I·'.
'I,
' .. O'Brien, P.K.
_/!
(2000). 'The reconstruction, rehabilitation and reconfiguration of he British
industrial revolution as a conjuncture in global history,' in: Itinerario, 3/4, p. 117134.
fin
J
117
The Reconstruction, Rehabilitation and
Reconftguration of the British Industrial
Revolution as a Conjuncture in Global History*
PATRICK KARL O'BRIEN
The First Industrial Revolution as a Conjuncture
in Global History
All historical research, however micro and focussed can be represented as
part of a process of 'reconfiguration', Research is simply the crafts dominant
and traditional activity of transforming archival evidence into printed narratives which validate, qualify and occasionally demolish dominant metanarratives. Most historians continue to be engaged in Von Ranke's grand
project for construction of history by making different, more durable and
better quality bricks that are piled up awaiting to be used as more modem
architecture for national histories. They agree as a point of discipline (if
not belief) that this remains the best way to proceed. Some (as Randolph
Churchill remarked of Gladstone) are 'old men in a hurry' and opting to
proceed from the top down by relocating national histories within the wider
spaces, larger chronologies and cosmopolitan concerns of global history.
There is, however, nothing new about writing of world histories. They
go back to Herodotus, characterised the writings of clerical scholars in the
times of Christendom, blossomed briefly during the Enlightenment and
have (for obvious reasons, that can be summed up by reference to the
accelerated globalisation of times) reappeared as a serious agenda for
scholars to pursue.
Indeed two distinct approaches have now clearly emerged. First, is the
model, persuasively elaborated in several books by William McNeill. He
has inspired a programme of historical investigation into connexions across
continents, countries and geographies as well as through very long spans
of time. NcNeill's paradigm assumes that such 'interactions', '·encounters',
'contacts with others', can be represented as the origins and motor of
economic, social, political, military, cultural, religious, technological, and
presumably all other conceivable types of change studied by historians.
Put simply, the other major approach extends geographical catchment
areas and time spans for comparative histories of topics that might be
illuminating to study across national boundaries, continents and separate
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118
1'ATRJCK KARL O'BRJEN
cultures. Although the linguistic qualifications for research in this style of
history are difficult to acquire and the scholarship needed to make sense
of verified contrasts is formidable, the methodological problems involved
are similar to those encountered for exercises in comparative history conducted within European, national or regional frames of reference. Comparative history helps scholars to escape from the complexity and tyranny
of local detail and to offer controlled if conjectural, answers to the variety
of questions they select for investigation. For global historians, insights
derived from the method tends to be realised when they concentrate upon
well defined historical episodes, artefacts, institutions, social practices, attitudes and beliefs that are found in many places and which have already
been studied in depth in the context of particular locations; and which
exhibit comparable but, more important, dissimilar ecological, political,
cultural, social, economic and other features. Then, as Marc Bloch anticipated, 'the comparative method can elicit from the chaotic multiplicity
of circumstances these contrasts which were generally effective'.
For obvious reasons and in order to communicate contrasts of major
significance, global historians will aggregate and average data and information pertaining to wider spaces (continents, oceans, civilisations) than evidence mobilised within the parameters of national histories. For purposes
of constructing building blocks for an ongoing programme designed to
produce metanarratives that are of 'universal' interest the comparative
method looks set to dominate the renaissance in global history for years
to come. It has, for example, already generated a bibliography of global
histories concerned with the family, youth, marriage, diet, housing, health,
military organisation, government, human rights, parliaments, nationalism,
religions, revolutions, gender and, of course, material life or material
change.
No surprise will be occasioned by the appearance in recent decades of
histories encompassing 'the world economy', going back in time to Sung
China and written to explain disparate levels of economic progress achieved
by countries, societies and communities located in all continents. Such
cDncerns will continue to be a litmus test of the field's mission to keep
humanity in view, because throughout history most people in most places
have been preoccupied with obtaining food, shelter, clothing and manufactured artefacts that they required to sustain either a basic, comfortable
and, only latterly, an agreeable standard of living.
