Who gained most from the Industrial Revolution?

The short answer

• Coal-powered productivity. The industrial countries’ wealth rested on machines driven by coal, which multiplied what each worker could produce. Britain mined about 287 million tons of coal in 1913, its all-time peak, and exported about a third of it to fuel other nations’ ships and factories. Countries with coal, capital and skills pulled ahead, and countries without them, or prevented from using them, fell behind. Energy was the foundation of the whole divergence.
• Diffusion through states and markets. Industrialisation spread fastest where states could protect new industries, build railways and educate engineers, as in Germany, the United States and Japan. Late starters borrowed Britain’s technology and invented their own institutions, from Germany’s investment banks, which lent long-term to industry, to the model factories built by Japan’s Meiji government, the modernising regime that took power in 1868. The result by 1914 was an industrial core of several countries competing for markets, resources and colonies. Adapting borrowed methods to local conditions decided which followers succeeded.
• Empire and unequal exchange. Colonial rule and unequal treaties, agreements forced on weaker states that fixed low tariffs, or import taxes, kept much of Asia and Africa in the role of supplier of raw materials and buyer of manufactures. Low tariffs, guaranteed returns for foreign investors and forced labour regimes such as the Congo Free State, the private colony of King Leopold II of Belgium, channelled the gains toward the industrial powers. The map’s tan and blue show how far that system reached by 1914. Political power decided who would capture the gains of the new technology.
• Workers and voters organised. The losers of early industrialisation inside Britain did not remain powerless. Luddites, who smashed machines, Chartists, who demanded votes for working men, trade unionists and socialists built organisations that won the vote, legal unions and the first welfare laws, and similar movements spread across Europe, the United States and Japan. Their pressure explains why industrial societies grew more equal in income, though not in wealth, after the middle of the century. Reform came from below as well as from above.

What it changed

An industrial war. The industrial powers’ greatest new capacity in 1914 was for total war, waged with a nation’s whole economy, and in August they turned their steel, chemicals, railways and factories against each other. The First World War mobilised whole economies for machine guns, heavy artillery and poison gas on a scale the American Civil War had only foreshadowed, and estimates of military deaths run from about 9 to 11 million. The industrial powers had never traded more with one another than in 1913, so the war showed that economic interdependence alone could not keep the peace.

Catching up, slowly. The Great Divergence, the gap between the industrial West and the rest of the world, began to narrow only in the late twentieth century. After 1945 many former colonies sought to industrialise behind tariffs, taxes on imports, and from the 1950s Japan, then South Korea, Taiwan and finally China followed the path of earlier latecomers such as Germany: state guidance, protection and exports. Their success shows that the divergence of the nineteenth century rested on circumstances, such as capital, technology and the power to set tariffs, that later policy could change.

The carbon century. Coal, and then oil, powered the twentieth century. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, about 280 parts per million before industrialisation, had reached about 300 by 1914 and passed 400 in the 2010s. The first scientists to connect burning coal with a warmer planet, such as the Swedes Arvid Högbom and Svante Arrhenius, worked in the industrial world this atlas describes, and the costs they glimpsed are now global.