Industrial Revolution questions and answers

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.

READ CHAPTER 1 — Why Britain industrialised first →

The machines were real and their gains enormous. A self-acting mule, an automatic spinning machine, spun in 135 hours what an Indian hand spinner needed 50,000 hours to spin, and no amount of discipline could have produced that difference by itself. Yet the first factories brought machines and workers together under one roof partly for reasons of control. The rules and child apprentices of the mill owners Richard Arkwright and Samuel Greg, together with the fines and bells of Manchester’s mills, show employers solving the problem of making people work steadily, a problem the domestic system, in which spinners and weavers worked at home for merchants, could not solve. The historians Sidney Pollard and E. P. Thompson emphasise this side, the economist Stephen Marglin pushed it furthest, and the economic historians David Landes and Robert Allen stress the technology. The most persuasive answer treats the two as inseparable, because expensive machines paid only if they ran without pause, and they ran without pause only if workers were disciplined to tend them. The wider lesson is that a new technology usually arrives together with a new way of organising people, and both have to be explained.

READ CHAPTER 2 — Cotton and the factory system →

The steam engine is the most famous symbol of the Industrial Revolution, yet the evidence suggests it was as much a result as a cause. The inventor Thomas Newcomen’s engine was designed to solve a problem created by an existing coal industry, the engineer James Watt’s improvement found its market in mines and mills that were already expanding, and steam supplied less power than water until about 1830. Economic historians who measure growth, such as N. F. R. Crafts, find steam’s contribution to productivity small before the railway age. On the other side, steam freed industry from rivers and let factories, ironworks and later railways cluster on the coalfields and in towns, which made concentration and scale possible. It also turned coal’s heat into motion, the step that made the mineral economy, one powered by coal dug from the ground, fully productive. A balanced judgement treats steam as a late but decisive cause: it arrived after the revolution had begun, and it was steam that made the revolution self-sustaining. Technologies that become the symbols of an age often matter most in its second phase, after the pioneers have proved the market.

READ CHAPTER 3 — Steam power, coal and iron →

The chronology of events favours the second view. Railways appeared after cotton, coal, iron and steam were already transforming Britain, they grew out of the coal industry’s needs, and they were paid for with savings that an industrial and commercial economy had produced. Measured by social savings, the extra cost of moving the same traffic without them, as the economic historian G. R. Hawke did, they made Britain richer by several per cent of national income, a large gain but one the economy could partly have made up with canals and roads. Yet the railway also changed the industrial economy’s character. It created a mass market for coal and iron, made engineering a leading industry, built towns, standardised time and drew ordinary investors into a national market for shares, so the system that emerged after 1850 differed in kind from the one before it. The best judgement is that an industrial economy created the railways, and the railways then created a fully industrial society. For any innovation it helps to separate the change that starts a process from the change that completes it.

READ CHAPTER 4 — Early railways and Railway Mania →

The answer depends on which evidence carries the most weight. Wage data show modest gains: the economic historian Charles Feinstein’s careful series suggests that working-class living standards rose by less than 15 per cent between the 1780s and the 1850s, while optimists such as the economists Peter Lindert and Jeffrey Williamson found much larger rises. Other evidence points the other way. Average heights fell for men born between the 1820s and 1850, a sign of poorer nutrition and more childhood disease, and life expectancy in the largest industrial towns fell far below the national average. Child labour, on the evidence of the economic historian Jane Humphries, grew more intense. Yet many migrants chose the towns because wages there were higher than on the land, and the factory laws, sanitation and cheaper goods of later decades rested on the wealth those years created. Most historians conclude that the first generations bore heavy costs for gains their grandchildren enjoyed. In judging any transformation, the useful questions are who paid and when, as well as whether average incomes rose.

READ CHAPTER 5 — Urbanisation and the Factory Acts →

The modern use of “Luddite” to mean someone who fears technology misreads the people it is named after, the machine-breaking textile workers of 1811–13. The evidence shows targeted, disciplined action: knitters broke the frames of employers who paid low rates and spared the rest, and croppers, who finished cloth by hand, attacked the mills where shearing frames were being installed. In a decade when unions were illegal, wages were falling and food was dear, machine-breaking was a way to bargain, which is why the historian Eric Hobsbawm called it collective bargaining by riot and the historian E. P. Thompson defended the Luddites against the condescension of later historians. Yet the Luddites could not stop technical change, and the machines they fought eventually made cloth and stockings far cheaper for everyone, workers included. The fairest judgement is that they were rational defenders of their livelihoods who lost to a change whose benefits went mainly to other people and later generations. Any society facing a new technology must decide how the costs of change are shared, and the Luddites were among the first to ask.

READ CHAPTER 6 — Luddites, Peterloo and Chartism →

Imitation was everywhere at the start. The continent’s first steam engines, spinning mills and railways were British in design, often British-built and sometimes British-run, from the Cockerill family’s ironworks at Seraing in Belgium to the railways the English contractor Thomas Brassey built in Normandy, and continental entrepreneurs measured themselves against Lancashire. Yet the conditions in which they worked were different, and so were their solutions. Belgium and Prussia, the largest German kingdom, used their governments to plan railways and run mines, German banks financed heavy industry on a scale British banks never attempted, and the German economist Friedrich List’s protectionism, the sheltering of young industries behind tariffs, rejected the free trade Britain recommended. France’s more gradual, skill-based path, which the economic historians Patrick O’Brien and Caglar Keyder argue suited its resources, shows that there was more than one road. The economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron’s insight that backwardness changes the method of industrialisation explains much of this variety, and even British institutions, from patents to joint-stock companies, firms owned by many shareholders, were copied selectively. The best answer is that the continent borrowed Britain’s technology and invented its own institutions, a combination that later industrialisers, from the United States to Japan, would repeat.