Before the end of the twentieth century, a modern generation of economic historians began to resituate the acclaimed scientific, technological
and economic achievements of Western societies in a global context. Not
long after the second World War, and during an era of decolonisation,
historians were offered the opportunity- provided by the accumulation of
a body of knowledge, (long available about Europe, but emerging for Asia ,
the Middle East, Mrica and Latin America) - to 'reposition' their hitherto
disconnected histories of wealth and poverty, one against another, in order
THE BRITISH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AS A CONJUNCTURE IN GLOBAL HISTORY
119
to construct global histories of material progress that could have satisfied
the aspirations of Voltaire , Adam Smith and their enlightened followers
and pleased Max Weber.
Those who follow Max Weber, Karl Marx and a tradition of writing that
can be traced back to Montesquieu , insist that Europe's competing national
economies had been on a potentially more promising trajectory for long
run growth for several centuries. They emphasise evolving, but persistent
contrasts, between European and Asian institutional arrangements, political
systems, legal frameworks , cultural conditioning and religious beliefs, within
which economic activities were embedded for at least four centuries before
1815. Cruder Weberians simply juxtapose selected 'preconditions' for
Smithian growth that they observed operating efficiently in Europe (or
rather in some countries in northwestern Europe), in stark contrast to Asia,
where, in their perception, political, social, familial, cultural and ecological
'impediments' to growth and structural change prevented or constrained
the emergence of competitive markets for commodities, capital, land and
labour.
Their critics often more widely and deeply read in the now massive bibliography of economic history dealing with South, East and Southeast Asia and
the Ottoman Empire, have traduced samples of data (related to population
growth, urbanisation, balances of trade, yields per hectare and real wages)
for selected regions of Asia that at least qualify traditional impressions that
levels of labour productivity and standards of living afforded by European
economies to their populations were 'definitely' let alone 'significantly'
superior much before the era of the French revolution. Yet at this level of
'continental' aggregation the selection of samples of data for comparative
history must be problematical, not simply because quantitative information
is scarcer and of poor quality, but because the 'Asian' economy included
much larger shares of the world's cultivable land, resources, income and
population . AI though we remain a long way from offering statistically secure
comparisons for average levels of productivity and real incomes, the accumulating volume of research (now available on Asian agricultures, industries, trad.es, credit systems, mercantile enterprise, u·ansportation networks,
markets for commodities and factors of production) 'degrades' simplistic
Weberian perceptions that Europe alone had evolved the political institutional, legal, cultural and religious frameworks required for Smithian growth.
That outcome would not have surprised Marshal Hodgson who decades
ago observed that 'all attempts to invoke pre-modern seminal traits in the
occident can be shown to fail under close historical analysis'. William
McNeill, Fernand Braude!, Kirti Chaudhuri, Gunder Frank, Ken Pomeranz,
Jack GDldstone, Kaoru Sugihara, David Washbrook and other historians
would agree. Eric jones continues to revise some of the positions he adopted
for the first edition of the European Miracle. From his detailed comparisons
of levels and types of development achieved by Europe and Asia for the
_,_
120
THE BRITIS. .NDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AS A CONJUNCfURE IN GLOBAL HISTORY
_,ATRlCK KARL O'BRIEN
achieved by advanced and industrialised economies in Europe, North America, Australasia, Japan and East Asia would be much difjr?rent were it not
for a unique and trans-national event in world history that occurred in the
British Isles from 1750-1850.
early modern period, Braude! inferred that 'the populated regions of the
world faced with demands of numbers seem to us to be quite close to each
other'. But there is, he continued 'a historiographical inequality between
Europe and the rest of the world. Europe invented historians and made
good use of them. Her own history is well lit and can be called as evidence
or used as claim. The history of non-Europe is still being written. And until
the balance of knowledge and interpretation has been restored, the historian will be reluctant to cut the Gordian knot of world history'.
Since Braude! wrote these wise words, more knowledge has accumulated
and the Gordian knot of world history has been cut, not merely by those
who sweep through history with 'chain saws', but by up-to-date, widely read
and sophisticated scholars like Ken Pomeranz, Bin Wong, and Jack Goldstone, who have found a way not 'through' but 'round' the Gordian knot
by 'rehabilitating' the British Industrial Revolution as a seminal event in
world history.
The British will once again be delighted that their American cousins
have restored the First Industrial Revolution to the canonical status it has
long held, not only in their own historical estimation, but as the 'bridge'
constructed by the godfathers of social science (Tocqueville, St Simon, List,
Marx, Comte, Durkheim and Weber) to carry their grand narratives of
modernisation through a phase of transition to our modern world.
