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Was the British industrial revolution a conjuncture in global economic history?

Part of: The Industrial Revolution as a Global Conjuncture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 November 2021

Patrick O’Brien
Patrick O’Brien*
Affiliation:
Department of Economic History, London School of Economics, London, WC2A 2AE, UK
*
Corresponding author. E-mail: patrick.obrien@sant.ox.ac.uk
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Journal of Global History , Volume 17 , Issue 1 , March 2022 , pp. 128 - 150
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© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

†

Emeritus Professor of Economic History, University of London and Convenor of an International Network to Investigate Economic Outcomes Flowing from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars 1793–1815.

This essay is a tribute to Ken Pomeranz, who first posed the meta question: ‘Why wasn’t England the Yangzi Delta?’ (The Great Divergence. China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000, 13). I also wish to thank warmly Gagan Sood and Ewout Frankema for the time and trouble that they have devoted as colleagues and editors to critiquing and improving this essay.

References

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12 Examples include: D. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York: Little Brown, 1998); D. North, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); D. Acemoglu and J. Robinson, Why Nations Fail (New York: Crown Publishers, 2012).

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25 A. Wrigley, The Path to Sustained Growth. England’s Transition from an Organic Economy to an Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016); P. O’Brien and D. Heath, ‘English and French Landowners 1688–1789,’ in Landowners, Capitalists and Entrepreneurs, ed. F. M. L. Thompson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 23–62; Broadberry, ed. British Economic Growth; M. Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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31 Broadberry et al., eds. British Economic Growth 1270–1870.

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33 P. O’Brien, ‘Agriculture and the Home Market for British Industry,’ English Historical Review 41 (1985): 773–800.

34 M. Overton, Agricultural Revolution in England; L. Brunt, ‘Nature or Nurture? Explaining English Wheat Yields in the Industrial Revolution, c. 1770,’ Journal of Economic History 64 (2004): 193–225.

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40 R. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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42 This ratio could be reduced by the small amounts of coal utilized for domestic heat and manufacturing in 1600, but increased by the more extensive substitution of coal for thermal purposes in manufacturing and also by the reduction in kilocalories required for work and health from the cheaper fuel that coal provided to households for warmth and cooking.

43 Wrigley, The Path to Sustained Growth.

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53 J. Cuenca-Esterban, ‘Comparative Patterns of Colonial Trade: Britain and Its Rivals,’ in Exceptionalism and Industrialization. Britain and Its European Rivals 1688–1815, ed. L. Prados De La Escosura (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 35–69.

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56 R. Sylla and G. Toniolo, Patterns of European Industrialization (London: Routledge, 1991); Riello and O’Brien, ‘Reconstructing the Industrial Revolution’; P. Vries, ‘Does Wealth Entirely Depend on Inclusive Institutions and Pluralist Politics?,’ Tijdschrift Voor Social En Economische Geschiedenis 9 (2012): 74–93.

57 K. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. China, Europe and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). For a survey and critique of the Pomeranz thesis, see P. Vries, State Economy and the Great Divergence. Great Britain and China (London: Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2015) and P. O’Brien, The Economies of Imperial China and Western Europe (Palgrave, forthcoming).

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63 P. O’Brien, ‘Fiscal Exceptionalism: Great Britain and its European Rivals from Civil War to Triumph at Trafalgar and Waterloo,’ in The Political Enemy of British Historical Experience 1699–1914, eds. D. Winch and P. O’Brien (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 246–65.

64 N. Voigtlander and H.-J. Voth, ‘The Three Horsemen of Riches, Plague, War and Urbanization in Early Modern Europe,’ Review of Economic Studies 80 (2013): 774–811.

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67 Parliamentary Paper 1868–69 (XXXV); C. Chandaman, English Public Revenue 1660–88 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); F. Dietz, English Government Finance 1458–1641 (New York: Frank Cass, 1964).

68 N. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean. A Naval History of Britain, vol. 2 1649–1815 (London: Allen Lane, 2004).

69 R. Morris, Naval Power and British Culture. Public Trust and Government Ideology (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004); R. Morris, The Foundations of British Maritime Ascendency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

70 D. Baugh, ‘The Eighteenth Century Navy as a National Institution,’ in The Oxford Illustrated History of the Royal Navy, ed. J. R. Hill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) 120–60; Page, Britain and the Seventy Years War.

