OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
This paper studies technology adoption and factory location in England during the Industrial Revolution. First, we document a negative relationship between industrialization in the 19th century and pre-industrial economic activities. Second, we show that while city-level self-governing institutions promoted early economic growth, these cities failed to adopt the new industrial technologies during the 19th century. We argue that because local self-governance led to the development of representative institutions, these facilitated collective action and enabled workers threatened by labour mechanization to resist technology adoption. Higher resistance to technology adoption, in turn, resulted in the relocation of economic activities away from traditional centres of production.
