5 questions for Anton Howes on the Royal Society of Arts and British economic development | American Enterprise Institute

The Royal

Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce was an

important institution that helped transform Great Britain from a backwater in

1500 to the technological leader of the world by 1850. Recently, I spoke with

Anton Howes on Political Economy about the history of this organization and

what we can learn from this time period to encourage more innovation today.

Anton is the historian-in-residence at the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce. He is the author of the recently released authorized history “Arts and Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation.”

Below is an abbreviated transcript of our conversation. You can read our full discussion here. You can also subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher, or download the podcast on Ricochet.

Pethokoukis:

You have written that the British Isles in the 16th century were a backwater,

peripheral to European technological development. And yet, by the middle of the

19thcentury, the United Kingdom was

leading the entire world in technology. How

and when did that happen?

Howes:

That really is the question. It’s the first sustained economic growth that the

world had seen. The main reason it happens is that Brits in particular become

especially good at developing the kinds of institutions that spread innovation

further. What innovators managed to do in Britain, I think quite uniquely, was

consistently get victories in creating the sorts of institutions, laws, and

policies that would support innovation in general.

You

see this spread of an improving mentality from inventor to inventor. And at the

same time, there’s a sort of public spiritedness, in that they are not just

inventing for their own private gain (keeping secrets and so on), but also

actively trying to spread innovation further — spreading that mentality to

other people much as possible.

The other interesting thing is the

timing. By 1700, Britain seems to have this reputation for inventiveness and

improvement. And so I think we really need to look at the period before the

Industrial Revolution, or even 1660. We need to say, “Well, how is it that

the Royal Society could emerge in the first place?” I think the crucial century

that we really need to focus on is really 1550 to 1650. Clearly that’s when

something happens that’s quite special.

Can you connect the following dots, explaining how each led to the

next? I have Francis Bacon, then the

Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, and then the subject

of your book: the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and

Commerce.

Bacon systematizes a way of

thinking about the world. He’s a sort of lightning rod for the sorts of people

who are saying, “Let’s look at all of the existing knowledge that we

currently have and question everything, and we’ll rebuild what we currently

know from the ground up.”

And the Royal Society of London is

really set up by a bunch of people who essentially have been inspired by that

Baconian call. The Royal Society focused primarily on what we today would call

science; that is, discovery of new laws. By the 1750s, there’s this perceived need

for a specific institution that takes the extra step of applying this expanding

knowledge. And that’s where the Society of Arts fits in. Essentially, it’s

about application of knowledge.

What did the Royal Society for the

Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce see as its mission at the

beginning? How did it go about that mission?

Anything

that could be for the public good was up for grabs — from tackling problems

that could have technological solutions to opening a new trade route.

They

tried to fill in the gaps of what wasn’t already being invented. For instance,

they very quickly decided that they wouldn’t accept patented inventions.

Patents in those days were extremely expensive and suggested that there was

already an incentive to invent that thing. So they focused on the sort of

things that wouldn’t otherwise be patented — what was less profitable, but

still useful. Safety improvements for workers, consumer safety improvements — things

that maybe couldn’t be covered by the patent system, but were  still innovations, like signaling systems for

the Navy. They’d give a whole bunch of prizes for that sort of thing.

The

role of the Society sort of changed from kind of a prize-awarding organization

to being a place where reformers across society had a forum to promote those

reforms in a variety of sectors. And that evolution leads to the Great

Exhibition in 1851. How?

Instead

of using prizes all the time, they became more of a platform for the diffusion

of knowledge. Particularly when it came to combining existing specializations —

they started to see themselves as a platform for bridging specialties.

Since

about 1798, France held national exhibitions of industry where you could put in

one room all of the manufactures from throughout the country. Putting

everything physically in the same space allowed manufacturers to learn from one

another much more rapidly and also exposed consumers to what they didn’t already

know about — and didn’t know they wanted.

Eventually

this leads to the Great Exhibition of 1851, the pinnacle of British industrial

leadership in the world. Instead of just having these national exhibitions, they

have an international exhibition, which would also promote free trade. It seems

as though with every international exhibition, there was more and more

international cooperation and lowering of tariffs. You also get a lot of the

international standardization movements coming out of it. So these exhibitions became

these engines of international cooperation as well as of free trade.

What

advice would you give policymakers — whether in London or Washington — to

encourage a more innovative society?

I suggest doing the sort of thing that the French government did in the 1830s: purchasing patents and then releasing them to the public. Some work by Michael Kremer suggested a clever way of doing this: using auctions to discover the prices of those patents. Then the government could release the more valuable patents which are bottlenecks to technological progress, which is very common. For example, 3D printing has been around since the 1980s, but it’s only flourished as a sector since the mid-2000s because that’s when all the patents started to expire.

I’m not suggesting changing the patent system. That’s an extremely difficult thing to do. But you can supplement it by having this policy of patent buyouts.