Showing posts with label Hoppit. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hoppit. Show all posts

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Property rights and the Industrial Revolution

I have discussed here a few times (herehere and here, for example; last one by Cesaratto) the role of institutions in the process of economic development. Within the mainstream the dominant view is that property rights are the essential institution for promoting growth. I only now came across the excellent paper by Julian Hoppit.* He says:
"Such views of the interrelated importance of property and the rule of law have led to major interpretations of the interplay of Britain’s economic, social and political histories, including that secure property rights were a vital foundation for the first industrial revolution. Yet property was often heavily taxed, frequently expropriated and, exceptionally, eradicated through redefinition. Such vulnerabilities did not diminish after the Glorious Revolution, they increased—mainly because parliament now met annually, had greater sovereign power than earlier monarchs and legislated prolifically regarding property. After 1688, Britain’s economic precocity rested less on the enhanced ‘security’ of property in any general sense of the word, much more on respect for parliament’s authority and its willingness to allow property to be alienated, most usually by particular interests claiming to act for the public or wider good. At times this required the reversal of commitments made only a generation earlier, raising doubts about central government’s credibility. Taken together, these uncertainties over property rights were sufficient for some to question whether property had a sound theoretical basis at all.
...
The scale of that expropriation was such, and the consequences so profound, as to undermine an important thesis that property rights became more secure after the Glorious Revolution, developed in a notable essay by Douglass North and Barry Weingast and now conventional amongst some ‘new institutional economists’."
Hoppit looks at the extensive expropriations in financial markets, after the South Sea Bubble, in heritable jurisdictions (offices granted by the Crown), and in the property of slaves. Very little is left of the new institutional argument.

* Julian Hoppit in "Compulsion, Compensation and Property Rights in Britain, 1688-1833," Past and Present, No. 210, Feb. 2011 (here; subscription required).

Was Bob Heilbroner a leftist?

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