Programme

Bob Allen is Professor of Economic History at Oxford University and a fellow of Nuffield College. He received his doctorate from Harvard University. He has written on English agricultural history, international competition in the steel industry, the extinction of whales, and contemporary policies on education. His articles have won the Cole Prize, the Redlich Prize, and the Explorations Prize. His books include Enclosure and the Yeoman: The Agricultural Development of the South Midlands, 1450-1850 (2009), and Farm to Factory: A Re-interpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution (2003), both of which won the Ranki Prize of the Economic History Association, and The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (2009). Currently, he is studying the global history of wages and prices and pre-industrial living standards around the world. Bob Allen is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Canada.

Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University and Sackler Professor (by special appointment) at the Eitan Berglas School of Economics at the University of Tel Aviv. He specializes in economic history and the economics of technological change and population change and has authored over 70 articles and books in his field. His books include Why Ireland Starved: An Analytical and Quantitative Study of the Irish Economy, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress, The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective and his most recent The Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy. His new book The Enlightened Economy will be published in 2009 by Yale University Press and Penguin Books.
Professor Mokyr is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. His books have won a number of important prizes including the Joseph Schumpeter memorial prize (1990), the Ranki prize for the best book in European Economic history and more recently the Donald Price Prize of the American Political Science Association. In 2006 he was awarded the biennial Heineken Prize by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences for a lifetime achievement in historical science. He is President of the Midwest Economics Association. He is currently working on the intellectual and institutional origins of modern economic growth and the way they interacted with technological elements. His current other research is an attempt to apply insights from evolutionary theory to long-run changes in technological knowledge and economic history.