Steam Engine Diffusion in Early Industrial Britain: A New Spatial Analysis and Perspective on Industrialisation Dynamics
ex Dissipating the Steam
[Working Paper]
Did Britain’s Industrial Revolution unfold as a set of independent regional trajectories, or were industrial territories connected through imitation, knowledge diffusion, and sectoral spillovers? This paper addresses this question through the study of the diffusion of steam engines – the paradigmatic general-purpose technology of the period. Based on a Spatial Durbin Model applied to county-level data of engine installations it shows that while the diffusion of Newcomen engines responded mainly to local coal availability and short-range imitation, the more complex Watt & Boulton engines spread largely through cross-county knowledge spillovers carried by mobile technical expertise. In addition, both engines greatly benefitted from sectoral spillovers from the cotton and iron industries. The results suggest that Britain's industrial geography was regionally concentrated but not locally self-contained, with industrial territories connected through imitation, sectoral agglomeration, and the mobility of technical skill.
Keywords: Steam engines; Spatial spillovers; Regional diffusion; British Industrial Revolution
JEL codes: O33, N13, C21
Networks of Change: Infrastructure and the Spread of Steam Power in 19th-Century France
Project in collaboration with Charlotte Le Chapelain, Claude Diebolt and Alexis Litvine
[Working Paper SSRN, BETA, and AFC]
This paper examines how transport infrastructure shaped the diffusion of steam power across French departments between 1840 and 1911. Using a newly constructed annual departmental panel of steam engine stocks, firms, and installed horsepower, we reconstruct regional diffusion trajectories and estimate the causal impact of transport connectivity on mechanization. We combine department and year fixed effects with an instrumental-variable strategy based on successive French railway planning laws to address the endogeneity of railway expansion.The results reveal substantial territorial heterogeneity in the timing and speed of adoption, indicating that industrialization unfolded unevenly across space. Railway expansion exerted a positive and increasingly strong effect on steam adoption from the mid-1860s onward. An additional 100 kilometers of railway is associated with roughly six additional steam engines per 10,000 inhabitants around 1865 and more than nine by 1900. Navigable waterways also promoted adoption, though their role evolved from complementing railways to becoming progressively substituted by them as the rail network matured.To identify the mechanisms underlying these effects, we construct time-varying measures of accessibility to coal markets and engineering expertise. The results indicate that improved access to coal significantly increased steam adoption throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, while access to engineering knowledge became important only in the 1890s as steam technology grew more complex. The findings suggest that the diffusion of general-purpose technologies depended not only on relative prices and local endowments but also on the infrastructures that reduced economic and informational frictions across space.
Keywords: Technological diffusion; Transport infrastructure; Steam power; French industrialisation; Regional inequality
JEL codes: N93 ; N73 ; O33 ; C23