29 McCloskey (2010).
30 Michalopoulos and Xue (2017).
31 Rubin (2018) considers interactions between religion and political institutions.
32 Greif (1994, 2006); Alesina and Giuliano (2010); Platteau (2014); Rubin (2018).
33 Alesina and Giuliano (2010).
34 Bryson (2016).
35 Mokyr (2009, 2017).
36 The concept of the Industrious Revolution is relevant here. See de Vries (2008).
37 Mokyr (2017).
38 According to Bates (2014), p. 439, Africa's problem was a lack of verification and diffusion of knowledge, due to limited literacy and a desire to keep ideas ‘secret’.
39 McCloskey (2010, 2011, 2017).
40 Austin (2016), p. 321; Mandala (1984).
41 Platteau (2014).
42 Platteau (2014); Wiesner-Hanks (2015), pp. 253‒4.
43 Ibid, p. 268.
44 Ibid, pp. 66‒9.
45 Ibid, p. 69.
46 McClintock (1995), pp. 22‒7.
47 Williams (1994); Eltis and Engerman (2000); Fatah-Black and van Rossum (2014); Akyeampong et al. (2014); Beckert (2015).
48 Allen (2001, 2009, 2014). See Scheidel (2010) for ancient economies.
49 Stephenson (2018); Allen (2018).
50 See e.g. Geloso (2018). Also Gragnolati, Moschella and Pugliese (2011).
51 Humphries (2013); Humphries and Schneider (2018).
52 Acemoglu (2002) contains a model which shows that where the elasticity of substitution between factors of production is low, Allen's intuition is correct. Otherwise, technologies may focus more on the abundant rather than the scarce factors of production, as Humphries (2013) argues was the case in the cotton industry.
53 See e.g. Rodrik (1998) and Hausmann, Rodriguez and Wagner (2006). Also Broadberry and Wallis (2017).
54 See Jones (1988) on Asia, Ober (2015) on Greece, Fouquet and Broadberry (2015) on Italy and de Vries and van der Woude (1997) on Holland. More generally, Mokyr (1990) and Fara (2010).
55 Allen (2001); Broadberry (2016), pp. 35‒6.
56 Inikori (2014).
57 Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2002).
58 Pomeranz (2012) and Parthasarathi (1998) argue that China and India (respectively) were on a par with Europe until around 1800. Others date the divergence earlier: Ma (2016), p. 189; Broadberry (2016), p. 35.
59 Bertola and Ocampo (2016), p. 123.
60 Ashraf and Galor (2011).
61 Clark (2007) argues that the survival rate (the evolutionary advantage) was greatest for families who educated their children, leading to a gradual rise in the proportion of the population that was educated.
62 For a technical exposition of this unified growth theory, see Galor and Weil (2000); Galor (2011).
63 Galor and Mountford (2008).
64 For a summary of the various economic factors affecting fertility, including declining infant mortality and child labour, expanding capital markets, increasing demand for skills and a declining gender wage gap, see Galor (2005).
65 For example, it doesn't receive a single mention in Galor (2005). Cinnirella, Klemp and Weisdorf (2017) find some limited evidence of birth control in use, albeit clearly not to modern standards.
66 Rodgers (2018).
67 UNFPA (2017).
68 Diamond (1999); Campbell (2016).
69 Stern (2006).
70 Raworth (2018).
71 Hawken (2017).
72 Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas (2011).
73 Agarwal (1992): 120.
74 Nelson and Power (2018).
75 On social provisioning, see Nelson (1993) and Power (2004). On social reproduction, see Rai, Hoskyns and Thomas (2011).
76 Coyle (2014).
77 Bjørnholt and McKay (2014); Berik (2018).
78 Agarwal (1992): 150.
79 Habtezion (2013), pp. 2‒3.
80 Akyeampong et al. (2014), p. 7.
81 Akyeampong et al. (2014), pp. 14‒20.
82 Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson (2002); Engerman and Sokoloff (2002).
