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The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective
Why did the industrial revolution take place in eighteenth-century Britain and not elsewhere in Europe or Asia? In this convincing new account Robert Allen argues that the British industrial revolution was a successful response to the global economy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He shows that in Britain wages were high and capital and energy cheap in comparison to other countries in Europe and Asia. As a result, the breakthrough technologies of the industrial revolution - the steam engine, the cotton mill, and the substitution of coal for wood in metal production - were uniquely profitable to invent and use in Britain. The high wage economy of pre-industrial Britain also fostered industrial development since more people could afford schooling and apprenticeships. It was only when British engineers made these new technologies more cost-effective during the nineteenth century that the industrial revolution would spread around the world.
342 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2009
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
April 3, 2020
الن واقعا یکی از خو،ش مغزترین و چپ مغزترین آدم هایی که دیدم و قطعا خداوندگار من در روش تحقیقه. تمرکز و دقتش رو برای کمی کردن ادعاهاش بسیار میپسندم و همینطور بددهنی و بداعصابی ش رو.
تقریبا تمامی نظریه های رایج برای توضیح چرایی مکان و زمان انقلاب صنعتی رو پوشش داده و برخلاف نقد-کتاب هایی که مینوسه جمع بندی و نقدهاش اینجا خیلی مستدل تر و منظم ترن.
در ضمن من چون از خاله زنکی اقتصاددان هام خوشم میاد اول رفتم فصل ده رو خوندم که استاد عزیزم رو نقد کرده بود.
تقریبا تمامی نظریه های رایج برای توضیح چرایی مکان و زمان انقلاب صنعتی رو پوشش داده و برخلاف نقد-کتاب هایی که مینوسه جمع بندی و نقدهاش اینجا خیلی مستدل تر و منظم ترن.
در ضمن من چون از خاله زنکی اقتصاددان هام خوشم میاد اول رفتم فصل ده رو خوندم که استاد عزیزم رو نقد کرده بود.
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January 18, 2021Probably the best single explanation for why the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain, summarized in the following formula:
A high wage economy from the Empire and the Atlantic Trade + low energy costs from Britain's weirdly rich coal deposits = a demand for labor-saving, energy-using inventions
It's a pretty dry read though, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't an economic historian, unless for some reason understanding the genesis of the spinning jenny is your jam.
A high wage economy from the Empire and the Atlantic Trade + low energy costs from Britain's weirdly rich coal deposits = a demand for labor-saving, energy-using inventions
It's a pretty dry read though, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't an economic historian, unless for some reason understanding the genesis of the spinning jenny is your jam.
November 3, 2015
This is what you would expect from the 2009 The Economist Book of the Year. It's a scholarly book filled with charts, graphs, models, citations, theories,examples. facts and conjectures.
This books tries to answer the interesting question: Why did the Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain and not elsewhere ?
Allen speaks of a number of factors that made England ripe for this new way of life where other countries were not.
1) High Wages:
High Wages were brought on from population decreases from the Black Death. The capital costs of Machinery replacing labor cost made sense here and not France. The English worker being the highest paid laborer of the time. Interesting asides on the daily diets of workers around the world in different time periods.
2) Economics of Coal. (Cheap Energy)
For the first inefficient Steam Engines that ran on waste coal it only made sense here to be used in pumping out Coal Mines. If you had to truck the coal any distance it would not be economical. Also deforestation in England made Coal much cheaper than wood/Charcoal which was not the case in France .
3) Agricultural Efficiencies (brought on by High Wages).
There were no longer serfs, the Black Death caused fewer farmers and actual return of much land to pasture which benefited English Sheep Farming and better quality of wool. Government Policies, Farmers active study and sharing data on improving yield, larger farms led to a near doubling of how many people who could be fed by a single farmer.
There is discussion of urbanization, the shift to heating with coal,history of textile innovations,steam engines, coke smelting, scientific enlightment. the role of the "Big Invention" ,scientists , incremental improvements, experimentation .
This is a great book to be read after the more narrative book
The Most Powerful Idea in the WorldThe Most Powerful Idea in the World
This books tries to answer the interesting question: Why did the Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain and not elsewhere ?
Allen speaks of a number of factors that made England ripe for this new way of life where other countries were not.
1) High Wages:
High Wages were brought on from population decreases from the Black Death. The capital costs of Machinery replacing labor cost made sense here and not France. The English worker being the highest paid laborer of the time. Interesting asides on the daily diets of workers around the world in different time periods.
2) Economics of Coal. (Cheap Energy)
For the first inefficient Steam Engines that ran on waste coal it only made sense here to be used in pumping out Coal Mines. If you had to truck the coal any distance it would not be economical. Also deforestation in England made Coal much cheaper than wood/Charcoal which was not the case in France .
