CityReads│Why was the Industrial Revolution British?

Robert C. Allen 城读 2022-07-13

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Why was the Industrial Revolution British?

The Industrial Revolution emerged from the high wage, cheap energy environment ofthe 18^th Britain.

Robert C. Allen, 2009. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain, in the eighteenth century?

Indeed, explaining the Industrial Revolution has been a long-standing problem in social science and has generated all manner of theories. Most approaches fall under the headings of social structure, constitution and property rights, science, and culture.

Prof.Robert Allen, an Economy historian at Oxford University, offers a different explanation in his book, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. His explanation proceeds in two stages. Part I of this book analyzes the expansion of the early modern (i.e. 1500–1750) economy and shows that it generated a unique structure of wages and prices in eighteenth-century Britain: Wages were remarkably high, and energy was remarkably cheap. Part II shows that the steam engine, the waterframe, the spinning jenny and the coke blast furnace increased the use of coal and capital relative to labour. They were adopted in Britain because labour was expensive and coal was cheap-- Britain’s unique wage and price structure was the pivot around which the Industrial Revolution turned-- and they were notused elsewhere because wages were low and energy dear. Invention was governed by the same considerations, for why go to the expense of developing a new machine if it was not going to be used? The Industrial Revolution, in short,was invented in Britain in the eighteenth century because it paid to invent it there, while it would not have been profitable in other times and places.

When industrial revolution started?

The Industrial Revolution was the result of a long process of social and economic evolution running back to the late middle ages. The path to the Industrial Revolution began with the Black Death. The population fall increased labour mobility by generating many vacant farms, and that mobility undermined serfdom.The low population also created a high wage economy. The benefits of high consumption were not confined to people: sheep ate better as well, and their longer wool was the basis for England’s early modern worsted industry – the new draperies. The enormous export of these fabrics through the port of London led to rapid growth in the city’s population and the rise of the coal industry to provide the capital with fuel.

When industrial revolution ended?

The end of the Industrial Revolution is usually dated to 1830 or 1850 when new industries – first the rail road and the steam ship and then novel manufactures like Bessemer steel –appeared on the scene. I also date the end of theIndustrial Revolution to the second third of the nineteenth century, but for a different reason that is the culmination of its origins. The ‘closing of the gap’ only occurred between 1850 and 1873, when modern technology displaced traditional methods, and European industry could compete on an equal footing with British.

The high-wage economy of pre-industrial Britain

At the exchange rate, British wages were among the highest in the world. London wages were the highest in the world during the eighteenth century.

British wages were high relative to the cost of consumer goods, i.e. British workers could buy more with their money than workers in many other countries, so living standards were higher in Britain than elsewhere.

Wages were higher relative to the price of capital in Britain than elsewhere.

The cheap energy boosted economy

Coal was, indeed, critical for British industrialization because it provided an inexhaustible supply of cheap energy. Coal was also important for its technological spin-offs, the steam engine and the railway. Combined with metals, coal was the basis of the engineering industries that mechanized manufacturing and integrated the world economy in the nineteenth century. Inall of these ways, coal separated Britain from the rest of the world, including, in particular, the high wage economy of the Low Countries.

The cheap energy economy was a foundation of Britain’s economic success. Inexpensive coal provided the incentive to invent the steam engine and metallurgical technology of the Industrial Revolution. The cheap energy economy also sustained the high wage economy. The burden of high wages in England was offset by cheap energy.

Why the steam engine, mechanical spinning and coke smelting were

invented in the 18^th Britain?

The Industrial Revolution emerged from the high wage, cheap energy environment. These prices affected the demand for technology by giving British businesses an exceptional incentive to invent technology that substituted capital and energy for labour. The high real wage also stimulated product innovation since it meant that Britain had a broader mass market for ‘luxury’ consumer goods including imports from east Asia.

The demand for technology depended on the price of labour relative to the prices of other inputs in production, i.e. the price of labour relative to the prices of capital and energy. The ratio of the wage relative to the price of capital was trendless in the early seventeenth century, and the differences between the cities were small. English labour was relatively cheap. The positions were reversed in the mid-seventeenth century when the series diverged, and English labour became increasingly expensive relative to capital. Thus the incentive to mechanize production was much greater in England than in France, Germany or Austria.

The differences between Britain and other countries were even more pronounced inthe case of energy. Figure 6.2 shows the ratio of the building wage rate to the price of energy in the early eighteenth century in important cities in Europe and Asia. The high cost of labour relative to fuel created a particularly intense incentive to substitute fuel for labour in Britain.

The macro-inventions were made in Britain in the eighteenth century since Britain’s high and rising wage induced a demand for technology that substituted capital and energy for labour.

For instance, in Britain, pottery was fired in round, up-draft kilns shown in Plate6.1. These kilns were cheap to build but did not use energy efficiently. Much heat was lost as the draft left the kiln through the holes in the top.

In Asia, on the other hand, kilns were designed to conserve energy. A common design was the‘down-draft climbing kiln’ shown in Plate 6.2. These kilns were builton the slope of a hill. The kiln was a series of domes (‘beehives’) that were connected at the bottom. The walls were built thick to prevent heat loss. Much capital was used, however, and many workers were employed stoking the various fires.

There is no reason to believe that French technology would have led to the engineering industry, the general mechanization of industrial processes, the railway, the steamship or the global economy. In other words, there was only one route to the twentieth century – and it traversed northern Britain.

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