Industrial Revolution · CHAPTER 1 ·
Why Britain industrialised first
Chapter 1 of The Industrial Revolution, 1750–1914: “Why Britain?”
In 1750 China made about a third of the world’s manufactured goods and the Indian subcontinent about a quarter, while Britain made under two per cent. Britain industrialised first partly because it combined dear labour with cheap coal: London labourers earned roughly twice the real wages of workers in Vienna.
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The map above is the world of The industrial world, 1750 — An Atlantic and Asian world.
Part of IB History: The Industrial Revolution →
BRIEF EXPLANATION — THE ESSENTIAL ARGUMENT
The central question of this whole atlas is how a few regions of the world learned, between 1750 and 1914, to make goods with machines driven by coal, and why that change began on one small island off the coast of Europe. Historians call the change the Industrial Revolution, the shift from making things by hand in homes and workshops to making them by machine in factories, much as office work moved from typewriters to computers within a single working life. In 1750 almost nobody would have predicted that Britain would lead it. By one estimate China made about a third of the world’s manufactured goods and the Indian subcontinent about a quarter, while Britain made under two per cent. Bengal’s weavers, in eastern India, turned out cotton cloth so fine and cheap that Parliament banned printed Indian calicoes, light cotton cloths named after the port of Calicut, to protect English wool, which shows that in 1750 it was Asian industry that Britain feared.
Britain moved first because it combined advantages that no rival held together. The economic historian Robert Allen argues that British wages were high and British coal was cheap, so a machine that replaced costly workers with cheap fuel paid for itself in Britain long before it paid in France, India or China. Other historians add the Atlantic empire, built on the labour of enslaved Africans, which supplied raw materials, markets and profits, and the historian Joel Mokyr adds a culture that linked scientists with craftsmen. On the map, the red patches show the world’s great textile districts of 1750, in Bengal, Gujarat and south-east India and in China’s Yangzi delta, and the dark hatching marks the slave plantations of the Americas. The answer to “why Britain?” lies in the meeting of coal, wages, empire and ideas, and no single one of them would have been enough on its own.
The full story
Any explanation of the Industrial Revolution, the shift from hand production to machines driven first by water and then by coal, has to start from how ordinary the world of 1750 still looked. The richest manufacturing regions lay in Asia. Around Suzhou in the Yangzi delta millions of rural households spun and wove cotton and silk for markets across China, and Bengal supplied about two-thirds of the textiles bought in Asia around 1750 by the English East India Company, a private firm holding a royal monopoly of Britain’s trade with Asia, much like a corporation with its own army. All of these economies, Britain’s included, were what the historian E. A. Wrigley calls organic economies, in which nearly all heat, light and motion came from the land, as wood for fuel, food for workers and fodder for horses. Such an economy can grow only until it runs short of land, much as a town heated by local firewood can grow only until its woods are gone. What made the Industrial Revolution new was the escape from that ceiling.
Britain escaped first because it offered inventors an unusual pair of prices: dear labour and cheap energy. Its trading economy had grown so fast in the century before 1750 that London’s labourers earned real wages, meaning what a day’s pay could actually buy, roughly twice those of workers in Vienna, while labourers in Delhi or Beijing earned barely enough to survive. At the same time Britain sat on thick coal seams close to its rivers and coast. Colliers, the ships of the coal trade, carried coal from Tyneside, the coalfield around Newcastle, down the coast to London, which already received over 460,000 tons a year by 1700. The economic historian Robert Allen’s insight is that inventors respond to prices, because a machine that saves labour and burns coal is worth building only where labour is expensive and coal is cheap. Britain offered the biggest reward for such machines, while the Dutch Republic, today’s Netherlands, matched British wages around Amsterdam but had only peat, a slow-burning fuel cut from bogs, so labour-saving machines paid far less there.
Prices alone cannot explain the outcome, and the map shows two further forces. The first is the Atlantic economy. British ships carried enslaved Africans from West African forts such as Cape Coast Castle to plantations like those of Jamaica, and the sugar and tobacco they were forced to grow sent profits, raw materials and customers back to Britain; the black arrows trace that triangle. The Trinidadian historian Eric Williams argued in 1944 that slavery financed British industry, a claim later historians have narrowed without dismissing. The second force is knowledge, and especially the British habit of sharing it between scientists and craftsmen. The historian Joel Mokyr describes an Industrial Enlightenment, a culture in which scientists, engineers and skilled craftsmen swapped ideas through societies, journals and workshops, so one practical invention could build on the last. The strongest answer is therefore cumulative, since prices made machines profitable, the Atlantic supplied raw materials and markets, and a culture of tinkering turned possibilities into working engines.