3) Agricultural Efficiencies (brought on by High Wages).
There were no longer serfs, the Black Death caused fewer farmers and actual return of much land to pasture which benefited English Sheep Farming and better quality of wool. Government Policies, Farmers active study and sharing data on improving yield, larger farms led to a near doubling of how many people who could be fed by a single farmer.
There is discussion of urbanization, the shift to heating with coal,history of textile innovations,steam engines, coke smelting, scientific enlightment. the role of the "Big Invention" ,scientists , incremental improvements, experimentation .
This is a great book to be read after the more narrative book
The Most Powerful Idea in the WorldThe Most Powerful Idea in the World
October 24, 2023
Great book explaining causes of the Industrial Revolution, which were distinctly *British* - which were largely expensive wages, cheap energy incentivising the invention of labour-saving technology. Good, evidence-based discussion of other theories. It also has a good discussion of how urbanisation drove rural change and not the reverse, which undermines Brenner's account of agrarian capitalism being fundamental.
February 13, 2015
I love the data, but the global perspective is a little limited. By "data" I mean the work is based on solid facts gathered at great human cost from many sources by many people. By "limited" I mean--where's the politics? For example, he goes on and on about how the British system of high wages and low energy prices led directly to the industrial revolution and prevented it from happening in other countries. This is the "liberal" (in the sense of rapid free market economics) interpretation. Perhaps the fact that Britain had no regime changes after the Glorious Revolution (and what about that?) and France and the Netherlands and Spain and China had these small regime changes and global setbacks that may have led to a tiny bit of economic and political and cultural instability had something to do with it? We don't know, because Allen totally ignores all political factors, not even testing them. Most of the book is super-informative, particularly on the history of macro-inventions and inventors, but his statistics are a little shaky. Where are the R2 numbers to say how much variance is explained by his regressions? F-stats? I have no way to evaluate the models he presents. Also, studying the characteristics of inventors by collecting information about 50 successful ones is just bizarre--has he never heard of sampling bias? An enjoyable, well-written book, but take it all with a grain of coal. As an aside, the kind of causal modeling he is doing would greatly benefit from modeling with Bayesian networks rather than the crude structural models he uses.
January 23, 2022
Here we have yet another explanation of the most important event in history, this time from an economic historian.
Allen mostly focuses on one key piece of the causal chain: British wages were high compared to the cost of energy.
Nearly everything he says seems correct, but I have some medium-sized complaints about what he neglects.
High Wages
British wages were higher than those of just about any other country, at least after 1575. That was an important component in Britain's lead at producing technological innovation. The initial steps in many key technological advances were crude enough that they wouldn't have made sense if they were competing with cheap labor.
It seems important to focus on what caused the high wages. Allen is a bit weak here.
He mentions British diets, mostly as evidence of high British wages. But he also hints that the high calorie, high protein diet enabled higher productivity, which may have perpetuated the high wages.
A low ratio of workers to land seems to be part of the story. Malthusian forces usually pushed societies away from this. The Black Death provided some respite from high population density. Allen mumbles something about the Black Death's effects maybe still being important a couple of centuries later. But why was this more true of Britain than of neighboring countries?
Some urbanization was also important, as inventors needed other skilled craftsmen nearby as sources of ideas, tools, and parts. So maybe it took a good deal of luck for Britain to get just the right population density?
Cheap Energy
Before the 1700s, most countries used wood instead of coal, even when they had an ample supply of coal. Switching to coal required significant redesigns to most systems that burned wood.
Countries such as Britain didn't recklessly exhaust their supply of wood. Demand for wood in Britain grew due to population growth, and the resulting rise in wood prices would have constrained London's population growth if it weren't for increased use of coal. But that was due at least as much to the high cost of transporting fuel over long distances as it was to the limited supply of wood.
Something was fairly unusual about Britain's best coal mines. They produced unusually cheap coal. That helped Britain switch from wood to coal for heating and machinery, well before other countries did.
That didn't mean that coal was much cheaper in London than in other major cities. High transportation costs made coal a mediocre option almost anywhere other than right at a mine.
China is a key country to look at when wondering where the industrial revolution could have started. How did China's cheapest coal mines compare to Britain's? Allen presents no data. Pomeranz seems to care about the quantity of coal reserves, not the cost of the lowest hanging fruit. Coal use in 1700 seems to have been too small relative to reserves for the quantity of reserves to matter much.
It's unclear whether anyone knows whether China had locations where coal was as cheap as Britain's cheapest coal mines.
If China didn't have cheap coal, how much of that was due to natural conditions, and how much of it was due to less interest in developing cheap coal mines? I'm frustrated at how little I've found on this subject. The closest that I've found to an answer is this claim from Vries:
Allen implies that cheap coal is obviously good. I see some tension between that and evidence from the past century concerning the effects of natural resources on economic development. There are enough examples of failing resource-rich countries that economists often refer to a curse of natural resources. The curse appears to mostly depend on large international commodity markets, which didn't exist for coal until sometime after 1800. So it's not a strong argument against Allen's theory. It's merely a warning that it's easy to overestimate the benefits of natural resources.
