Navigation Acts, the first of which was passed in 1651, and
they remained in force with alternations for the next two
hundred years. The aim of these acts was to facilitate
England’s monopolization of international trade—though
crucially this was monopolization not by the state but by the
private sector. The basic principle was that English trade
should be carried in English ships. The acts made it illegal
for foreign ships to transport goods from outside Europe to
England or its colonies, and it was similarly illegal for third-
party countries’ ships to ship goods from a country
elsewhere in Europe to England. This advantage for
English traders and manufacturers naturally increased their
profits and may have further encouraged innovation in
these new and highly profitable activities.
By 1760 the combination of all these factors—improved
and new property rights, improved infrastructure, a changed
fiscal regime, greater access to finance, and aggressive
protection of traders and manufacturers—was beginning to
have an effect. After this date, there was a jump in the
number of patented inventions, and the great flowering of
technological change that was to be at the heart of the
Industrial Revolution began to be evident. Innovations took
place on many fronts, reflecting the improved institutional
environment. One crucial area was power, most famously
the transformations in the use of the steam engine that
were a result of James Watt’s ideas in the 1760s.
Watt’s initial breakthrough was to introduce a separate
condensing chamber for the steam so that the cylinder that
housed the piston could be kept continually hot, instead of
having to be warmed up and cooled down. He
subsequently developed many other ideas, including much
more efficient methods of converting the motion of the
steam engine into useful power, notably his “sun and
planets” gear system. In all these areas technological
innovations built on earlier work by others. In the context of
the steam engine, this included early work by English
inventor Thomas Newcomen and also by Dionysius Papin,
a French physicist and inventor.
The story of Papin’s invention is another example of how,
under extractive institutions, the threat of creative
destruction impeded technological change. Papin
developed a design for a “steam digester” in 1679, and in