• Economic History
• Industrial Enlightenment
• Industrial Revolution
• Talent

This contribution proposes a new index of cultural activities in Europe, for the period 800-1800. In order to test it, a novel dataset is constructed by joining two existing works complemented with an additional set of original data. The index measures the degree of cultural activity of a region at city level by counting the number of high achieving innovators clustering in it. In this way a map of innovation across Europe can be produced and a series of historical hypotheses can be assessed. Emerging properties of persistence and diffusion of talent are observed. A series of regression analyses are implemented to test for alternative theories about the influence of culture. In particular, the so called “Industrial Enlightenment” is put into question. It holds that the ideals stemming from the scientific revolution of the XVII century, European positivism and the political experience of XVIII century's French intellectuals, contributed in a determinant way to the industrial revolution by interacting with the English intellectual and productive system. This view is compared with some alternative theories. The results of the analysis do not allow for a refusal of the cultural hypothesis for the industrial revolution: the role of France, and in particular Paris, as the pulsing hearth of European innovation is confirmed by the data. Moreover, England is more active in the fields of invention than France before and for much of the industrial revolution. Other historical impressions concerning intellectual activities in Europe are confirmed and indicate a good reliability of the index.