Coal seems like a plausible guess as to why Britain developed key technologies before highly similar societies such as Denmark and the Netherlands. But there were numerous differences between Britain and China. I don't see a clear argument that coal prices deserve to be treated as one of the top two relevant differences. I'll guess that, in spite of the "Global" in the book's title, Allen hasn't studied China enough to have much insight about why it lagged behind Europe.
Steam Engines
Allen gives a detailed description of the development of steam power, as a clear example of where innovation depended on wages being high relative to energy costs. The first steam engines were inefficient enough that they were only worthwhile at coal mines, where they were used to pump water out of the mines. The inefficient use of fuel made it very sensitive to fuel costs.
It took decade of R&D for Newcomen to perfect this underwhelming machine. That much effort could only be repaid where there were many mines that were willing to buy such machines. Britain had far more coal mines than other European countries, partly because the low price of coal led Britain to heat more homes with coal. So Britain was able to afford more R&D.
It took nearly a century of refining steam engines before it made commercial sense for other countries to adopt steam engines.
Why was Britain's early adoption of the steam engine important? It took a century or so to produce large benefits, at which time other countries copied it.
Was it because the technical knowledge enabled British innovators to be the first to develop better steam engines, and use them in a variety of applications such as railroads, ships, better factories, etc.? Or was the steam engine mainly a symptom of British innovation abilities?
Allen suggests that Britain's cheap coal and first-mover advantages were more important than cultural or institutional features, at least up to WWI.
The steam engine and cheap iron were dependent on cheap coal, and had important influences on automating factories and transportation. That included a bit of recursive self-improvement: factory automation was used to mass-produce machines used to automate factories.
Why 1575?
To the limited extent that Allen identifies a start to the industrial revolution, it was around 1575, when British wages began to diverge from the Malthusian patterns seen in most of Europe and Asia (it took at least another century before British wages exceeded Amsterdam wages).
Allen says cheap coal was around well before then, and doesn't suggest any other resource-based explanation of what changed in the 1500s to break northwestern Europe out of the Malthusian pattern.
Was it due to lingering effects of the Black Death? Wages certainly increased in the 1300s relative to natural resources, particularly land. That's a potentially important contributor to high wages two or three centuries later.
But why was that effect stronger and more lasting in Britain than in other parts of Europe? Allen's coal-related explanation is somewhat plausible from the early 1700s to about 1900. But why did wages stay somewhat above Malthusian levels in the 1600s in northwestern Europe? I'm unclear as to whether Allen thinks he has an answer. I think he attributes it to increased agricultural productivity, driven by growing cities. But I don't see how those cities provided more of a force in Britain than in the rest of Europe and Asia.
It is now time to compare Allen's ideas with those of my current favorite book on this topic: Henrich's The WEIRDest People.
Culture
Henrich promotes a clear answer of why the 1500s were special: the rise of Protestant culture.
Allen downplays cultural explanations, enough that I got 90% of the way through the book before realizing that he admits culture played a nontrivial role in the industrial revolution.
Early in the book, he points to versions of cultural arguments that I agree are weak enough to be dismissed. Those versions were probably somewhat popular when the book was written (2009), but have been fading since then. Toward the end of the book, Allen more respectfully mentions several better ideas about cultural influences, mostly from Mokyr.
Here are some relevant cultural influences for which Allen provides some evidence, and which Henrich convinced me are more important than Allen admits:
Industrial Enlightenment
Allen describes Industrial Enlightenment as a process by which the Scientific Revolution influenced industry.
Allen shows that scientific knowledge contributed to some key inventions, such as the steam engine, via better knowledge of the principles by which those inventions worked. But he also argues that other important industries such as cotton advanced without much contribution from scientific knowledge.
The harder-to-evaluate impact of science involves indirect cultural effects. The social networks associated with science may have indirectly influenced innovation, e.g. by encouraging more experimentation in industry.
I'm reminded of this quote from Shut Out:
Did this change in elite culture begin around 1500? It was certainly far from common for elites to involve themselves in business, but Allen says some important inventors came from elite backgrounds. How much did this differ from other parts of the world?
There are a variety of ways that elite interest in industry might have improved innovation: more spare time and resources to devote to investments that don't provide quick payoffs, or maybe better cognitive abilities due to better nutrition and/or better genes.
Literacy, Numeracy
These certainly correlated with the changes that seeded the industrial revolution. Allen expresses doubts about the direction of causality.