The industrial market economy, along with liberty and democracy, has
long been widely perceived by Anglo-Americans as part of their nation's
bequest to modern civilisation. That is why so many of that fraternity of
NATO intellectuals continue to represent the First Industrial Revolution
as superior in significance for the welfare of mankind compared to the
transition from the paleolithic to the neolithic civilisation; to urban industrial developments under the Sung, to the Florentine Renaissance and,
above all, to that unnecessary and destructive revolution that occurred in
France round about the same time.
Revising the Old Story
Global historians should be aware that over the past two decades British
and American economic historians have engaged in a wide ranging debate
about the nature and significance of the First Industrial Revolution.
Although the label Industrial Revolution has, will and perhaps should
survive, 'triumphalist' books with such titles as the 'First Industrial Revolution', 'the First Industrial Nation', will probably no longer be published
by historians with posts in higher education. Furthermore, the deployment
of a British 'paradigm' to analyse the 'retardation' or the 'industrialisation'
of 'follower countries' on the continent or elsewhere, in Eurasia has been
effectively 'disabled'. Few historians (and fewer social scientists) are now
prepared to argue that current levels of per capita income and productivity
121
Reconfiguration of the British Industrial Revolution is now being transformed into a modern consensus because scholars have:
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• redefined the pace and chronology of British industrialisation
re-specified the nature, extent and origins of innovations that appeared
during the classic period of the Industrial Revolution, I 763-1846
investigated the European (and Asian) antecedents of the new and
re~iable knowl~dge_ introduced into British industry d~lfing this period
1• rejected the diffusiOn model as a way of understandmg the spread of
" modern industry onto the mainland of Europe in the nineteenth century
and to Asia in the twentieth century
• brought 'contingent factors' to the foreground of the established story,
including the availability of natural resources such as coal, mineral ores
and fecund soils
• rediscovered the important role played by massive investment in naval
and military power by the Hanoverian state on behalf of the economy
• failed to isolate enduring and peculiarly 'British' features of the kingdom's institutions, religion or culture behind its precocious transition
to urban industrial society.
•
•
Revisionists have addressed an old story that journalists and far too many
professional historians still carry in their heads; and defend perhaps for
the sake of prolonging an argument. But as ever, one of the problems with
old stories is that many versions float around and the one regaled here
does, in several respects replicate, an 'old/ old story', going back as historiography to Arnold Toynbee, the Hammonds, Tawney and the Webbs. Yet
in form and substance the story addressed by revisionists is post war and
revises classic texts by Ashton, Rostow, Landes, Hobsbawrn, Chambers,
Hartwell, Gerschenkron, Flinn, Deane and Cole et al. None of these 'scholars' and teachers ever maintained that the British Industrial Revolution
came without antecedents, preparation, exemplars, or that it lacked a European dimension. Nevertheless this (let's call it the Ashtonian story) agreed
and elaborated upon several features of a quintessentially British Industrial
Revolution that was chronologically confined. (The chronologies varied:
Ashton favoured 1760-1830; Hartwell preferred 1783-1832; Rostow boldly
plumped for 1783-1802.) Most maintained the revolution was not on stream
much before 1750 and had run its course from the late eighteenth to the
first quarter of the nineteenth century. At the core of the story are growth
rates which accelerated (visibly and rapidly, particularly for industrial output, but also for agricultural production and gross domestic product). Long
122
"RICK KARL O'BRIEN
run growth in per capita income emerged as normal over the course of
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Accelerated growth emanated from: an abrupt jack up' in rates of investment (capital formation), but above all from innovations (new technologies
techniques and processes) for the production of manufactured goods and
also from the application of inanimate forms of energy (steam power) to
industry and transportation.
Industries, beginning with cotton and iron (but followed in fairly rapid
sequence by others), were 'radically transformed' in terms of their capital/
labour ratios; technologies; modes and scale of organisation, and location.
In short, the old story of the Industrial Revolution was represented as:
• led by industry
• revolutionary in tempo (a short sharp discontinuity, take off, watershed,
great divide or break-through) conceived essentially as an economic, not
a social and certainly not a cultural episode
• funded, prompted, managed by private enterprise - largely by entrepreneurs and humble artisans from the North of England and the Midlands,
\lnassisted by the State
• as British (if not English).
