Industrial Revolution · 1870
Did Europe industrialise by copying Britain?
The seminar question: “Did continental Europe industrialise by imitating Britain, or by finding its own path?”
Belgium led the continent: John Cockerill opened an ironworks at Seraing in 1817, and in 1835 the Brussels–Mechelen line became the continent’s first state-built steam railway. In the German states the Zollverein customs union of 1834 created one market, and from the 1840s railways and Ruhr coal powered a boom.
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Belgium industrialised first on the continent because it held the same ingredients as Britain and had a government willing to use them. The coal belt running from Mons through Charleroi to Liège had been worked for centuries, and Liège had a long tradition of metalworking. Britain banned the emigration of skilled artisans until 1824 and the export of textile machinery until 1843, yet skills travelled anyway. William Cockerill, a Lancashire mechanic, built spinning machines at Verviers from 1799, and his son John founded a giant machine works and ironworks at Seraing in 1817, soon one of the largest industrial plants in the world. After winning independence from the Netherlands in 1830 the Belgian state planned and paid for a national railway network, beginning with the line from Brussels to Mechelen on 5 May 1835. In proportion to its size Belgium became the most industrialised country on the continent, the first proof that Britain’s lead could be copied.
The short answer
- Coal and old industrial skills. The continent’s first industrial regions combined coal or fast water with long traditions of craft. The Sambre–Meuse valley had mined coal and worked iron since the Middle Ages, and Flanders, Saxony and Alsace had old textile industries. Where coal, skill and water transport met, British techniques could be adopted quickly, which is why the hatched coalfields and red districts on the map lie close together. Where any one of them was missing, industry came later.
- Borrowed machines and migrant experts. Britain guarded its lead by banning the emigration of artisans until 1824 and the export of textile machinery until 1843, but machines were smuggled and men moved. British mechanics, engineers and navvies, the labourers who dug canals and railways, built mills and railways from Liège to Rouen, and continental entrepreneurs toured Lancashire to copy what they saw. The Cockerills, a Lancashire family of mechanics who built Belgium’s first spinning machines and the Seraing ironworks; the Irish mining engineer William Mulvany in the Ruhr; and the English contractor Thomas Brassey’s railway gangs in Normandy all carried British know-how abroad. Such migrants let followers skip the pioneers’ costly experiments.
- Governments built markets and railways. Continental governments took a direct hand in starting industry. Belgium planned its railways, and Prussia, the largest German state, led the Zollverein, a customs union that abolished taxes on goods moving between its German members, much as the European Union does today. Prussia also ran state mines in the Saar and Silesia, and France laid out its main railway lines in a law of 1842 before leasing them to private companies. The economist Friedrich List’s case for protecting infant industries, young industries not yet able to compete, gave this activism a theory. States took on the risks that private investors would not yet bear.
- Peace and new borders after 1815. The peace of 1815, agreed by Europe’s great powers at Vienna after Napoleon’s defeat, ended a generation of war, blockade and occupation, and the settlement redrew borders in ways that shaped industry. Prussia, the largest German state, gained the Rhineland and Westphalia, including the Ruhr and the Saar, and the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, from which Belgium broke away in 1830, gained the coal and iron of Liège and Hainaut. Peace allowed capital, goods and people to cross borders again. The diplomats who redrew Europe’s borders in 1815 were also deciding, largely without realising it, which states would own the coal of the industrial age.
THE TURNING POINT
Cockerill at Seraing, 1817. The Lancashire-born engineer John Cockerill’s works at Seraing are the hinge because they show how industry left Britain. Cockerill, trained in his father’s workshop at Verviers, won the backing of William I, king of a Netherlands that then included Belgium, and turned the former summer palace of the prince-bishops of Liège, the churchmen who had ruled the city until 1795, into works that made steam engines, locomotives, ships and iron with local coal and local workers trained in British methods. Seraing became a school as well as a factory, and engineers trained there spread across the continent. From this moment industrialisation was a European process, because Britain’s laws against exporting machines and skilled workers could not stop knowledge that travelled in engineers’ heads.
What it changed
Germany overtakes. The German customs union known as the Zollverein, the Ruhr coalfield and the railways laid the foundations on which a united Germany, created in 1871, overtook Britain in steel and chemicals by the 1890s. Political unification grew partly out of the economic unification of the Zollverein, which had already tied the smaller German states to Prussia, the largest of them. The new empire’s industrial strength would rest on science and big business as much as on coal.
The workers’ question crosses borders. Industrial distress made the protection of workers a European political question within a generation. The Silesian weavers’ revolt of 1844 inspired a poem by the German writer Heinrich Heine and, half a century later, the dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann’s play The Weavers (1892), and in the 1880s Germany, under its chancellor Otto von Bismarck, introduced state insurance against sickness, accidents and old age, partly to undercut the socialists. The social question had become a European one, shared by workers and feared by governments across the continent.
A model for late developers. The German economist Friedrich List’s case for protecting infant industries, those too young to face foreign competition, and the German partnership of banks and state, became templates for later industrialisers. The United States raised tariffs to shelter its factories, and Japan’s Meiji leaders, in power from 1868, barred by unequal treaties imposed by the West from raising tariffs until 1911, studied Germany and used the state to found industries. Both refused to leave industry to the free market that Britain, secure in its lead, recommended to everyone, advice List had compared to kicking away a ladder after climbing it.
The full answer, argued
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.
An interesting fact
Germany’s first railway locomotive was English. The Adler, or Eagle, which opened the six-kilometre line from Nuremberg to Fürth on 7 December 1835, was built by the locomotive makers Robert Stephenson & Co. in Newcastle and shipped to Bavaria in pieces. With it came an English engine driver, William Wilson, whom the company paid more than its own director, because nobody in Bavaria knew how to drive a locomotive. Wilson stayed, trained German drivers and died in Nuremberg in 1862. For years most of the line’s trains were still pulled by horses because coal was expensive, which shows that Germany could import the railway long before it could cheaply fuel one.
This is the study layer of Industrial Revolution in Europe, chapter 7 of The Industrial Revolution, 1750–1914; the full index of the atlas is here.
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