Calvinism, Huguenots and the Industrial Revolution
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In this paper, we argue that the industrial revolution in 18th century Great Britain had its origins in Calvinism as expressed by/in the 50,000 French Protestant refugees that landed on the shores of England and Ireland in the 16th and 17th centuries. Unlike most theories that are essentially unidimensional (Moykr's " Republic of Letters " and McCloskey's " Bourgeois Dignity "), ours is multidimensional, involving both pull and push factors. The pull factor was the migration, after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, of thousands of Huguenot merchants to England and Ireland. The latter arrived with the intention of plying their trade within a new, expanded network , namely that of late 17th century Britain augmented by what John F. Bosher refers to as the Protestant International, the trade network that resulted from the di-aspora of Huguenots throughout the World. This we argue increased the demand for tradeables which spurred invention and innovation both among Huguenot refugees (push factor) and their descendants as well as in the local, predominantly Calvinist population. While unicausal, this theory provides a structuring framework for the many competing hypotheses of the origins of the industrial revolution, rationalizing them as parts of a greater whole.
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Max Weber introduit l’idée que le système capitaliste de production s’est développé dans les communautés calvinistes du XVII e siècle les rendant plus prospères que les communautés catholiques contemporaines, et ce grâce à l’apport indispensable d’un « esprit de capitalisme » fondé sur une éthique calviniste austère étrangère au catholicisme. Cette théorie demeure un point de référence incontournable auprès des chercheurs depuis bientôt cent ans. L’objet de cet article est de présenter une synthèse des contributions théoriques et empiriques qui ont marqué, surtout au cours des cinq dernières décennies, l’évolution de la recherche sur ce thème. Nous situerons ces contributions dans le courant progressiste de l’évolution de la pensée économique sur ce sujet, afin de mieux apprécier les nouvelles orientations de la recherche dans ce domaine.
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