Huge! I even understands parts of it!

In the middle ages people endowed chantries and (idiots) Oxford colleges in the perfectly rational belief that they were laying up their treasure in Heaven

Cathedrals as Banks?

Indeed you are right!

That reminds me, when I was in London the BM did an exhibit, in honour of the debate over the coming Euro (the death of the European currencies was the turn of the year a few weeks later), on the history of currency. How it went from personal notes written to bankers to pay such and such to so and so, to individual banks issuing their own (they had examples with all the sweet little pictures they all used to make theirs distinctive) to putting the Queen on her first notes. Anyway, there was a bit of overlap with some of that in that exhibition. It was really interesting. I kept all my flyers.

1) Timescale: can there be evolutionary changes in just a few hundred years? I really doubt it.

2) Timing: the date of the start of the industrial revolution has been getting earlier and earlier. This guy has it at about 1800, which is very late. Agricultural improvement, which generated the 8 per cent rate of capital formation identified by Rostow as a precondition for take-off into sustained growth, had been in train for nearly a century by then, as had modern ironworking (Darby at Coalbrookdale 1709). Mining had been improved enormously by steam powered pumps in the early18thC, and some would make a case for there having been a “mini industrial revolution” under Elizabeth. Like the Renaissance, it just keeps getting earlier. All of which goes to show that the term “industrial revolution”, itself an invention of the early 20th century, is of less use when describing late 18thC advances in productivity in the textile, metalworking and ceramics industries than the more accurate term people used at the time, “the machine system”.

3) Culture: difficult to believe that England lacked a culture of saving until 1800. There’s lots of evidence to the contrary. In the middle ages people endowed chantries and (idiots) Oxford colleges in the perfectly rational belief that they were laying up their treasure in Heaven. Not what our contemporary academic would call saving, but perfectly rational to them at the time. Incidentally, the evidence on how people reacted to having been thinned out by the Black Death varies. There was some increase in productivity per head as marginal land was taken out of production, but the people who were left weren’t significantly more productive than they’d been before. There was some downward pressure on land rents, which acted as an incentive to landlords to enclose the land, get rid of the tenants and put it all out to less labour-intensive sheep – which didn’t improve the lot of the tenants one bit. Those who could, saved or spent, but there were two major longstanding difficulties, shortage of things to save and shortages of media through which to save. These shortages were addressed in two ways a) The amount of capital in private hands was greatly increased by the privatisation of Church lands during the Reformation. This more or less coincided with the first sustained period of price inflation anyone had ever seen as large amounts of silver entered the European economy from Peru and as government expanded its operations and as ever caused inflation. The effect was to accelerate investment in agriculture, with more enclosures and more sheep, (now the Church had lost its wealth the landless former tenants really were on their own – see Elizabethan Poor Laws). They also did what the English have done ever since, the period 1575-1625 being identified by WG Hoskins as a golden age of home improvement. While the 17thC wasn’t the best century for economic growth – Charles I was a terrible dirigiste, the Civil War just destroyed capital – by its end investment was beginning to find its way into the transport infrastructure and new ways of farming. As these took hold over following century, with canals in the latter half creating national markets for bulk goods, capital formation had reached the necessary level – a long time before this historian chap detects any change in “culture”.

b) The ways in which people could save changed too during the 18thC. With government needing to finance wars and the construction of the Royal Navy, government loans offered a new way to make money by shifting paper, as did the new marine insurance industry. Commercial investment through joint stock companies became possible, and for those who enjoyed a gamble were always the money-pits of the North American colonies in which to invest. Poor people could save too - agricultural improvement gradually generated enough of a surplus to permit, not just the purchase of modest luxuries, but also the formation of new fortunes as new fodder crops enabled farmers to over-winter far more livestock.

I really don’t see what evolution’s got to do with the industrial revolution, and the cultural argument’s pretty thin – fortunes have always been built up and then dissipated, it’s a staple tale from the Prodigal Son through to Thomas Mann. The rise of Methodism – the first sect to allow people to choose just how much religion they were willing to pay for – could be said to have been part of a change of culture, but you didn’t have to be a Methodist to be careful with money.

I’ve only written at this length because the poor bloke who’s written this book must be squirming at the way it’s been misreported. That’s what happens when colleges hire PR people to “raise their profile”. Poor sod.

Looking at Schama’s script, I’d say that appearing on TV takes even less energy than watching it. Golly that chap likes himself. An enduring passion, as it were.