Why did Britain industrialise first: resources or people?

The short answer

• 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.

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.