Finally and following canonical traditions in the social sciences the British
Industrial Revolution could be offered to other nations as 'paradigm' for
modern economic growth. Thus implicitly and as an historical process
industrialisation could be understood as the diffusion of best practice (i.e.
British and by extension, North American) techniques of production,
modes of organisation, institutions and political frameworks for the operation of factor and commodity markets onto the mainland of Europe and
(in the fullness of time) eastward to Asia.
Although this tale in ever more sophisticated forms was told to British,
North Americans and European students for three decades after the war,
its origins can be traced back to the generation's of scholars writing economic history during the 'high tide' of British imperialism and beginnings
of socialism before the Great War, 1914-18.
New and Old Stories Juxtaposed
The current (and contested) story (which might be labelled as a 'new/old'
story) has utilised economic theory and statistics to locate the British 'case'
of economic growth within:
• a framework of general theory concerned to model how economies grow
and are transformed into affluent market economies
• a body of statistical information about British economic growth gathered,
calibrated and refined since the War
THE BRITISH
lSTRlAL REVOLUTION AS A CONJUNCTURE IN GLOBAL HISTORY
123
• an international database largely related to European and North American economies, within which the British case can be resituated
• deeper investigations into the political, institutional and cultural foundations for economic development in general and for Britain in particular.
By re-contextualising Britain (as a 'case study') within a broader and even
broadening geographical space (which is now includes Eurasia); a longer
chronology going back millennia; a body of more rigorous and sophisticated
theory about economic growth, and an explicitly comparative framework.
British economic historians have 'effectively' demystified, 'denationalised'
and cut their own industrial revolution down to size. They offer undergraduates and the media (if and when the episode enters the public arena)
a more realistic, nuanced, illuminating, and altogether less chauvanistic
'First Industrial Revolution' and 'First Industrial Nation'. Nevertheless,
historical interpretations really are cyclical in character. Scholars have been
writing economic histories of the British Islands for more than a century.
Their new story was anticipated in several respects (save theoretical rigour
and quantification), in the writings of yesteryear by Ashley, Clapham, Redford, Lipson and Musson. Indeed we might depict this recent version as
the renaissance of gradualism; the re-emergence of good fortune and the
reintegration of coal into and political power into modern economic
history.
From the plethora of texts on the shelves of university libraries quotations
can be cited to draw contrasts between older and modern stories of the
First Industrial Revolution. For example in the 1960's Professor Gill told
undergraduates at Harvard that 'The modern economic world can be said
to have been born in England in the second half of the eighteenth century'.
While David Landes taught them that 'the technological changes we denote
as the industrial revolution implied a far more general breach ,with the
past than anything since the invention of the wheel'. In Oxford round
about the same time, Max Hartwell told us, 'on any historical accounting
the industrial revolution is one of the great discontinuities in history, and
it would not be implausible to claim it has been the greatest'.
This kind of hyperbole is still commonplace and can no longer be substantiated with reference to discontinuities as currently measured for industrial '
output let alone for national output on a whole. It is now recognised that\
the British industrial revolution is among the slowest and evolutionary of
5
'transitions' to an industrial economy. The statistical exercises conducted
by Crafts and Harley slowed the Revolution down, but some acceleration
in growth is still discernible and their numbers are contested by Hoppit,
Berg and Hudson, Jackson and latterly by Cuenca. Yet there will be no
need to treat readers to another disquisition about the range and quality
of the data, let alone to the arcane ramifications of index number theory,
because few British economic historians would now rest a case for 'revolution', 'take off', 'fundamental chasm', 'great spurt', 'watershed' or any such
l
124
-.TRICK KARL O'BRIEN
THE BRITISH tnUUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AS A CONJUNCTURE IN GLOBAL HISTORY
label on the data available for the measurement of cycles and trends in
industrial output, agricultural production or gross domestic product.
