Professor Joel Mokyr presented the 2024 Griffin Public Lecture at the University of Melbourne, on Wednesday, November 6, 2024.
The Industrial Revolution and the Industrial Enlightenment
The 2024 Griffin Economic History Lecture explores the interconnectedness of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment in 18th-century Europe. Professor Mokyr argues that without the Enlightenment’s influence on fostering scientific and intellectual progress, the economic growth sparked by the Industrial Revolution might not have been sustainable. Mokyr is a distinguished scholar specialising in economic history and technological change.
About the speaker:
Professor 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 specialises in economic history and the economics of technological change and population change. He has authored over 100 articles and books in his field. Professor Mokyr has an undergraduate degree from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD from Yale University. He has taught at Northwestern since 1974 and has been a visiting Professor at Harvard, the University of Chicago, Stanford University, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Tel Aviv, University College of Dublin, and the University of Manchester. In 2006, he was awarded the biennial Heineken Prize by the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences for a lifetime achievement in historical science. In 2015, he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Economic History awarded once every twenty years. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign fellow of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, a corresponding fellow of the British Academy, and a Fellow of the Econometric Society and the Cliometric Society. In 2018, he was elected as a distinguished fellow of the American Economic Association. His books have won a number of important prizes including the Joseph Schumpeter Memorial Prize, the Ranki Prize for the best book in European Economic history, the Don K. Price Prize of the American Political Science Association, and the Allan Sharlin Prize of the Social Science History Association. He was made a doctor honoris causa by the National University of Uruguay in 2018. He was awarded the Jonathan Hughes Prize for excellence in the teaching of
economic history by the Economic History Association in 2019.
About the lecture series
The Griffin Economic History Public Lecture is named after Peter Griffin AM, an alum of the Faculty (BCom 1963) who has had a long and successful career in business, particularly in the investment and banking sectors. In 2008, he was honoured as a Member of the Order of Australia for his service to the Australian community through support for medical research, arts and charitable organisations. Peter is passionate about Economic History and is keen that students graduate from the University of Melbourne with a solid understanding of business and finance, and a deep awareness of previous mistakes made by governments, industry and the banking sector. The University of Melbourne gratefully acknowledges support for the Griffin Economic History Public Lecture from the Peter Griffin and Terry Swann Foundation.