The Hidden Cause of the Industrial Revolution (with Ben Southwood)

Ben Southwood of Works in Progress argues that the Glorious Revolution of the 1680s was a quiet legal revolution that unlocked British growth well before the steam engine. By shifting power to a Parliament of landowners, England began streamlining its tangled, inefficient property rights through thousands of case-by-case acts. This freed up land for investment, enabled the consolidation of fragmented farms, and sparked a boom in privately-built roads, canals, and navigable rivers that created national markets. The conversation explores how these centuries-old lessons about buying off holdouts could inform solutions to today's housing and infrastructure gridlock.