Response to Edwards and Ogilvie

Abstract Our article on ‘Late marriage as a contributor to the industrial revolution in England’ is intended to show that the evidence is consistent with the European marriage pattern being a major influence on long-run English economic development, through the accumulation of human capital, broadly defined. Edwards and Ogilvie assert that our approach is inadequate because, they claim, we consider neither other influences on English industrialization, such as non-familial institutions, nor other European economies where marriage age was high throughout the early modern period but where industrialization came later. We do allow for other influences on English industrialization in our model, and the observation that some late industrializers had later marriage than England does not refute our contention, which we test appropriately by simulating the model.