when military power and imperial aspirations were bound up with commerce. The project will confront open questions about the origins of modern economic growth in the 19th century. The Industrial Revolution remains the key event in economic history, yet our understanding is still incomplete. One important and recurring dispute centers on whether the event was localized in a few sectors or a broad advance. Other controversies surround questions of how other countries eventually caught up and surpassed Britain, the role of technology and endowments in that process, and how inter- and intra-industry trade evolved during that transition to eventually shape the world economy of today.
BROADER IMPACTS In 1700 Britain was a heavily agrarian power in a mercantilist era. By 1899 Britain was the world's first industrial economy in an age of globalization. The data to be gathered and the analyses to be undertaken will help researchers better understand the emergence of modern economic growth and the role of trade and globalization in that process. The study of that historical process has an intellectual merit of its own, but the investigators also expect to draw lessons from the past for contemporary challenges for economic policymaking in a new era of globalization. Attacking these long-run development questions is also an important goal for the project. Assembling and coding a 200 year span of data from a consistent source will allow the investigators (and future researchers) to confront key causes and consequences of the Great Divergence between rich and poor nations, and the role of trade and comparative advantage in that process.