READ CHAPTER 7 — Industrial Revolution in Europe →

Three kinds of explanation compete for attention. The first stresses German strengths: universities and technical colleges that trained chemists and engineers by the thousand, banks that financed huge plants, a protected and growing market after 1871, and the coal and ore of the Ruhr and Lorraine. The second stresses British weaknesses, in the tradition of the historians David Landes and Martin Wiener: family firms content with old methods, an education system that prized Latin and Greek, and capital that flowed abroad. The third, argued by the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey and others, doubts that Britain failed at all, since British firms often chose rationally to keep profitable older technologies, and a larger, later starter was bound to catch up. The evidence supports a mixture of all three. In science-based industries such as dyes, Germany’s institutions gave it a real advantage, while in steel and cotton the gap mainly reflected differences in resources, markets and timing. The institutions that win one technological era are seldom the ones best suited to the next.

READ CHAPTER 8 — Second Industrial Revolution →

Resources made the scale of growth possible. Coal, ore, oil, timber and land, much of it taken from Native American nations, gave American industry cheap inputs, and the economic historian Gavin Wright’s evidence shows how resource-intensive its exports were. Yet resources needed people to exploit them, and the people came from everywhere: inventors and managers who built the large corporation, about 22 million immigrants between 1880 and 1914, Chinese railway workers later barred from the country, and the formerly enslaved and their children whose cotton remained a leading export. Institutions shaped how both were used. High taxes on imports, federal land grants and courts friendly to employers channelled wealth toward industry and kept labour costs low, at the price of fierce conflict. The most convincing answer is that America’s abundance of resources set the direction of its technology, while its ability to draw labour and capital from the whole world set the speed. Abundance and openness together explain the rise, and exclusion and conflict show who paid for it.

READ CHAPTER 9 — Industrial Revolution in America →

The state’s role was decisive at the start. It abolished the domains, the territories of the feudal lords, created the taxes that paid for modernisation, built the railways and telegraphs, founded factories such as the Tomioka silk mill and the Yawata steelworks, and hired foreign experts, all within a generation, as the economic historian Alexander Gerschenkron’s model of late development predicts. Yet many state enterprises lost money and were sold cheaply to private firms in the 1880s, and the industries that earned Japan’s foreign currency, cotton spinning and the reeling of silk thread from cocoons, grew mainly through private investment, from the banker Shibusawa’s Osaka Spinning Company to thousands of small rural silk workshops. Historians such as Thomas Smith stressed the state, while later work by Penelope Francks and others emphasises the inheritance of markets, merchants and literacy from the Tokugawa shoguns, the military rulers who governed until 1868, and the labour of young women. A balanced judgement credits the state with setting the direction and removing obstacles, and private enterprise and women’s labour with doing most of the work. Countries that industrialise late can use the state to accelerate industry, but they still need a society ready to respond.

READ CHAPTER 10 — Industrialisation of Meiji Japan →

Industrial competition did real and lasting damage. Lancashire’s machines made cloth so cheaply that Bengal’s weavers lost their export markets, and the economists Clingingsmith and Williamson argue that India’s share of world manufacturing would have fallen steeply even under Indian rule, since India’s own wages and food prices had risen after the Mughal empire, which had ruled most of India, fragmented and droughts struck. Imperial rule shaped how the damage fell. The colonial government kept import taxes low on British goods and from 1896 taxed Indian mill cloth, guaranteed British railway investors their returns from Indian taxes, and paid for an army and administration that nationalists such as Naoroji called a drain. The historian Tirthankar Roy warns against assuming total ruin, since weaving by hand adapted and Indian-owned mills grew. A balanced answer is that industrial technology made the decline of Indian hand industry likely, and empire removed the tools, such as taxes on imports and an investing state, that Germany, the United States and Japan used to industrialise. Competition set the challenge, and political power decided who could answer it.

READ CHAPTER 11 — Great Divergence and global trade →

The clearest winners by 1914 were the owners of capital and the populations of the industrial core, who were richer, healthier and more numerous than any earlier society, and whose working classes had begun, after 1850, to share in the gains. The clearest losers were those who paid without benefiting: enslaved people whose cotton fed the first mills, handworkers from Lancashire to Bengal whose trades vanished, colonised peoples supplying raw materials on others’ terms, and the dead of famines and forced labour. Judging whether the price was worth paying raises a problem historians cannot settle with evidence alone, because the people who paid and the people who gained were mostly different, and often separated by generations and continents. Two observations help to settle it. Much of the cost came from political choices, such as slavery, empire and minimal famine relief, which were not inevitable parts of industrial technology. The gains also spread, eventually, far beyond the first industrial countries. A defensible judgement is that industrialisation was a transformation worth having, achieved at a price that was far higher than it needed to be and paid by the wrong people.

READ CHAPTER 12 — Impact of the Industrial Revolution →