83 Steckel and Prince (2001).
84 This body of research is summarized, with references, in Akyeampong et al. (2014), pp. 15‒20.
85 Ibid., p. 19. Also see Bates (2014), p. 437.
86 Akyeampong et al. (2014), p. 20.
87 As Mokyr (2006) writes: ‘[t]hroughout history, the wealth resulting from economic growth has tended to attract predators and parasites the way jam attracts houseflies.’
88 Acemoglu and Robinson (2000).
89 Also see Parente and Prescott (1999).
90 Mokyr (2006); Mokyr and Nye (2007): 67‒8.
91 Elbaum and Lazonick (1984); Mokyr and Nye (2007); Glaeser et al. (2004).
2
Uncensored: The Secret Recipe of Economic Success
In 1995, in Beijing, some fifty years after its initial formation, the United Nations made a declaration that was unanimously adopted by 189 countries. It stated that they were ‘convinced’ that the ‘[e]radication of poverty based on sustained economic growth, social development, environmental protection and social justice requires the involvement of women in economic and social development, equal opportunities and the full and equal participation of women and men as agents and beneficiaries of people-centred sustainable development’. In 2012, the World Bank dedicated its annual development report to the same topic, noting that gender equality is not only ‘a core development objective in its own right’ but that ‘greater gender equality is also smart economics’.1 The idea that gender equality is ‘good for growth’ is now central to the international development agenda.
However, within the ivory towers that house ‘expert’ economic growth theorists, gender hardly features. And when economic historians debate between themselves how precisely the West grew rich, they have a tendency to focus on people like Isaac Newton, James Watt, Isambard Kingdom Brunel and Richard Arkwright, all of whom are men. It's as if we could have got to where we are today without any women at all. Women's freedom only seems to enter the story as a by-product of economic prosperity.2
Where gender is taken seriously by economists, there is in fact little in the way of agreement. There are those who argue that gender equality aids growth, but there are also those who argue the very opposite: that economic growth has been built on the exploitation of women.3 The empirical evidence has not always helped to resolve the debate.4 Even World Bank researchers have sometimes expressed difficulty with finding evidence of a link between gender equality and growth.5
In this chapter, I will consider the whole wealth of evidence from history. After defining freedom, I will then take a short global tour, highlighting the difference between women's freedom in the West and ‘the rest’ on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. From investment and education to entrepreneurship and democracy, I will then identify the various channels through which women's (relative) freedom in the West supported growth, no more so than in Britain.
Women are too often seen as passive beneficiaries of economic growth, as the people who should be forever thankful to the many male inventors and industrialists of the past for creating the riches that enabled women's rights to flourish. We imagine that, by targeting economic growth, everything else will follow. As we will see, it's time to look at things the other way around. It's time to see women as active creators, not passive beneficiaries. Indeed, as we will see in chapter 3, whilst women's freedom creates growth, growth doesn't always pay women back in return. Freedom comes first, not last.
Que Sera, Sera
I admit it. I am a control freak. If there is one thing I cannot bear, it is not having control. In her famous song, Doris Day recalls asking her mother ‘What will I be?’ Seemingly superficial but also profound, the answer has gone down in history: que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be. The notion that our future is predetermined, a mere produ
ct of fate, is not something that particularly appeals to me. We all know that being happy is not just about having enough money to live a comfortable life; it is also about feeling in control of your life. After all, there were plenty of people living in times gone by who managed to find happiness in conditions which, by today's standards, would seem pretty shabby, without, for example, the convenience of an indoor toilet. Amongst the historic aristocratic elites who were, by contrast, relatively well endowed, there were plenty of women who, admired for their exquisite silk gowns and with tea and cake on tap, felt like little more than caged birds. Historic novels contain a constant theme of the wealthy but caged woman, living an affluent life but one over which she has no control and one in which the slightest social transgression could lead her husband to commit her to a mental asylum. These women wanted for nothing except, that is, for that one vital ingredient: control over their own lives.
However, when economists measure the success of an economy, they look at what the average person can afford to buy; if this is increasing over time, they are judged to be experiencing improvement. That was, at least, until Amartya Sen radically proposed that development was not about money; it was about freedom.6 According to Sen, economic development is a process in which people gain the ability to take charge of their lives. Control is an often overlooked difference between a modern western economy and many poorer countries in the world today and, of course, a key difference between today's Europe and that of the feudal Dark Ages, when we ‘serfs’ were under the control of local lords. Sen argues that poverty is often characterized not only by a lack of money but also by coercive relationships, a lack of free choice and political rights, and exclusion from economic opportunities and protections.