DEEP EXPLANATION — EVIDENCE & INTERPRETATION
The high-wage, cheap-energy economy
The most influential economic answer to the question “why Britain?” turns invention into a matter of profit, and it comes from the economic historian Robert Allen’s The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (2009). Using records of wages and prices for European and Asian cities, he finds that labourers in London and Amsterdam earned about four times what a family needed to survive, while workers in Delhi and Beijing earned barely enough for subsistence, and that coal near Newcastle was the cheapest energy in the world. He then prices the inventions themselves. A spinning jenny, a hand-turned machine that spun 24 threads at once, cost about 134 days of a worker’s earnings in Britain against 311 in France, and he estimates its rate of return, the yearly profit as a share of the money invested, at about 38 per cent in England, 2.5 per cent in France and below zero in India. Critics question the wage half of the argument. The economic historian Jane Humphries notes that the jenny was worked mainly by women and children, whose wages were low, and the economic historians Morgan Kelly, Joel Mokyr and Cormac Ó Gráda argue that Britain’s better-fed and more skilled workforce mattered more than its wage level. The wage records themselves rest on thin samples of urban building workers. Even so, Allen’s framework explains why so many early machines were British, and why they spread abroad only after engineers made them cheaper to run.
Pomeranz and the Great Divergence
The debate about why Europe pulled ahead changed when historians began to compare like with like, a method the historian Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence (2000) made famous. Where earlier comparisons had set Britain against all of China, he set England against the Yangzi delta, a region of similar size, and argued that around 1750 the two were comparably commercial, literate and prosperous. Their paths parted, he argued, because of two windfalls. England’s coal lay close to its industrial centres, while China’s lay far to the north-west of the delta, and Britain’s colonies in the Americas supplied land-hungry goods it could not grow at home. Pomeranz calls these imports ghost acres: by about 1830 the cotton, sugar and timber Britain imported would have needed some 25 to 30 million acres to produce domestically, more than all its farmland. Critics answer that the divergence began earlier. The economic historians Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta find that silver wages, pay measured in grams of silver, in the Yangzi delta and India were well below England’s by the eighteenth century, and the historian Philip Huang argues that delta households kept growing output only by working ever harder for falling returns, a pattern he calls involution. The debate has narrowed the gap between the two sides without closing it, and it shows that Britain’s lead can be explained only by comparing it with the rest of the world.
Slavery, capital and the Williams thesis
Whether slavery financed the Industrial Revolution is one of the oldest debates in the field. It began with Eric Williams, a Trinidadian historian who later led his country to independence, who argued in Capitalism and Slavery (1944) that profits from the slave trade and Caribbean plantations financed Britain’s industrialisation, and that Britain abolished slavery once it stopped paying. Economic historians first tested the narrow claim and found it hard to sustain. The economic historian Stanley Engerman estimated that slave-trade profits at their peak around 1770 were about half of one per cent of national income, and the historian David Eltis and Engerman calculated that Caribbean sugar added about £5.4 million to the British economy in 1805, against £10.5 million for cotton textiles, £12.8 million for wool and £14.7 million for iron. Later work widened the frame again. The historian Joseph Inikori argues in Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England (2002) that Atlantic markets, built on enslaved labour, drove the export industries that led growth, and the economic historian Klas Rönnbäck estimates that all the trades tied to the plantations grew to the equivalent of about 11 per cent of the British economy by the early 1800s. Direct profits were modest, while the system that produced them was large: it supplied the cotton, the customers, the ships, the insurance and the banks of the industries that followed, which is why the question remains open.
Key places on the map
Why it happened
Dear labour and cheap coal. British wages were high by world standards because a century of trading growth had raised the price of labour, while coal from Tyneside and the Midlands was the cheapest energy anywhere. That pair of prices meant that a machine replacing workers with fuel repaid its cost in Britain far sooner than in France, India or China. Inventors and investors follow such returns, so Britain attracted the experiments, and the experiments were then improved until they paid elsewhere too.
An Atlantic economy built on enslaved labour. Britain’s Atlantic empire rested on enslaved labour: by 1750 it ruled colonies in North America and the Caribbean whose plantations were worked by enslaved Africans. About 12.5 million people were embarked on slave ships across the Atlantic between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and in the late 1700s British ships carried more of them than any other nation’s. Slavery thus enriched Britain twice, through the sugar and cotton the plantations sold and the cloth and iron they bought, and through the ports, merchants and banks their trade built, whose capital and skills later served industry.
A culture of useful knowledge. Britain was unusually good at moving knowledge from the study to the workshop, and that habit mattered as much as discovery itself. The Royal Society, London’s leading scientific academy, and provincial philosophical societies, as science clubs were then called, joined with cheap print and travelling lecturers to connect gentlemen scientists with instrument makers, millwrights, who built mill machinery, and clockmakers. A patent system, slow and expensive as it was, let inventors sell their ideas. The historian Joel Mokyr argues that this culture, which he calls the Industrial Enlightenment, turned one-off ingenuity into a steady flow of improvements, which is the condition for growth that lasts.
