Britain…England, specifically, was the first country to be transformed by the Industrial Revolution. Starting around 1760, it was the first country to have its people migrate en masse from earning their living from subsistence agriculture and hand crafts to working in factories that had mechanized the art of production. The transition from subsistence agriculture to manufacturing had actually been going on for a few centuries before then. They got just got turbo-charged and took a critical dimension around 1760 with the invention of the steam engine. In addition to manufacturing, the revolution also involved dramatic innovations in mining, transportation and communication, which of course led to profound changes in society.
A natural question to ask at this point is “Why England and not somewhere else?” In trying to answer this, we will see that so large a transformation does not all of a sudden come out of nowhere. In fact, changes and developments that had been going on in Western Europe for about 150 years played a big role in making the Industrial Revolution possible. These changes themselves were enabled by processes and events stretching back to the 10th century.
The Industrial Revolution enabled Britain, and others that would eventually follow like the rest of western Europe, the US and Japan, to create mass affluence societies, pulling far ahead of other regions of the world that didn’t adopt these changes thereby creating the difference between the rich world and the developing world we know today. It would also help usher in a new global political order where the rich world, whose technological and economic might led to geopolitical and military might, were able to push the developing world around, foisting abhorrent institutions on them like colonization and slavery.
Before we get to talking about Britain, I should point out that the period between the years 900 and 1300 (i.e. between the 10th and 14th centuries) was a critical one for Europe where fundamental institutions enabling the emergence of modern society were put in place, setting it up for future global leadership. Western Europe in particular, became the most urbanized part of the world. There was a lot of land reclamation, forest clearing, building of roads, bridges, churches, castles etc. during this time. The urbanization process was a key driver for an investment boom that followed. It was during this period that the economy of Europe first surpassed the economies of China and the Middle East.
The mass urbanization in Western Europe was accompanied or followed by other far reaching changes both technical and societal that were the exclusive preserve of Europe for centuries but have since spread to every other part of the world that even we in the developing world take them for granted, not appreciating the crucial roles they played in advancing society. Some of the technical advances include: –
Eyeglasses: This might seem trivial but was actually a tremendous advance. Eyeglasses doubled the work life of skilled craftsmen, especially those who did high precision jobs. The crystalline lens of the human eye begins to harden around age 40, causing a condition similar to farsightedness. At that age, a 13th century European craftsman could reasonably expect to live and work for another 20 years…if he could see well enough. Eyeglasses solved this problem. Eyeglasses further encouraged the invention of fine instruments like gauges, micrometers, fine wheel cutters etc., thereby laying the basis for articulated machines with fitted parts. This gave Europe a huge advantage over other civilizations as it solidly put them on the road to batch and then mass production. Europe enjoyed a monopoly on eyeglasses for 300 to 400 years.
Mechanical Clock: It is easy to trivialize the mechanical clock but it is arguably the greatest invention of the European Middle ages around the 13th century. It made reliable time-keeping on an infinite basis possible. Prior to its invention, time was kept with sun dials and water clocks. Sun dials could only be used on clear days and water clocks eventually clogged up and stopped working as a result of sedimentation. The mechanical clock was the first digital device, paving the way for a whole new field of precision engineering. Productivity, a concept so fundamental to wealth creation, is inextricably bound up with the invention of the mechanical clock. It led to an effort to maximize production per unit of time, giving birth to the field of scientific management, which played a huge role in lifting 20th century worker productivity. Europeans enjoyed a monopoly on the mechanical clock for about 300 years.
Printing: China invented printing in the 9th century but a combination factors, including the difficulty of the Chinese language, the dominant printing technique used at the time and the relatively rigid nature of Chinese social institutions, prevented it from exploding as it did in Europe, where it was introduced several centuries later. The invention of the Gutenberg printing press in the 15th century would eventually cause the cost of books and other reading material to drop by at least 90%, leading to the phenomenon of mass publication for the first time in history.
The waterwheel: Known to the Romans, it was revived in 10th-11th century Europe. It was used for grinding grain, pounding cloth (transforming wool manufacture in the process), hammering metal, rolling and drawing sheet metal and wire; mashing hops for beer; pulping rags for paper. Paper, which was manufactured by hand and foot for a 1,000 years following its invention by the Chinese (later adopted by the Arabs) was manufactured mechanically as soon as it arrived in Europe in the 13th century.
I should point out that these technical achievements were the outgrowth of a value system that placed a premium on scientific, rational explanations for natural occurring phenomena (as opposed to myth and magic).