Marital Rules / Habits
Protestant culture has some features which slow population growth. Europe, and especially northwestern Europe, had several cultural norms which prevented early marriage, and left a relatively large number of people unmarried.
Without something like that, it seems hard to explain why low population density persisted long enough after the Black Death for technology to sustain high wages.
Trade Secrets
Allen reports that innovators depended on learning from mentors. Many cultures have a distrust of strangers that limits such learning to a small circle of people who trust each other because they've lived together most of their life.
Protestant culture promoted trust among all Protestants, paving a path to the accumulation of a richer body of trade knowledge. I'm unsure whether Chinese culture had work-arounds which provided adequate substitutes for this source of trust.
Noncomformity
Allen notes that Luddites threatened innovation, particularly in the key cotton industry. Most cultures value conformity more than Protestant culture does. I can imagine that no other culture would have produced entrepreneurs who persevered in the face of that kind of opposition.
Historians versus Scientists
Henrich, and to a lesser extent Allen, have helped to illustrate the differences between historians and scientists.
Historians focus on building stories about particular, unique, events. Whereas scientists seek general theories whenever possible.
Was the industrial revolution a unique event, or was it a long pattern of related events that might be better explained by a broad theory? Historians seem biased toward the former, scientists toward the latter. Allen seems to be mostly a historian, but has enough economic training to be more neutral on this issue than most authors. Whereas Henrich is mostly trying to be a scientist, and not a historian.
To the extent to which it was a long pattern of events, I value the opinions of scientists who focus on theories about which features of 16th through 18th century Britain caused it to stand out. That would help me predict what countries will become more powerful. So I want to avoid erring in the direction that historians err, more than I want to avoid the opposite mistake.
Here are several considerations that lead me to give more weight to Henrich's cultural model:
There are many markets today which English-speaking countries dominate in ways that are somewhat hard to explain by coal or high wages: the internet, universities, medicine, movies, etc. That seems to create some presumption in favor of explanations that focus on general-purpose abilities such as culture and institutions.
Allen's perspective encourages us to imagine that a good deal of British success comes from a first-mover advantage that has been self-sustaining for a couple of centuries. That seems to be somewhat large compared to other historical examples of first-mover advantages or resource-based advantages.
What are the best such examples? Cities built around ports have smaller but longer-lasting advantages, due to natural resources (harbors). I guess that's a good enough comparison that I can't say that Allen's perspective is too far-fetched.
Cultural models provide a clear explanation of the timing of the industrial revolution. I don't see how resource-based models explain the timing.
Allen says that other countries adopted British technology when it became profitable to do so. Yet that only seems true for countries with cultures similar to Britain's. Asian countries seem to have adopted it mainly after they imported parts of Western culture.
Conclusion
Allen's account is the strongest analysis I've yet seen of the resource-related forces that contributed to the industrial revolution.
I see almost no conflict between Henrich's account and Allen's account about what happened after 1500, only some big disagreements about what was important. They disagree a good deal about what pre-1500 causes were relevant, and they both seem relatively weak there.
Allen emphasizes Britain's geographic luck, and encourages us to imagine that key inventions were just barely useful enough to create a sustainable take-off. Whereas Henrich attributes northwestern Europe's luck to cultural choices that were in place by 1520 at the latest, and wants us to believe that take-off was close to inevitable by then. The evidence is weak enough that we may never know which is closer to the truth.
Reading both Allen and Henrich will produce a better understanding than either one of them alone will produce. But if you only read one book, read Henrich's.
Allen mostly focuses on one key piece of the causal chain: British wages were high compared to the cost of energy.
Nearly everything he says seems correct, but I have some medium-sized complaints about what he neglects.
High Wages
British wages were higher than those of just about any other country, at least after 1575. That was an important component in Britain's lead at producing technological innovation. The initial steps in many key technological advances were crude enough that they wouldn't have made sense if they were competing with cheap labor.
It seems important to focus on what caused the high wages. Allen is a bit weak here.
He mentions British diets, mostly as evidence of high British wages. But he also hints that the high calorie, high protein diet enabled higher productivity, which may have perpetuated the high wages.
A low ratio of workers to land seems to be part of the story. Malthusian forces usually pushed societies away from this. The Black Death provided some respite from high population density. Allen mumbles something about the Black Death's effects maybe still being important a couple of centuries later. But why was this more true of Britain than of neighboring countries?
Some urbanization was also important, as inventors needed other skilled craftsmen nearby as sources of ideas, tools, and parts. So maybe it took a good deal of luck for Britain to get just the right population density?
Cheap Energy
Before the 1700s, most countries used wood instead of coal, even when they had an ample supply of coal. Switching to coal required significant redesigns to most systems that burned wood.
