Douglass North argued, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), that the roots of the Industrial Revolution could be found in Great Britain’s seventeenth-century Glorious Revolution:
The Glorious (or “Bloodless”) Revolution established a bill of rights and strengthened Parliament at the expense of the monarch. The king couldn’t just renege on loans or confiscate his subjects’ property during a crisis as he had in the past. The crown, in effect, faced a market chief. Rather than plunging the government into bankruptcy, it immediately had the opposite effect. Like entrepreneurs in Lusaka playing the trust game, people were willing to lend the government money because they expected it would be paid back. With more incentive to lend and invest, England’s economy grew. Not coincidentally, economic growth in Europe took off first in countries where parliaments became strong.
[…]
North and two colleagues identified laws that apply uniformly to elites as the first precursor in the creation of an “open access order,” a state in which rules of commerce and politics don’t depend on a citizen’s identity. Open access orders contrast with “natural states,” which operate more like smaller tribal communities, with enforcement of rules dependent on personal status.
As basic as this might sound today, open access orders have only existed on Earth for about 150 years.
North got off to an interesting start:
He was accepted at Harvard at the same time that his father became the head of MetLife on the West Coast, so North chose instead to attend the University of California, Berkeley. During his time at Berkeley, North was a member of Chi Phi fraternity. In 1942, he graduated with a general B.A. in the humanities. Although his grades amounted to slightly better than a “C” average, he managed to complete a triple major in political science, philosophy and economics. That same year, he entered the US Merchant Marine Academy, graduated a year later and went to sea for three years as a deck officer.
A conscientious objector in World War II, North became a navigator in the Merchant Marine, traveling between San Francisco and Australia. During that time, he read economics and picked up his hobby of photography. He taught navigation at the Maritime Service Officers’ School in Alameda during the last year of the war, and struggled with the decision of whether to become a photographer or an economist.