71 R. Harding, The Evolution of the Sailing Navy 1509–1815 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995) and J. Landers, The Field and the Forge. Population, Production and Power in the Pre-Industrial West (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

72 P. O’Brien and P. Hunt, ‘England 1485–1815,’ in The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c. 1200–1815, ed. R. Bonney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 53–100.

73 Parliamentary Paper 1868–69 (XXXV); J. Ventura and H.-J. Voth, ‘Debt into Growth,’ National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper 21280 (2015), 1–29.

74 D. Baugh, ‘Great Britain’s Blue Water Policy 1689–1815,’ International History Review 10 (1988): 33–58.

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76 L. Cullen, An Economic History of Ireland since 1660 (London: Batsford, 1987).

77 J. Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

78 J. Rule, Albion’s People. English Society 1714–1815 (London: New York: Longman, 1992); E. P.Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London: Harmsworth, 1967).

79 J. Brewer and J. Styles, eds. An Ungovernable People: the English and their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London: Hutchinson, 1980); C. Emsley, Crime and Society in England 1750–1900 (Longman: London, 1987); Cookson, ‘Service without Politics’; B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People. England 1783–1846 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006).

80 For debate on the numbers, see M. Berg and P. Hudson, ‘Rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution,’ Economic History Review 45 (1992): 269–35; P. Temin, ‘Two Views of the British Industrial Revolution,’ Journal of Economic History 57 (1997): 63–83; N. Crafts and K. Harley, ‘Output Growth and the British Industrial Revolution: A Restatement of the Crafts-Harley View,’ Economic History Review 45 (1992): 703–30; N. Crafts and K. Harley, ‘Simulating the Two Views of the Industrial Revolution,’ Journal of Economic History 60 (2000): 819–41. For the very latest set of figures that await critical scrutiny from an audacious but laudable attempt to construct annual estimates for GDP per capita 1270–1870, see Broadberry et al., British Economic Growth.

81 C. MacLeod, Heroes of Invention, Technology, Liberalism and British Identity 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

82 N. Crafts, ‘Productivity Growth in the Industrial Revolution: A New Growth Accounting Perspective,’ Journal Economic History 64 (2004): 521–35; N. Voigtlander and H. J. Voth, ‘Why England? Demographic Factors Structural Change and Physical Capital Accumulation During the Industrial Revolution,’ Journal of Economic Growth 11 (2006); Broadberry et al., British Economic Growth. Clark’s data are utilized to support his definition of an Industrial Revolution that begins with a clear discontinuity in the growth of factor productivity. See G. Clark, ‘The Industrial Revolution,’ P. Aghion and S. Durlaf, eds. Handbook of Economic Growth (Amsterdam: North Holland, 2013), vol. 2, 217–62.

83 J. Mokyr, ‘Accounting for the Industrial Revolution,’ in Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, eds. Floud and Johnson (2004), 1–27.

84 B. A’Hearn, ‘The Industrial Revolution in a European Mirror,’ in The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain, eds. R. Floud et al., vol. 1, 1–53.

85 J. Madsen et al., ‘Four Centuries of British Economic Growth: The Roles of Population and Technology,’ Journal of Economic Growth 15 (2010): 263–90; Tepper and Boroweicki, Accounting for Breakout; J. Mokyr, A Culture of Growth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

86 Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective; Broadberry et al., British Economic Growth; N. Crafts, ‘The First Industrial Revolution: Resolving the Slow Growth/Rapid Industrialization Paradox?,’ Journal of the European Economic Association 3 (2005): 525–34.

87 R. Church and A. Wrigley, eds. The Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Oxford Blackwells, 1994), vols. 8–10.

88 V. Ruttan, Technology, Growth and Development: An Induced Innovation Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) part 2; C. Freeman, ‘History as Evolution and Economic Growth,’ Industrial and Corporate Change 28 (1991): 1–44; Roger Morriss, Science, Utility and British Naval Technology, 1793–1815: Samuel Bentham and the Royal Dockyards (Routledge, 2021).

89 J. Mokyr, Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); M. Jacobs, The First Knowledge Economy. Human Capital and the European Economy 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

90 R. C. Allen, ‘Engels Pause; Technical Change, Capital Accumulation and Inequality in the Industrial Revolution in Explorations,’ Economic History 46 (2009); Riello and O’Brien, ‘Reconstructing the Industrial Revolution’; Jacob, The First Knowledge Economy.

