Risky Business: investing in innovation and Britain's economic development, 1600-1750

The pursuit of innovation in a defining feature of our world. Over the past four centuries, innovation has been lauded as an investment opportunity, contributing to economic growth and the improvement of people's daily lives. During the economic boom of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, investors flocked to opportunities in trade, manufacturing, extractive industry, and agriculture in the hope of making their fortunes and take part in Britain's economic success. Successful innovation, through improvement or invention, depended just as much then as it does today on the willingness of individuals to undertake the risky business of overcoming uncertainty and putting their money on the line. Macroeconomic indicators do not tell us how specific projects, innovations and improvements overcome the risk-reticence of investors, nor how individual investors function within wider investment networks. Yet, despite their essential participation in productive and financial innovation, the ways in which individual investors made decisions about where, when, and how to invest have been side-lined in the existing historiography of capitalism.

"Risky Business: investing in innovation and Britain's economic development, 1600-1750" will address these gaps by investigating how these actors came to view financial investment, perceive risk, and self-consciously participate in 'improvement', 'innovation' and economic growth. In doing so, it will reshape inquiry into the cultural and social dimensions of investment during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries - a period in which financial revolution accelerated the development of the first modern economies. Through this analysis, it will expand beyond both state-focused or institutional accounts and efficient market explanations of the nature of economic development to instead assess 'investment practices' and examine the diverse means by which investment choice was experienced, understood and tackled in everyday life - from an investor's education to their business organisation, experience of failure, and how they functioned as part of an 'investing public'. Thus, this work will make key methodological contributions to current research by modelling the utility of a shift in attention to 'bottom-up' history of investment. More and better examination of the social and cultural practices underlying investment in innovation will transform our understanding of the shape and direction of economic change. This project therefore presents a new research framework for the study of economic development that recognises how individuals and communities responded to, and took part in, ventures that were risky, uncertain, and sometimes driven by considerations that had nothing to do with the profit principle.

The project will draw on an extensive body of primary sources and will employ an innovative methodological framework to present and interpret them. Through the development of a unique dataset, it will examine the economic activities, networks and behaviours of actors who invested in innovation and assess the cultural foundations of how they identified opportunity, understood uncertainty and mitigated against risk. Through this interpretation, this project will move beyond 'portfolio analysis'-focused interpretations of investment choice to present a more holistic understanding of how investors engaged in the innovation market and its impact on Britain's economic growth. It will also allow historians and social scientists to interrogate how seemingly unimportant or counter-intuitive relationships between individuals, business, and social engagements had considerable and dynamic influence on wider networks. In conclusion, through this analysis the project will present an interpretation of economic growth that moves beyond assessments of 'where' the economy expanded and start to question precisely 'why' and 'how' investors chose to drive the economy in those directions.