Spotty but Connected: Spatial Spillovers and the Geography of Steam in Early Industrial Britain
ex Dissipating the Steam
[Working Paper]
This article investigates the diffusion of steam engines during the British Industrial Revolution by analysing spatial interdependencies across counties. While the existing literature has identified factor endowments–above all coal–as the primary driver of territorial adoption, it has largely overlooked the mechanisms of imitation, knowledge spillovers, and agglomeration externalities that the economics of innovation literature identifies as central to technology diffusion. Utilising an updated version of Kanefsky and Robey's database and employing spatial econometric techniques, this study demonstrates that adoption was influenced not only by local endowments but also by spillovers from neighbouring regions. The results indicate the presence of significant clustering of steam engines, short-range imitation effects, and sectoral spillovers from iron and cotton, together with knowledge diffusion that played a particularly relevant role in the adoption of Watt & Boulton engines. These findings indicate that the process of regional industrialisation was not merely a series of distinct and unrelated trajectories, but rather a cumulative and interconnected phenomenon: the 'spotty' geography of industrialisation identified by Pollard was not the product of independent local factors alone, but was also shaped by reinforcing feedbacks between territories. By incorporating spatial dependence into the analysis, the study provides quantitative evidence of how proximity, agglomeration, and cross-regional linkages conditioned the geography of early industrialisation in Britain.
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