Now that we have explored the back drop of Western European development we can begin to ask why Britain. To answer this, it would help to have a template of what the ideal modern society should look like. That template is as follows: –
- Knows how to operate, manage and build the instruments of production and to create, adapt and master new techniques on the technological frontier.
- Is able to impart this knowledge and know-how to the young, whether by formal education or apprenticeship training.
- Chose people for jobs by competence and relative merit; promoted and demoted on the basis of performance.
- Affords opportunity to individual or collective enterprise; encourage initiative, competition, and emulation.
- Allows people to enjoy and employ the fruits of their labor and enterprise.
These standards imply corollaries: gender equality; no discrimination on the basis of irrelevant criteria (sex, race, religion. etc.); also a preference for scientific rationality over magic and superstition (irrationality).
Such a society would also possess the kind of political and social institutions that favor achievement of these larger goals; that would for example:
- Secure rights of private property, the better to encourage saving and investment.
- Secure rights of personal liberty – secure them against both the abuses of tyranny and private disorder (crime and corruption).
- Provide stable government, itself governed by publicly known rules (a government of laws rather than men).
- Provide responsive government, one that will hear complaint and make redress.
- Provide honest government, such that economic actors are not moved to seek advantage and privilege inside or outside the marketplace. In economic jargon, there should be no rents to favor and position.
- Provide moderate, efficient, not greedy government. The effect should be to hold taxes down, reduce the government’s claim on the social surplus, and avoid privilege.
This society would be marked by geographical and social mobility. People would move about as they sought opportunity, and would rise and fall as they made something or nothing of themselves. This society would value new as against old, youth as against experience, change and risk as against safety. It would not be a society of equal income, because talents and inclinations towards hard work are not equal; but it would tend to a more even distribution of income than is found with privilege and favor. It would have a relatively large middle class. By the 18th century, Britain clearly met these conditions more than any other society.
Specific developments in Britain’s development story worth highlighting include its success in developing textiles production in the 16th century and the invention of the steam engine in the 18th century, which was enabled by research into atmospheric science carried out in the 17th century and the abundance of coal which served as its cheap source of fuel. Its invention itself was incentivized by Britain’s relatively high wage structure, which was the result of its success with textiles production. By the end of the seventeenth century, about 40 per cent of England’s woolen cloth production was exported, and woolen fabrics amounted to 69 percent of the country’s exports of domestic manufactures.
This led to one-quarter of London’s workforce being employed in shipping, port services or related activities by the early 18th century. The gains from woolen production, however impressive would be dwarfed by those from cotton, which came about as a result of the mechanization of the processes involved in cotton production. Employment in the British cotton industry reached 425,000 in the 1830s and accounted for 16 per cent of jobs in British manufacturing and 8 per cent of British GDP. The mechanization of industry depended heavily on the availability of cheap iron, so it gave much impetus to the emergence of the steel industry.
Britain would build on its successes pioneering the Industrial Revolution in 18th century well into the 19th, as industrialization increasingly came to be powered by electricity as opposed to steam. By this time though, it was surpassed by the US and Germany because those two nations had developed bigger appreciation for the deeper scientific principles powering industrial progress as opposed to Britain that by a greater extent relied on technical trial and error. Still, the progress was nothing short transformational, continuing well into the 20th century and beyond. British income figures prove that fact. British income per head doubled between 1780 and 1860 and further increased by a multiple of 6 between 1860 and 1990, even as its population increased.
There are lessons for every developing region seeking to emulate British success, Africa included, though the development path won’t be exactly the same. For instance, a benefit of starting late means you can skip centuries long, trial and error and adopt the latest technologies and institutions. But be warned, reaching the higher echelons of economic development, requires the indigenization of technological innovation, which implies a highly skilled workforce and which further implies a solid education system, particularly scientific education. This ultimately depends widespread enthronement of a culture of scientific rationalization and enquiry. Such a culture is very far from being dominant in Africa. This is where African values must begin to change.
Bibliography
- Zanden, Jan Luiten Van. 2009 The Long Road to the Industrial Revolution: The European Economy in a Global Perspective 1000-1800. Leiden: Brill
- Landes, David. 1998 The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are so Rich and Some are so Poor. London: Abacus
- Allen, Robert C. 2012 The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
- Yulek, Murat A. 2018 How Nations Succeed: Manufacturing, Trade, Industrial Policy, & Economic Development. Singapore: Palmgrave Macmillan