91 C. Feinstein and S. Pollard, eds. Studies in Capital Formation in the United Kingdom 1750–1820 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

92 Allen, ‘Engels Pause’.

93 P. O’Brien, Contributions of Warfare with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France; Prados De La Escoura, Exceptionalism and Industrialization, 35–69; N. Palma and P.O’Brien, ‘Danger to the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street. The Bank Restriction Act and the Regime Shift to Paper Money, 1797–1821,’ European Review of Economic History 37 (2019): 1–37; J. Ventura and H.-J. Voth, ‘Debt into Growth. How Sovereign Debt Accelerated the First Industrial Revolution,’ N.B.E.R. Working Paper 21280; A. Digby, ed. New Directions in Economic History and Social History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992), 37–48.

94 R. Stern and C. Wennerlind, eds. Mercantilism Re-Imagines. Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and its Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); P. Vries, State, Economy and the Great Divergence; and T. Hutchison, Before Adam Smith. The Emergence of Political Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988).

95 K. Tribe, ‘Mercantilism and Economics of State Formation,’ in Mercantilist Economics, ed. L. Magnusson (Boston: Kluwer, 1993).

96 Rates of diffusion could conceivably be, but imperfectly, captured by records of applications for patents. See C. Macleod, ‘Patents for Invention? Setting the Stage for the British Industrial Revolution?,’ Empiria, Revista de Metologia de ciencas sociale 18 (2009): 37–58; A. Nuvolari, ‘Patents and Industrialization – An Historical Overview 1624–1907,’ Strategic Board on Intellectual Property Policy (unpublished paper, 2010).

97 G. Stedman-Jones, An End to Poverty. A Historical Debate (London: Profile Books, 2004); E. Rothschild, ‘The English Kopf,’ in The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, eds. D. Winch and P. K. O’Brien (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

98 F. Crouzet, The First Industrialists. The Problems of Origins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); McCloskey, Bourgeois Virtues.

99 Allen, The British Industrial Revolution.

100 On domestic market integration, see V. Bateman, ‘Markets and Growth,’ in Early Modern Europe (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012); Mokyr, Enlightened Economy; McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity. Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010).

101 Allen, ‘Engles Pause’. For Clark’s data, see G. Clark, A Farewell to Alms (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Feinstein, ‘Pessimism Perpetuated: Real Wages and the Standard of Living in Britain during and after the Industrial Revolution,’ Journal of Economic History 38 (1998): 625–58.

102 J. L. Van Zanden, The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution. The European Economy in Global Perspective (Leiden: Brill, 2012); Goldstone, ‘Efflorescences and Economic Growth in World History’.

103 M. Daunton, Progress and Poverty. An Economic and Social History of Britain 1750–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press); N. Crafts, ‘British Industrialization in an International Context,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 19 (1989): 415–28.

104 J. L. Hammond, The Town Labourer, 1710–1832 (London: Longmans, 1925); Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour; Riello and O’Brien, ‘Reconstructing the Industrial Revolution’.

105 O’Brien, ‘Aristocracies and Economic Progress under the Ancien Regime,’ in European Aristocracies and Colonial Elites, eds. P. Janssens and B. Yun-Casalilla (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005).

106 Voigtlander and Voth, ‘Why England? Demographic Factors, Structural Change and Physical Capital Accumulation during the Industrial Revolution’; G. Clark, ‘The Industrial Revolution’.

107 But see Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations; idem, The Unbound Prometheus. Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present Day (2nd edn, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Acemoglu et al., Why Nations Fail.

108 A. Bala. The Dialogue of Civilizations in the Birth of Modern Science (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); A. Pacey, The Maze of Ingenuity Ideas and Idealism in the Development of Technology (Cambridge: Mass., MIT Press, 1994); B. Bunch and A. Hellmans, The History of Science and Technology, 1455–1999 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2004); J. Madsen and F. Murtin, ‘The Mechanics of Economic Development in Britain since 1270: The Role of Great Scientists and Education,’ Journal of Economic Growth 22 (2017): 229–72.

109 J. Mokyr, The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Prados de la Escosura, Exceptionalism and Industrialization.

110 D. Wootton, The Invention of Science (London: Penguin, 2015); W. Clark et al., eds. The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999); L. Hilaire-Perez, L’invention technique au siècle des lumieres (Paris: Albin-Michel, 2000). For a dissenting view, see Jacob, The First Knowledge Economy.