Sen's thoughts on freedom cut through a major debate amongst philosophers. Isaiah Berlin famously distinguished between negative and positive freedoms. Negative freedom concerns freedom from the interference of others. Positive freedom concerns freedom to go out and do things; it requires not only non-interference but also the capabilities needed to do something with one's life.7 Sen's notion of freedom ‒ and his related ‘capability approach’ (developed in conjunction with Martha Nussbaum8) ‒ relates closely to two other concepts: agency and empowerment. The World Bank defines agency as ‘the capacity to make decisions about one's own life and act on them to achieve a desired outcome, free of violence, retribution, or fear’. Empowerment is a broader concept, defined by the World Bank as ‘the expansion of assets and capabilities of poor people to participate in, negotiate with, influence, control, and hold accountable institutions that affect their lives’. Empowerment can be thought of as encapsulating agency, plus a little bit more: ‘as control over resources, as self-determination, and as the ability to generate change’.9 In other words, empowerment equals resources, agency and success in bringing about change.10
Now when economists more generally discuss freedom, they tend to focus on the market. When academics employ the term, they instead focus on things like free speech and free inquiry. However, freedom for merchants, entrepreneurs and the intellectual elite wasn't the only thing that mattered in the story of how the West grew rich. Neither, as Sen knew, should we confine ourselves to thinking about freedom in the context of the public sphere, in the market, in the political forum or in intellectual debates. Freedom for women was just as important, and that requires us to begin with life in the privacy of the home.
Women's Freedom Across the Globe: An (All Too Brief) Historic Tour
In their recent book, Jan Luiten van Zanden, Auke Rijpma and Jan Kok11 argue that female agency is central to understanding how the West grew rich. To see if that's truly the case, we need to consider the degree to which women were free in the West compared with other parts of the globe, especially given that those western freedoms were far from where they are today. Gender inequality indices tend to measure things like labour market participation, wage gaps and the proportion of women in parliament, but economic historians Sarah Carmichael, Alexandra de Pleijt and Jan Luiten van Zanden have designed an index which both goes back much further in time and measures the deeper roots of gender inequality: practices within families.12 They have christened it the ‘female friendliness’ index, a measure of how ‘female friendly’ family practices are. This helps to capture the extent to which the different family norms that exist in different parts of the world help to support (or not) female agency. Using their index, they make a connection between the decline of many of the world's oldest civilizations in the East and the rise of the West. Their findings suggest:
that the ‘reversal of fortune’ which happened in EurAsia between 1500 and 2000 was not only related to colonial institutions …, or to the long-term effects of hierarchical institutions emanating from the process of ancient state formation following the Neolithic Revolution …, but that there is also a gender-dimension to this story: growth occurred after 1500 in particular in those parts of EurAsia that had relatively female friendly institutions.13
The subjugation of women is, they argue, at the heart of why many of the world's first civilizations – in the Middle East and Asia ‒ were unable to sustain economic growth and eventually went into relative decline.
Whilst for millennia Europe had been on the back foot in the global economic race, in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution it developed a secret weapon: women's freedom. The position of women in society was one of the things that most distinguished Europe, especially in the north-west, from other parts of the world. Life for women was, to say the least, far from perfect. However, women had significantly greater freedoms in this part of the world than they did elsewhere and indeed compared with many poor countries today.14 To see the extent of these greater freedoms, we need to begin with family life, for as Monica Das Gupta notes ‘[k]inship systems profoundly influence our values and social constructs in ways of which we are usually not conscious.’15 Whilst for Engels, the famous compatriot of Karl Marx, the oppression of women (like the oppression of the working class) is rooted in private property, historically invested in men,16 Claude Lévi-Strauss has long argued that the oppression of women is rooted in kinship systems – in society, particularly in the way individuals form families or clans.17
Although there was (and still is) significant heterogeneity in family systems across the world, there were also some regional commonalities that allow us to compare the daily lives of everyday women in different parts of the world, adding flesh to the bones of the female friendliness index.18 As we take our tour, there are certain things to watch out for: property, marital consent and attitudes to sexual relations. Engels's work would suggest that we keep our eyes open to rights over property. Lévi-Strauss's work suggests that women may themselves be treated as property, signs of which would include women being given as gifts, tribute or as exchanges between families, in the form of an arranged marriage, rather than having full rights over themselves. Finally, we should be alert to the ways in which family life values women. If it's simply for her body and fertility, it's likely that a woman's sexual honour will be closely guarded and she will therefore have very little freedom.