Countries such as Britain didn't recklessly exhaust their supply of wood. Demand for wood in Britain grew due to population growth, and the resulting rise in wood prices would have constrained London's population growth if it weren't for increased use of coal. But that was due at least as much to the high cost of transporting fuel over long distances as it was to the limited supply of wood.
Something was fairly unusual about Britain's best coal mines. They produced unusually cheap coal. That helped Britain switch from wood to coal for heating and machinery, well before other countries did.
That didn't mean that coal was much cheaper in London than in other major cities. High transportation costs made coal a mediocre option almost anywhere other than right at a mine.
China is a key country to look at when wondering where the industrial revolution could have started. How did China's cheapest coal mines compare to Britain's? Allen presents no data. Pomeranz seems to care about the quantity of coal reserves, not the cost of the lowest hanging fruit. Coal use in 1700 seems to have been too small relative to reserves for the quantity of reserves to matter much.
It's unclear whether anyone knows whether China had locations where coal was as cheap as Britain's cheapest coal mines.
If China didn't have cheap coal, how much of that was due to natural conditions, and how much of it was due to less interest in developing cheap coal mines? I'm frustrated at how little I've found on this subject. The closest that I've found to an answer is this claim from Vries:
My thesis would be that China, in a way, also had its 'coal' and its colonies, but that government was a serious hindrance in making the most of them. When it comes to coal mining, the Qing often prohibited opening mines in the first place or wanted those already opened closed down. Initiatives by government itself to open mines or to 'modernize' them are absent.
Allen implies that cheap coal is obviously good. I see some tension between that and evidence from the past century concerning the effects of natural resources on economic development. There are enough examples of failing resource-rich countries that economists often refer to a curse of natural resources. The curse appears to mostly depend on large international commodity markets, which didn't exist for coal until sometime after 1800. So it's not a strong argument against Allen's theory. It's merely a warning that it's easy to overestimate the benefits of natural resources.
Coal seems like a plausible guess as to why Britain developed key technologies before highly similar societies such as Denmark and the Netherlands. But there were numerous differences between Britain and China. I don't see a clear argument that coal prices deserve to be treated as one of the top two relevant differences. I'll guess that, in spite of the "Global" in the book's title, Allen hasn't studied China enough to have much insight about why it lagged behind Europe.
Steam Engines
Allen gives a detailed description of the development of steam power, as a clear example of where innovation depended on wages being high relative to energy costs. The first steam engines were inefficient enough that they were only worthwhile at coal mines, where they were used to pump water out of the mines. The inefficient use of fuel made it very sensitive to fuel costs.
It took decade of R&D for Newcomen to perfect this underwhelming machine. That much effort could only be repaid where there were many mines that were willing to buy such machines. Britain had far more coal mines than other European countries, partly because the low price of coal led Britain to heat more homes with coal. So Britain was able to afford more R&D.
It took nearly a century of refining steam engines before it made commercial sense for other countries to adopt steam engines.
Why was Britain's early adoption of the steam engine important? It took a century or so to produce large benefits, at which time other countries copied it.
Was it because the technical knowledge enabled British innovators to be the first to develop better steam engines, and use them in a variety of applications such as railroads, ships, better factories, etc.? Or was the steam engine mainly a symptom of British innovation abilities?
Allen suggests that Britain's cheap coal and first-mover advantages were more important than cultural or institutional features, at least up to WWI.
The steam engine and cheap iron were dependent on cheap coal, and had important influences on automating factories and transportation. That included a bit of recursive self-improvement: factory automation was used to mass-produce machines used to automate factories.
Why 1575?
To the limited extent that Allen identifies a start to the industrial revolution, it was around 1575, when British wages began to diverge from the Malthusian patterns seen in most of Europe and Asia (it took at least another century before British wages exceeded Amsterdam wages).
Allen says cheap coal was around well before then, and doesn't suggest any other resource-based explanation of what changed in the 1500s to break northwestern Europe out of the Malthusian pattern.
Was it due to lingering effects of the Black Death? Wages certainly increased in the 1300s relative to natural resources, particularly land. That's a potentially important contributor to high wages two or three centuries later.
But why was that effect stronger and more lasting in Britain than in other parts of Europe? Allen's coal-related explanation is somewhat plausible from the early 1700s to about 1900. But why did wages stay somewhat above Malthusian levels in the 1600s in northwestern Europe? I'm unclear as to whether Allen thinks he has an answer. I think he attributes it to increased agricultural productivity, driven by growing cities. But I don't see how those cities provided more of a force in Britain than in the rest of Europe and Asia.
It is now time to compare Allen's ideas with those of my current favorite book on this topic: Henrich's The WEIRDest People.
Culture
Henrich promotes a clear answer of why the 1500s were special: the rise of Protestant culture.
Allen downplays cultural explanations, enough that I got 90% of the way through the book before realizing that he admits culture played a nontrivial role in the industrial revolution.
