New Delhi, June 22 -- In May 2026, Andrew Bailey, governor of the Bank of England, addressed Sheffield's annual Cutlers' Feast with a question that seemed whimsical but was not: Can artificial intelligence (AI) make cutlery? It could, the AI systems he consulted replied, but usually as part of a wider manufacturing system, not by itself.

What interested Bailey was the larger story behind that answer: why did Britain industrialize first and what does that history tell us about how countries grow?

His answer, drawing on recent scholarship by economists Avner Greif, Joel Mokyr and Guido Tabellini, points to institutions-specifically, the trade organizations and commercial networks that broke down family and clan-based societies in medieval...