Let's begin by comparing Europe with Asia, at the start of the family life cycle, which is with marriage. Whilst the consent of the bride became a necessity for marriage in Europe during the Middle Ages,19 elsewhere individual consent took a back-seat role: ‘In both India and China, child or infant marriages were common’ and ‘parental consent (at least for the woman) was a prerequisite until the 1950s, if not still.’20 Once married, northern European women tended to reside in their own homes, independently of their parents and parents-in-law, but in Asia they were more commonly found living in the homes of their parents-in-law, where they had limited agency. Indeed, ‘the traditional position of the daughter-in-law in China and India is uniformly described as pitiful.’21 As Das Gupta notes:
Women are at the bottom of two hierarchies: the gender hierarchy as well as the age hierarchy. A young bride enters her husb
and's family as a marginal person with little autonomy. Layers of people are above her in the decision-making hierarchy: not only the men of the household, but also the women who are senior to her. By contrast in the North European stem family, women are subservient to their husbands, but not to anyone else in the household. The relative absence of an age hierarchy means that the woman has considerable autonomy in the running of the household.22
Polygamy – the practice of multiple wives – was much more common in Asia than in Europe, as was purdah, the seclusion of women. The inheritance practices of European families certainly favoured men, but European widows could inherit their husband's property, and, in the event that a parent died without a son, a daughter was able to inherit. By contrast, ‘[i]n China, South Korea, and Northwest India, the logic of patrilineality is very rigid.’ Rather than allowing a daughter to inherit, a father would adopt a son or ‘take another wife or concubine’ in order to produce one.23 According to Bina Agarwal, the historic concentration of property ‒ in the form of land ‒ in male hands is a key driver of the gender gap.24 A less egalitarian gender distribution of property has been shown to be bad for economic prosperity, restricting women's access to collateral to start new businesses, and lowering wages.25
In the Middle East, the position of women was ‘relatively strong’ compared with India and China. In particular, women were able to own property and were entitled to a (half) share of inheritance, and marriage did not involve a complete transfer into a different kinship group, meaning that ‘a woman could always count on the protection of her father and brothers’. However, there was a downside: male members of her family carefully guarded her sexual honour, which was seen as key to overall family honour. Transgressions could be severely punished.26 Although in property terms, Middle Eastern women were in a stronger position than many women in Asia, and also compared with many married women in Europe (though less so single women and widows), in other aspects of life they ‘possessed very little autonomy’,27 not only in terms of more severe sanctions for sexual transgressions but also in terms of arranged marriages (often to older men) and the very strict separation of men and women. The employment rates of women in the Middle East have, as a result, historically been some of the lowest in the world. Women's engagement with the market was almost always discouraged as it risked sexual transgression and was a sign of severe poverty – a sign of desperation. In Europe, by contrast, particularly in the north-west, not only was marriage more consensual, but women were commonly active in the market.28 Whilst they were often excluded from producing or selling certain types of goods, particularly where guilds were strong, there were still opportunities for employment and engagement with the marketplace, albeit not always the best ones.29 Laurence Fontaine points to the way in which, where the law was flexible enough, women's legal autonomy was enhanced as market opportunities presented themselves, and especially where local authorities wanted to avoid the alternative: the welfare costs of looking after the poor.30 Indeed, as Martha Howell argues, the nuclear family – dominant in the north-west of Europe ‒ often necessitated a wife's involvement in the family business compared with more extended family systems.31
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