Early in the book, he points to versions of cultural arguments that I agree are weak enough to be dismissed. Those versions were probably somewhat popular when the book was written (2009), but have been fading since then. Toward the end of the book, Allen more respectfully mentions several better ideas about cultural influences, mostly from Mokyr.
Here are some relevant cultural influences for which Allen provides some evidence, and which Henrich convinced me are more important than Allen admits:
Industrial Enlightenment
Allen describes Industrial Enlightenment as a process by which the Scientific Revolution influenced industry.
Allen shows that scientific knowledge contributed to some key inventions, such as the steam engine, via better knowledge of the principles by which those inventions worked. But he also argues that other important industries such as cotton advanced without much contribution from scientific knowledge.
The harder-to-evaluate impact of science involves indirect cultural effects. The social networks associated with science may have indirectly influenced innovation, e.g. by encouraging more experimentation in industry.
I'm reminded of this quote from Shut Out:
The evolution of capitalism has led to almost universal acceptance of middle-class values. Whereas the elite of most societies have sought control and leisure, these few modern open access societies have a citizenry that seeks to be productive, to cooperate, and to innovate. It is common to hear complaints that wealthy children today have an unfair advantage because they can access the best schools, get the best education, and therefore perpetuate inequality by working in the most lucrative careers. But everyone should appreciate how revolutionary this is. Elites of the past would scoff at the notion that this even describes elites. Elites don't need to be productive. Elites have access and control.
Did this change in elite culture begin around 1500? It was certainly far from common for elites to involve themselves in business, but Allen says some important inventors came from elite backgrounds. How much did this differ from other parts of the world?
There are a variety of ways that elite interest in industry might have improved innovation: more spare time and resources to devote to investments that don't provide quick payoffs, or maybe better cognitive abilities due to better nutrition and/or better genes.
Literacy, Numeracy
These certainly correlated with the changes that seeded the industrial revolution. Allen expresses doubts about the direction of causality.
Marital Rules / Habits
Protestant culture has some features which slow population growth. Europe, and especially northwestern Europe, had several cultural norms which prevented early marriage, and left a relatively large number of people unmarried.
Without something like that, it seems hard to explain why low population density persisted long enough after the Black Death for technology to sustain high wages.
Trade Secrets
Allen reports that innovators depended on learning from mentors. Many cultures have a distrust of strangers that limits such learning to a small circle of people who trust each other because they've lived together most of their life.
Protestant culture promoted trust among all Protestants, paving a path to the accumulation of a richer body of trade knowledge. I'm unsure whether Chinese culture had work-arounds which provided adequate substitutes for this source of trust.
Noncomformity
Allen notes that Luddites threatened innovation, particularly in the key cotton industry. Most cultures value conformity more than Protestant culture does. I can imagine that no other culture would have produced entrepreneurs who persevered in the face of that kind of opposition.
Historians versus Scientists
Henrich, and to a lesser extent Allen, have helped to illustrate the differences between historians and scientists.
Historians focus on building stories about particular, unique, events. Whereas scientists seek general theories whenever possible.
Was the industrial revolution a unique event, or was it a long pattern of related events that might be better explained by a broad theory? Historians seem biased toward the former, scientists toward the latter. Allen seems to be mostly a historian, but has enough economic training to be more neutral on this issue than most authors. Whereas Henrich is mostly trying to be a scientist, and not a historian.
To the extent to which it was a long pattern of events, I value the opinions of scientists who focus on theories about which features of 16th through 18th century Britain caused it to stand out. That would help me predict what countries will become more powerful. So I want to avoid erring in the direction that historians err, more than I want to avoid the opposite mistake.
Here are several considerations that lead me to give more weight to Henrich's cultural model:
There are many markets today which English-speaking countries dominate in ways that are somewhat hard to explain by coal or high wages: the internet, universities, medicine, movies, etc. That seems to create some presumption in favor of explanations that focus on general-purpose abilities such as culture and institutions.
Allen's perspective encourages us to imagine that a good deal of British success comes from a first-mover advantage that has been self-sustaining for a couple of centuries. That seems to be somewhat large compared to other historical examples of first-mover advantages or resource-based advantages.
What are the best such examples? Cities built around ports have smaller but longer-lasting advantages, due to natural resources (harbors). I guess that's a good enough comparison that I can't say that Allen's perspective is too far-fetched.
Cultural models provide a clear explanation of the timing of the industrial revolution. I don't see how resource-based models explain the timing.
Allen says that other countries adopted British technology when it became profitable to do so. Yet that only seems true for countries with cultures similar to Britain's. Asian countries seem to have adopted it mainly after they imported parts of Western culture.
Conclusion
Allen's account is the strongest analysis I've yet seen of the resource-related forces that contributed to the industrial revolution.
