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Dudley, Leonard --- "Explaining the great divergence: medium and message on the Eurasian land mass, 1700 - 1850" [2005] ELECD 105; in Marciano, Alain; Josselin, Jean-Michel (eds), "Law and the State" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005)

Book Title: Law and the State

Editor(s): Marciano, Alain; Josselin, Jean-Michel

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781843768005

Section: Chapter 4

Section Title: Explaining the great divergence: medium and message on the Eurasian land mass, 1700 - 1850

Author(s): Dudley, Leonard

Number of pages: 21

Extract:

4. Explaining the great divergence:
medium and message on the
Eurasian land mass, 1700­1850
Leonard Dudley

1 INTRODUCTION

In 1712, an ironmonger named Thomas Newcomen and a plumber named
John Calley installed a steam-powered engine to pump water from a
coalmine near Dudley Castle in Staffordshire, about 200km northwest of
London. Although to James Watt, some 50 years later, the technology of
their atmospheric steam engine already appeared quite primitive, the
machine was arguably the most important innovation of the past 500 years.
It marked the first use of heat to generate mechanical power (Rolt and
Allen 1977). The machine combined three ideas developed shortly before
by physicists of different nationalities: first, a vacuum used to move a piston
(Otto von Guericke, a German); second, condensed steam to generate a
partial vacuum (Denis Papin, a Frenchman); and third, a separate boiler to
generate steam (Thomas Savery, an Englishman). Yet the two inventors had
no scientific training. Moreover, they had developed their invention in
Dartmouth, a remote port on the southwest coast of England. Both were
devout Baptists, members of a non-conformist religious sect who insisted
that their children be able to read and write.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century, when Newcomen and Calley
began their experiments, average income levels were quite similar across
the Eurasian land mass. Estimates by Maddison (2001) suggest that in
1700, Europe had a per capita GDP of about 870 dollars at 1990 prices.
Average incomes elsewhere at that time were ...