In a recent post I compared and contrasted Joel Mokyr’s and Bob Allen’s viewpoints on the origins of the British Industrial Revolution (IR). One failure was to not link to a review paper by Nick Crafts. His is an in-depth review of their two positions, and you should read it.
One of the the themes running through Crafts review is that differences among economic historians in explaining the IR should be set aside (perhaps temporarily) in favor of defending themselves from the real enemy, unified growth theory (UGT). For the uninitiated, UGT is a set of work that develops dynamic models of growth that capture both a period of Malthusian stagnation in output per worker and the take-off to sustained growth. They are concerned with understanding what allows for that transition from stagnation to growth. Oded Galor is the capo di tutti capi of the UGT mafia, and early chapters…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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