I see almost no conflict between Henrich's account and Allen's account about what happened after 1500, only some big disagreements about what was important. They disagree a good deal about what pre-1500 causes were relevant, and they both seem relatively weak there.
Allen emphasizes Britain's geographic luck, and encourages us to imagine that key inventions were just barely useful enough to create a sustainable take-off. Whereas Henrich attributes northwestern Europe's luck to cultural choices that were in place by 1520 at the latest, and wants us to believe that take-off was close to inevitable by then. The evidence is weak enough that we may never know which is closer to the truth.
Reading both Allen and Henrich will produce a better understanding than either one of them alone will produce. But if you only read one book, read Henrich's.
August 4, 2021
I really liked this book. I read it in a little over a day on holiday. While some of the economic formulas went over my head, I found the argument cogent, and I enjoyed the fairly detailed accounts of the macro inventions by Newcomen, Hargreaves, Arkwright, and the Darby family. I particularly appreciated the discussion about innovation among open field communities and feel Allen makes a convincing challenge to Joel Mokyr's top-down model focused on an Industrial Enlightenment. I also think Allen's economic explanation for Britain being first is a good way to get around the baggage that can come with the cultural explanations that have so often been invoked, much as I as a Quaker do like to think the prevalence of dissenters among the earlier innovators is significant, and it is striking that for all his other graphics, that is something that he does not quantify. I also think at times, Allen misses a chance to take the argument out of the abstract. For example, while it may be accurate to say that Hargreaves intent was to save labor, it might be more useful to not that the high price of yarn was an incentive for a man like Hargreaves to innovate because it would multiple the income a family made from home spinning. It also explains why he was able to sell his machine to neighbors early on, and also why it soon made Hargreaves unpopular. What Hargreaves did not foresee and likely did not grasp until after the fact was that the greater efficiency of the Spinning Jenny mitigated the bottleneck that had been driving the demand for yarn -- the increased weaving speed brought about by Kay's invention of the flying shuttle. In fact, I find it quirky that Allen barely mentions Kay at all. That is a small quibble though. If you are interested in the Industrial Revolution and why England was first, this is a must read.
August 25, 2013
A valuable and short synthesis of the historiography of the Industrial Revolution, with a stronger emphasis on economic causation than one sees in the cultural or social schools. The strong thesis: a high-wage, cheap energy economy will benefit from labour saving mechanisation is clear. Yet, the reduction of invention to a supply of educated inventors and a recognition of opportunities ("demand") is not so convincing. A middling class and rising wave of human capital are pre-requisites, but so is a set of individuals who can recognise and respond to opportunity. A valuable read and a confirmation that it is unlikely the Industrial Revolution could have arisen elsewhere.
The road to the modern world runs through Britain, especially northern England.
The road to the modern world runs through Britain, especially northern England.
August 21, 2012
Robert C. Allen answers the question "why Britain has been the first country to develop an industrial revolution" by a three-fold response: wealth, cheap energy and cultural (scientific) superiority. Whether this rather simple answer is adequate enough or not is to be answered by each reader according to his like but it gives the reader a good idea about what is meant by industrial revolution and the historical connections. For a more diversed range of theories I would recommend David Landes or Kevin H.O'Rourke on the topic.
October 31, 2021
Top-notch, one of the best economic history books out there even if you don't agree with the argument (but you should, it's pretty correct). The data is terrific, and it is analysed wonderfully. Combines a very big scope with precise detail when necessary.
July 29, 2017
¿Por qué la revolución industrial comenzó en Inglaterra y no en otro país de Europa como Holanda o Francia? ¿Por que no comenzó en la India o en China u cualquier otro lugar del mundo? La mayor parte del libro trata de responder estas preguntas y la respuesta que Robert Allen encuentra es por que Inglaterra era una economía de salarios altos y tenía un acceso barato a una fuente de energía (el carbón)
La historia del arranque de la revolución industrial entonces ocurrió en buena medida dónde ocurrió por una serie de accidentes históricos que hicieron rentable que el desarrollo de tecnologías como la fundición de acero con coque, la mecanización de los textiles o la maquina de vapor tuvieran sentido económico al permitir la sustitución de factores de producción más caros por otros más baratos.
El autor utiliza muchas fuentes de datos históricos para darnos una idea de los niveles de producción de ciertos bienes y como la mezcla de estos factores con el imperio de ultramar británico permitieron que la economía de las islas británicas despegara rápidamente y se beneficiaria de la primera etapa "moderna" de la globalización.
La parte final del libro hace un recuente de como fue el proceso de desarrollo de las tres tecnologías más conocidas de la revolución industrial y como lograron su adopción en Inglaterra y en otros países alrededor del mundo, especialmente en Europa occidental.
