A Semipopular Review of the Industrial Revolution(s)

Too many 40-somethings get way too into World War 2, so I’m taking up economic history as a hobby instead

The Industrial Revolution is commonly held to be one of the two or three most important things the human race ever did, yet until a few years ago I had a tenuous grasp of what it actually was, aside from trains and a bunch of dark Satanic mills. It’s fundamental to understanding comparative economic development, which is something worth knowing about for anyone interested in a better, fairer world. None of what I write here is meant to claim any special expertise on my part—it’s meant to be a summary of the conventional wisdom among economic historians. In addition to or instead of the books below, Davis Kedrosky’s Substack is a valuable summary of the current consensus in the field, as well as its bones of contention.

Two revolutions

The whole idea of the Industrial Revolutions became much clearer to me after encountering the theory that there were (at least) two of them, and that it was the second one, beginning around 1850, that was ultimately the more consequential. Britain at that time, followed at lags of varying lengths by most of the rest of the world, began an ongoing era of strong and sustained technology-driven growth, unprecedented in human history and interrupted only by occasional wars, recessions, and pandemics. A developed country can now reliably expect GDP per capita to multiply by two to five over the course of a typical lifetime, which means a vastly improved quality of life for almost all the income distribution. Yet it’s the first Industrial Revolution, beginning in 1757 when British inventions began to inexorably rise in quantity, that gets all the attention. The assumption seems to be that the first revolution made the second inevitable, barring historical contingencies like Napoleon winning. Yet for a revolution that was arguably the most significant event of the last 10,000 years, it took a remarkably long time for anyone to notice something big was happening: Blake and Wordsworth were among the earliest around the turn of the century. So at least at first, the changes must’ve been quite subtle, difficult to distinguish from those in other urban booms like the Italian Renaissance or the Dutch Golden Age, neither of which led nearly as directly to spaceships and Nintendos. E.A. Wrigley’s table-filled The Path to Sustained Growth argues the first Industrial Revolution is best understood as an energy transition, from then-limited organic energy ultimately derived from photosynthesis to fossil fuels, which permitted exponential growth. This seems true enough, which then raises the question: if coal has been in the ground for all of human history, why didn’t this happen before?

Before the (first) Revolution

Malthus gets a bad rap these days, in part because his theory became wrong just at the moment he published it, in part because of the appropriation of his name for dumb and/or racist Population Bomb-style nonsense. Neo-Malthusian UC Davis econ professor Gregory Clark, author of A Farewell to Alms which I read the first two-thirds of, is at least not dumb. The first big question he addresses is why there was little to no long-run improvement in living standards for basically all of recorded history until (at least) the first Industrial Revolution—the stubborn refusal of quality of life to rise consistently is by now very well documented. The crux of his model is that when material living standards rise, people have more surviving children, raising population and reducing living standards again. This does seem to be the most parsimonious story consistent with his endless time series graphs he displays, though you’d need better data on how fertility responds to changes in income to definitively distinguish between his theory and slightly Marxier ones. Clark’s second big question is the perennial “why did the Industrial Revolution begin in Britain and not somewhere else?” He argues some kind of evolution towards “middle-class values”, like hard work, is responsible, strategically leaving open whether he thinks this evolution is cultural or biological (although the Hemingway-punned title of his upcoming For Whom the Bell Curve Tolls gives a hint as to on which side of the culture war he’s on.) In contrast to his temporal comparisons, his geographic comparisons are weak: his best evidence for a different rate of values evolution in Asia compared to Europe is “samurai adopted more children after 1700”, which would get you demoted from the varsity debate team. For a thorough comparison, we need someone who knows a lot more about the world beyond Europe.

Could it have been China?

Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence, first published in 2001, comes close to being a consensus left view of comparative economic history. It remains a major book, yet its central thesis is iffy, so reading it requires some care. Pomeranz claims that there wasn’t much difference in economic development between the richest parts of Europe and the richest parts of Asia until around 1800, then seeks to explain why the Great Divergence occurred. He amasses a huge amount of evidence to show that China in particular had highly sophisticated markets, perhaps before Europe did, and shows convincingly that there’s nothing differentiating about European institutions in themselves that made it inevitable that the West would take off before the East. But the latest and best empirical evidence says the divergence between Britain and the most prosperous parts of China (around Shanghai) began at more like 1700. A hundred years might not sound like much on the scale of human civilization, but it does make reading the book tricky because one has to constantly mentally adjust for this. So the New World has to get downweighted as a potential explanation for the divergence, since trade didn't blow up until long after 1700, whereas coal, which was much easier to acquire in large quantities in Britain than in Shanghai, gets upweighted. The other big lacuna is tech—soon after the divergence, the rich parts of Europe achieved consistently improving technology, whereas China’s tech progress, while not lacking in inventiveness (prototypes of many of the key 18th century British inventions appeared in China centuries earlier) was highly uneven until quite recently. Pomeranz, in common with seemingly just about all non-specialist historians, economists, and economic historians, shows little curiosity as to why.

Why Britain?

Robert Allen’s The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective is probably the most complete attempt to answer why the first Industrial Revolution began in 18th century Britain and not elsewhere in Europe, though the very premise encourages overdeterministic answers. Allen doesn’t entirely escape this, but also doesn’t settle for monocausality. Much of the book’s focus is on why opportunities for invention were much more plentiful at that time in Britain compared to France or the Netherlands—coal, sure, and having an Empire didn’t hurt, whereas enclosure and parliamentary democracy don’t seem to have made much empirical difference. Allen’s signature theory is that high British wages meant a unique demand for labor-saving innovations, but his mathematical modeling isn’t the most robust and apparently there are bitter empirical disputes about relative wages in the 1700s. Still, it’s plausible, and probably a testable hypothesis with better data and equations. In contrast, the question of why the huge wave of inventions began when it did isn’t nearly as well-addressed.

When science?

Joel Mokyr’s The Enlightened Economy, in addition to answering “why 18th century Britain?”, attempts more seriously than the books above to describe how industrialization affected people at the time. While this is perhaps best addressed by people who aren’t economists, Mokyr presents a plethora of time series, showing that any increase in real wages before 1850 was limited and quite plausibly offset by worsening working conditions. (Historians often tut-tut economists for being too rosy about this time period; that’s not an issue here.) The book’s title gives away Mokyr’s answer to the question of when: his argument is the Enlightenment was the key force driving Britain’s and eventually the world’s economic transformation. He makes the case that some version of the Scientific Revolution had to precede the Industrial one: the invention of the printing press didn’t lead to anywhere the same rate of further innovations as did the factory system for textiles, and it’s very plausible that part of the explanation is that empiricism wasn’t nearly as well developed in the earlier era. Why the change began in Britain is never insuperably addressed: obvious resource differences, like in coal, are downplayed in favor of praise of British institutions and pragmatism, and there isn’t a careful comparative treatment that really makes it clear how Britain differs from Holland or Belgium in these respects. But you can get that from Allen, and the location was probably more random than the timing anyway. Given this, Mokyr is probably the book to read if you want to read one 500 page work by an economist on the first Industrial Revolution.

What’s unclear to me is the full structure of the causal interplay between science and the Revolutions. British science boomed in the 17th century, and yet it played at most a minor role in the first Revolution—famously, James Hargreaves, the inventor of the spinning jenny, was illiterate—so how did it eventually become crucial? Was it necessary to churn through the low-hanging fruit before science-based innovation could become the norm? Was the second Industrial Revolution really inevitable once the incentives for invention made it clear that science paid, or was it kind of a fluke result of the right inventions at the right time? Answering these questions requires understanding the development of science and technology during the crucial 17th to 19th centuries, so I guess that’s my next hobby. I’ll get back to you in a couple of years.