Why Britain First

Economies had grown before. Rome grew, Song China grew, the medieval Low Countries grew. What happened in each case is that the population grew with the economy, so output per person returned to roughly where it had started. A good century produced more people rather than richer ones. This is the Malthusian pattern, and it was the human condition for approximately the whole of recorded history.

What began in Britain in the late eighteenth century was growth in output per person that did not stop. That is the thing the Industrial Revolution names, and it is the only genuinely unprecedented item on the list. Machines were not new. Cities were not new. Rising total output was not new. Sustained rising output per head was new, and everything else is detail.

Thomas Malthus published his argument that it could not happen in 1798, roughly at the moment it started, which is a permanent warning about extrapolating from a very long run of past data.

So why Britain, and why then? The strongest available answer is not about national character, and it is worth stating precisely because the weak answers are so appealing. Robert Allen's version runs: British wages were unusually high by international standards, and British energy was unusually cheap, because there was coal close to navigable water. In that price environment a machine that substituted coal for labour paid for itself. In France, where wages were lower, it did not. In China, where wages were lower still and the coal was a very long way from where the people were, it emphatically did not.

This is a claim about relative prices rather than about ingenuity, and it has the great advantage of explaining the adoption pattern. Eighteenth-century China and India had the technical capacity to build many of these devices. What they lacked was a commercial case, and the same technologies were taken up elsewhere precisely when the price ratio moved. Knowing how to build something and having a reason to build it are different questions, and only the second is about economics.

Empire, institutions, property law, scientific culture and Protestant habits all appear in this debate and all have serious advocates. None of them survives alone: each explains some of the timing and fails on some of the comparison cases. The honest summary is that a specific and somewhat lucky combination of factor prices, geology and institutions arrived in one place, and that the combination is what did it.

Two corrections to the standard picture, both of which change what you are looking at.

The first is the steam engine, which is a good image and a bad summary. Newcomen's engine dates from 1712 and Watt's improvement from the 1760s, but water power dominated British industry for decades afterwards and steam only overtook it around the middle of the nineteenth century. The early productivity gains came from spinning machinery, from cotton, and from reorganising work into factories. A change in how labour was arranged at least as much as in what powered it.

The second is uglier. Real wages for British workers were roughly flat from about 1780 to 1820 while hours lengthened, urban mortality worsened and conditions in the new mills were what the reformers said they were. The gains arrive from the 1840s and then become enormous, compounding into the difference between the medieval standard of living and the modern one. But a generation paid for a transformation whose benefits went to their grandchildren, and any account that skips that is telling a story rather than a history.