111 J. Brooke, Science and Religion. Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); K. Davids, Religion, Technology and the Great and Little Divergencies (Leiden: Brill, 2013); P. O’Brien, ‘Cosmographies for the Discovery, Development and Diffusion of Useful and Reliable Knowledge in Pre-Industrial Europe and Late Imperial China. A Survey and Speculation,’ LSE Department of Economic History Working Paper 289/2019; D. Cantoni, ‘The Economic Effects of the Protestant Reformation. Testing the Weber Hypothesis in the German Lands,’ European Economics Association 13 (2015): 561–98.

112 But contrast the claims of Jacob, The First Knowledge Economy with P. O’Brien et al. (eds), Urban Achievements in Early Modern Europe. Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For a critique, see C. O’Grada, ‘Did Science Cause the Industrial Revolution?,’ UCD School of Economics Working Paper 14 (2014).

113 R. Porter, Enlightenment Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London: Allen Lane, 2001); J. Clark, English Society 1688–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); I. Inkster, Scientific Culture and Urbanization in Industrializing Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997).

114 J. Harris, Industrial Espionage and Technology Transfer. Britain and France in the Eighteenth Century (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997); P. O’Brien, ed. The Crucible of Revolutionary and Napoleonic Warfare and European Transitions to Modern Economic Growth (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming)

115 P. O’Brien et al., ‘Political Components of the Industrial Revolution: English Cotton Textile Industry 1660–1774,’ Economic History Review 44 (1991): 395–42; J. Inikori, African and the Industrial Revolution in England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); G. Riello, Cotton. The Fabric that Made the Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

116 S. Epstein, ‘Transferring Technical Knowledge and Innovating in Europe,’ Department of Economic History Working Paper 01-05 (2005), 1–39; M. Prak and S. Epstein, Guilds, Innovation and Economy in Europe (London: Routledge, 2008).

117 P. Wallis, ‘Labour Markets and Training,’ in Floud et al., Cambridge Economic History of Modern Britain (2014), 178–201; J. Lerner and S. Stern, eds. The Rate and Direction of Inventive Activity Revisited (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012); M. Kelly et al., ‘Precocious Albion – A New Interpretation of the British Industrial Revolution,’ Annual Reviews of Economics 6 (2014).

118 C. MacLeod and A. Nuvolari, ‘Glorious Times. The Emergence of Mechanical Engineering in Early Industrial Britain,’ Brussels Economic Review 52 (2009): 215–37; P. M. Jones, Industrial Enlightenment. Science, Technology and Culture in Birmingham and the West Midlands (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009).

119 Van Zanden, The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution.

120 Vries, State Economy and the Great Divergence.

121 C. O’Grada, ‘Did Science Cause the Industrial Revolution?’ disagrees, but see Madsen and Fabrice, ‘The Mechanics of Economic Development.’

122 P. O’Brien, ‘Historical Foundations for a Global Perspective on the Emergence of a Western European Regime for the Discovery, Development and Diffusion of Useful and Reliable Knowledge,’ Journal of Global History 8 (2013): 1–24; M. Kelly et al., ‘Precocious Albion’; M. Kelly and C. O’Grada, ‘Ready for Revolution?,’ University College Dublin Workng Paper 14 (2014).

123 D. Jeremy, ‘Damming the Flood. British Government Efforts to Check the Outflow of Technicians and Machinery,’ Business History Review 51 (1977): 1–34.

124 M. Berg and K. Bruland, eds. Technological Revolution in Europe. Historical Perspectives (Cheltenham: Elgar, 1998); D. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (London: Little Brown, 1998).

125 For an eloquent, but highly polemicized, elaboration of Hodgson’s argument, see J. Hobson, The Eastern Origins of Western Civilization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

126 The confounding of Malthus is the inspiration for Broadberry et al., British Economic Growth 1270–1870. Also see the special issue of the European Review of Economic History devoted to Clark’s Farewell to Alms.

127 Pomeranz, The Great Divergence.

128 T. Piketty, Capital in the Twenty First Century (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard, 2015).

129 R. Bin Wong, ‘The Political Economy of Agrarian Empire and its Modern Legacy,’ in China and Historical Capitalism, eds. T. Brook and G. Blue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 210–45; K. Sugihara, ‘The East Asian Path of Economic Development: a Long Term Perspective,’ in The Resurgence of East Asia, ed. G. Arrighi (London: Routledge, 2003).

130 M. Hodgson, Rethinking World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 68.

131 R. Allen, Global Economic History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).

132 P. O’Brien, Contrasting Cosmologies for the Development of Science in Pre-Industrial Europe and Late Imperial China (VSG, forthcoming); Madsen and Murtin, ‘The Mechanics of Economic Development.’