Farms, markets and a strong state. English farming fed a large population with a shrinking share of the workforce, so many people already worked in crafts and trade: by 1700 over 40 per cent of men worked in manufacturing, mining or building. Coastal shipping, rivers and turnpike roads, private toll roads kept in repair by their users’ fees, joined a national market with no customs barriers between its regions. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which made Parliament supreme over the monarch, a Parliament of property owners taxed heavily but predictably, borrowed cheaply and paid for the navy that guarded Britain’s trade, conditions that the economist Douglass North linked to secure investment.
THE TURNING POINT
Tyneside’s coal, c. 1750. The hinge of this first chapter is a resource Britain had burned for centuries before anyone thought of it as revolutionary. By the 1750s colliers, the ships of the coal trade, sailed from the River Tyne at Newcastle to London, and steam engines already pumped water from the deepest pits. Coal mattered because it broke the land ceiling of the organic economy, whose energy came almost entirely from the land, since a ton of coal gave off about as much heat as the wood an acre of forest grows in a year. Every later chapter, from the steam engine to the railway to the steel mill, depends on that fuel. Without cheap coal, Britain’s high wages would have produced a rich commercial economy like that of the Dutch Republic, today’s Netherlands; with it, they produced machines.
What it changed
Indian cloth becomes the target. The first industry to take the new path was the one in which Britain was most clearly behind. Indian calicoes, light cotton fabrics, set the standard for cheap, washable, printed cloth, and Parliament’s bans of 1700 and 1721 left British producers a protected home market in which to imitate them. The machines invented to spin cotton as fine as Bengal’s, the subject of chapter 2, would let Europe out-produce Asia in Asia’s own speciality for the first time.
Coal meets the steam engine. The engines that pumped water from Britain’s coal mines were so wasteful that they made sense only beside a pithead, the top of a mine shaft, where coal cost almost nothing. Making them efficient enough to work anywhere became the task of the Scottish engineer James Watt, and his engine, together with iron made with coke, a fuel baked from coal, and the canals dug to move coal, is the subject of chapter 3. The fuel came first, and the machines that burned it followed.
Slavery expands with the machines. Industrial demand enlarged the Atlantic slave economy. As British mills consumed ever more cotton, plantation slavery spread across the American South, from about 700,000 enslaved people in 1790 to almost four million in 1860. Chapter 2 traces this chain to Lancashire, and chapter 11 follows it to its breaking point in the American Civil War. Cheap cotton for the mills meant more land and more forced labour on the plantations.
A divergence begins. The industrial age turned a modest gap between the world’s richest and poorest regions into a chasm. Within a century and a half, industrial Europe and North America made most of the world’s manufactured goods, and the textile districts of Bengal and the Yangzi delta had lost their export markets. Chapter 11 examines this Great Divergence, as historians call the widening gap, and the epilogue asks who paid for it. The question still shapes how nations judge one another, because the rich world’s lead and the poor world’s grievances both date from these decades.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Did Britain industrialise first because of what it had, such as coal and colonies, or because of what its people did with them?
The case for what Britain had is strong. The economic historian Robert Allen’s prices show that only British conditions made the first machines profitable, and the historian Kenneth Pomeranz’s comparison suggests that a region as advanced as China’s Yangzi delta lacked chiefly coal near its towns and land overseas. Yet resources do nothing by themselves. China had coal too, and Britain had mined coal for centuries before anyone built a steam engine; turning resources into an industrial economy required inventors, mechanics, investors and institutions that rewarded them, the culture the historian Joel Mokyr calls the Industrial Enlightenment. The colonial advantage cuts both ways, since Britain held the Caribbean only because its navy, merchants and planters seized it and worked it with enslaved labour, which was itself a choice with victims. Most historians now combine the two answers: endowments, the advantages a country starts with, set the incentives, and people and institutions decided whether anyone responded to them. The transferable lesson is that geography and prices make an outcome possible, while human choices decide when and where it actually happens.
An interesting fact
Some of the men who did most to join science to industry in eighteenth-century Britain met by moonlight. The Lunar Society of Birmingham, active from the mid-1760s to about 1813, gathered once a month on a Sunday or Monday near the full moon, so that members could ride home safely after dinner along unlit roads. Its circle included the manufacturer Matthew Boulton, the engineer James Watt, the potter Josiah Wedgwood, the chemist Joseph Priestley and the physician Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of Charles. They called themselves the Lunarticks, and their dinners, where chemical experiments shared the table with business plans, show how closely British science and industry already worked together.
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