Resumo: Britain had a unique wage and price structure in the eighteenth century, and that structure is a key to explaining the inventions of the industrial revolution.  British wages were very high by international standards, and energy was very cheap.  This configuration led British firms to invent technologies that substituted capital and energy for labour.  High wages also increased the supply of technology by enabling Brits to acquire education and training.  Britain's wage and price structure was the result of the country's success in international trade, and that owed much to mercantilism and imperialism.

Biografia: Bob Allen is Professor of Economic History at Oxford University and a fellow of Nuffield College.  He received his doctorate from Harvard University.  He has written on English agricultural history, international competition in the steel industry, the extinction of whales, and contemporary policies on education.  His articles have won the Cole Prize, the Redlich Prize, and the Explorations Prize.  His books include Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands, 1450-1850 (2009), and Farm to Factory: A Re-interpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (2003), both of which won the Ranki Prize of the Economic History Association, and The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (2009).  Currently, he is studying the global history of wages and prices and pre-industrial living standards around the world.  Bob Allen is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Canada.