Yet by 1400, Europe had partly switched to a labour-saving ‘industrial’ trajectory instead, and the pattern was repeated after the cold and brutal seventeenth century, when famine, plague and war once more reduced the European population: in 1692–4, perhaps 15 per cent of all French people starved to death. Unlike Mesopotamia, Egypt, India, Mexico, Peru, China and Rome, early modern Europe became capital-intensive, not labour-intensive. That capital was used to get work out of animals, rivers and breezes, rather than people. Europe was, in Joel Mokyr’s words, ‘the first society to build an
...more
