The aim of this essay is to investigate the pattern of the English economic growth during the second and the third quarters of the eighteenth century. It has been urged that the sustained growth of the English economy started in 1740's. (Habakkuk and Deane). Can we accept this argument? Apparently the argument depends upon the aggregate indices of the national economy, and we can't find any remarkable change in the growth of per capita indices in the 1740's. In other words, from 1730's to 1770's, as in the later sixteenth century, the growth of the scale of the whole national economy was swallowed with the population increase. If the term of 'economic growth' means essentially the increase of per catita national income, we must put the starting-point in the late 1770's. But, another problem rises from this argument. Why could the growth of the eighteenth century bring about the Industrial Revolution while the later sixteenth-century growth poured into the 'crisis of the seventeenth century'? In this paper, I tried to show one of the answere to this question i.e. the quantitative one. One of the most conspicuous differrences between the two periods, is this in the eighteenth century there was no absolute stagnation of the average income and that the domestic demand was steadily increased.
View full abstract