Abstract(s)
During the Industrial Revolution, did population growth stimulate innovation, or did
causality run primarily from innovation to growth? Previous research fails to explain why
between 1700 and 1850: (i) most innovation originated in three clusters of cities in
Britain, northern France, and the USA; (ii) the rate of urbanization in these innovating
regions was greater than it was elsewhere; (iii) the most important innovations involved
cooperation between co-inventors with different areas of specialization. The key, we
suggest, was the existence, for the first time in history, of rapidly expanding networks of
people able to write and speak standardized languages. Metcalfe’s (2013) Law states that
the value of a network grows as the square of the number of its users. We find that the
presence in 1700 of a monolingual dictionary describing a language which considerable
numbers of people were able to read and speak was significant in determining a city’s
subsequent innovation. In turn, innovation – especially cooperative innovation – was
significant in explaining a city’s population growth.