“I thoroughly enjoyed this excellent book.”

Tyler Cowen | Marginal Revolution

"What are the connections among aristocrats, duels, private lighthouses and private police forces in the conduct of early modern economies? Douglas W. Allen in The Institutional Revolution brings together a whole series of customs and behaviors we now associate with irrational premodern practices and shows the part they played as informal institutions to ensure the provision of civil service goods before the nineteenth century."

Times Literary Supplement

“In 1910, J. H. Clapham memorably described the industrial revolution as a ‘thrice squeezed orange.’ Yet writing more than a century later, Douglas W. Allen has written a brilliant and enjoyable book that shows there is still plenty of juice left in this orange. With The Institutional Revolution, Allen provides a stimulating microeconomic reinterpretation of English economic development in the period between 1780 and 1850. The range of reading, the quality of the analysis, the elegance of the writing, and the lightness of touch displayed by Allen are all extremely impressive.”

Graham Brownlow | Economic History Review

“Douglas W. Allen has written a brilliant and challenging book that puts the measurement problem in the foreground to convincingly explain the logic of premodern institutions—institutions that the typical modern person, until reading Allen, views as the embodiment of chaos, inefficiency, corruption, and ineptitude. The Institutional Revolution contains a wealth of historical information that anyone with an interest in history will find interesting and often delightful.”

Thráinn Eggertsson, New York University

“This is a very important book that increases understanding of how changes in measurement and institutions can increase trade and welfare. Allen uses economic logic to show that quaint premodern institutions—including the social rules of the old aristocracy, and the practice of dueling—aligned incentives at a time when variance in outcomes due to the enormous effects of nature could not easily be separated from those due to human behavior. Especially interesting is his insight into how the industrial and institutional revolutions in Britain developed interactively. This wonderful book sets the groundwork for further essential investigation into the micro foundations of specific institutional changes and economic growth, topics that are at the forefront of modern efforts to increase welfare.”

Gary D. Libecap, University of California, Santa Barbara

“In the early modern period, British aristocrats engaged in a panoply of seemingly inefficient activities. They owned grandiose, high-maintenance estates. . . . They refused to engage directly in any commercial activity and spent their hours cultivating demanding but seemingly useless skills like, music, dancing, repartee, and Latin conjugations. Yet, despite these apparently wealth-destroying behaviors, aristocrats grew wealthy, often astoundingly wealthy. As Allen asks in his marvelous book, ‘what economic puzzle were they solving in order to generate this wealth?’ . . . A milestone in the New Institutional Economics."

Richard N. Langlois, Review of Austrian Economics