Es un gran libro, muy recomendable para entender los orígenes de la revolución industrial y que sirve para contrastar las explicaciones que emplean la evolución cultural como las de Mokyr con una interpretación mucho más clásica de la economía donde la innovación y sus efectos en el desarrollo parten en buena medida de la estructura de precios de la economía.
La historia del arranque de la revolución industrial entonces ocurrió en buena medida dónde ocurrió por una serie de accidentes históricos que hicieron rentable que el desarrollo de tecnologías como la fundición de acero con coque, la mecanización de los textiles o la maquina de vapor tuvieran sentido económico al permitir la sustitución de factores de producción más caros por otros más baratos.
El autor utiliza muchas fuentes de datos históricos para darnos una idea de los niveles de producción de ciertos bienes y como la mezcla de estos factores con el imperio de ultramar británico permitieron que la economía de las islas británicas despegara rápidamente y se beneficiaria de la primera etapa "moderna" de la globalización.
La parte final del libro hace un recuente de como fue el proceso de desarrollo de las tres tecnologías más conocidas de la revolución industrial y como lograron su adopción en Inglaterra y en otros países alrededor del mundo, especialmente en Europa occidental.
Es un gran libro, muy recomendable para entender los orígenes de la revolución industrial y que sirve para contrastar las explicaciones que emplean la evolución cultural como las de Mokyr con una interpretación mucho más clásica de la economía donde la innovación y sus efectos en el desarrollo parten en buena medida de la estructura de precios de la economía.
January 6, 2019
The Industrial revolution was considered one of the most important events that occurred in human history. The revolution basically replaced simple, time consuming, and cost-inefficient tasks with machines. Before the revolution, jobs like sewing or farming were all done by humans and animals due to there not being a cost-effective alternative, but as gas engines become more powerful, compact, and cost-efficient, those tasks were replaced by machines. Without the industrial revolution, we would not be able to live the life that we live right now.
Robert C. Allen provided a clear overview of the entire industrial revolution including the reason why it started, the procedure, and the ending results of the revolution. Unlike most other books about past history, this book about the industrial revolution is very concise and clear, all of the events were provided from a neutral point of view, therefore making all the information in the book reliable.
If asking me, I would consider this book one of the best talking about the industrial revolution, therefore I would rank it 4.5 points out of 5. I do recommend this book to read to readers of all range.
Robert C. Allen provided a clear overview of the entire industrial revolution including the reason why it started, the procedure, and the ending results of the revolution. Unlike most other books about past history, this book about the industrial revolution is very concise and clear, all of the events were provided from a neutral point of view, therefore making all the information in the book reliable.
If asking me, I would consider this book one of the best talking about the industrial revolution, therefore I would rank it 4.5 points out of 5. I do recommend this book to read to readers of all range.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 14, 2021
Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in Britain? According to Allen, a high wage economy & low energy costs! The inventions, which were first used in Britain, and later spread to the rest of the world, saved labor, but used energy. At first, the inventions were too costly and energy-intensive to work elsewhere, but tinkering helped bring the cost down and incentivized their spread beyond Britain.
4 stars for a plausible explanation for the origins of the Industrial Revolution, as well as an interesting discussion on the nature of human invention and creativity.
4 stars for a plausible explanation for the origins of the Industrial Revolution, as well as an interesting discussion on the nature of human invention and creativity.
Read
April 11, 2020This is the kind of historicism that concentrates on statistics and geological measurements. It would be a great resource for those who are familiar with political and individual agencies as a supplement.
April 3, 2021
Interesting Reading
Why in Britain and not France or Holland?
What was the factors that made it happen ?
When was that?
Read the exiting history about the industrial revolution. The language is easy flowing.
Why in Britain and not France or Holland?
What was the factors that made it happen ?
When was that?
Read the exiting history about the industrial revolution. The language is easy flowing.
September 18, 2023
I am wolf of Wall Street
June 22, 2015
I read this book for an NEH Summer Seminar. Deeply analytical, and packed with quantitative analysis. Primarily focused on the unique combination of high labor costs and cheap coal prices in Britain. This combination is the sole reason for the industrial revolution beginning in Britain. Good comparative analysis between Britain and other European countries and sometimes China. I wish Allen did more with China.
I like the way placed the work of British scientists and inventors into the context of their time and place. He described history as being largely a "path dependent trajectory," meaning that context shaped history more than individual initiative.
Warning this is a data heavy book. Several good case studies of particular farms and businesses.
I like the way placed the work of British scientists and inventors into the context of their time and place. He described history as being largely a "path dependent trajectory," meaning that context shaped history more than individual initiative.
Warning this is a data heavy book. Several good case studies of particular farms and businesses.
Read
May 4, 2012finished half
January 5, 2023
This is a fantastic book which I can't really find a flaw in. The worst things I can say is that assumes some economics knowledge and at times it's very thorough.
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