Nevertheless, the curves plotted on graphs expose discernible discontinuities in output coming on stream sometime over the second half of the
eighteenth century. They are neither 'dramatic' nor the only acceleration
in rates of change in per capita incomes that occurred in the economic
history of Britain. Long cycles of slower and faster economic growth have
been traced over several centuries. Medieval, Tudor and Stuart times were
not periods of stasis. Average real income were probably clearly higher by
the time of the Glorious Revolution than they had been at the Norman
Conquest. In this chronology and perspective the Industrial Revolution
appears as just another, but more sustained, upswing, and certainly not as
an escape from immobilisme or a Malthusian trap. Slow, cyclical, long run
evolutionary change followed by some 'discernible degree' of acceleration
into sustained growth occurred during the eighteenth century. In tempo
(at least for Britain) no great divide occurred between modern and premodern growth.
Something occurred and there is no case (as Rondo Cameron, jonathan
Clark and others advised) to abandon labels like industrial revolution.
Their correct observation that many famous contemporaries (including
Jane Austen, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth) along with classical economists
(such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo) were apparently unaware they
were living through an era of profound transition seems neither here nor
there.Joel Mokyr points out that some other equally well known economists,
literary figures, and scientists (Lauderdale, Colquhoun, Owen, Babbage,
Elizabeth Gaskell, Porter) marked the changes. Christians did not recognise
they were alive at the birth of Christianity. Abelard and Heloise did not
appreciate they resided in the Middle Ages. Historians (not contemporaries) select events, episodes, and coJ:Uunctures that mattered. The British
Industrial Revolution is a post-hoc imposition, but so is the Florentine
Renaissance and the Dutch Reformation.
Another mode of 'representation' (pioneered by Clapham and followed
up by Lipson, Redford and other academics writing in the 1930s and who
retained the congenital suspicions of their craft to 'discontinuities' in history) was to consider the British economy at the time of the Great Exhibition
and to ask: what had changed? They then proceeded to underline features 1 frJI
of production and work that had remained largely untouched by events of
the previous century (1751-1851). This style of painting was imitated in an vinfluential article published by Rafael Samuel in 1977, and the genre brings
to the foreground elements of continuity in:
•
•
•
•
•
food processing, finished metallurgy, clothing, etcetera) which had not
altered their modes of production for decades
transportation: where a canal system was in place but where railways only
really began to take over the delivery of freight in the 1840s and 1850s
occupation after occupation, where ratios of capital to labour, the tools
and techniques used to perform manual and skilled work were the same
as they had been in 1700 or even when Charles I went to the scaffold
the prevalence of small scale units of production which demonstrated
that factories and corporations were untypical, not modal forms of organisation
in numerous rural counties untouched by industrialisation
the widespread use of traditional forms of energy - provided by wind,
water, animals and human toil compared to the celebrated, but slow,
diffusion of steam power.
Historians are professionally adept at marking survivals, antecedents and
continuities. Nevertheless (and despite their valid reminders) several important features of the realm's system of production had changed by 1851.
Most Europeans (attending the great Exhibition) recognised Britain as an
advanced economy. They observed structural changes that historians later
measured and which included:
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• agriculture - the largest and still unmechanised sector of the economy:
where units of production, tenurial arrangements and techniques of
cultivation had hardly changed since the Restoration (1660)
• major industries: (such as glass, bricks, mining, furniture, shipbuilding,
125
• a low proportion of the national workforce engaged in agriculture, compared to industry and services
(• the use of coal as the dominant source of energy
• the concentration of manufacturing activity in large new towns such as
Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Birmingham and Bradford
• factories as places of work, concentrated production and as efficient
organisational forms for the supervision and control of labour
• the mechanisation of textile production, basic metallurgy and transportation by rail
• high and rising ratios of capital to labour
• high average incomes per capita
• large British proportions of European textile, cast iron and pottery production and shipbuilding
• the Victorian kingdom's extraordinary share of world trade in manufactured goods and services.
In short (and no surprise) continuities and discontinuities existed side by
side within and across regions, sectors, industries, operating in symbiotic
connexion.
,..--126
.ATRICK KARL O'BRIEN
Smithian Growth
Even (i) if some features of the British economy had clearly progressed in
scale and efficiency; (ii) if the pace of change had accelerated somewhat,
and (iii) if we wish to continue using the term 'industrial revolution', for
purposes of global history we need to enquire: what exactly had been
transformed from 1750-1850. Where did the impetus come from? What
was 'quintessentially British' about this celebrated Revolution?
Economic historians have devoted academic careers to investigating
major and minor 'inputs', as well as the institutional and legal frameworks,
political conditions, cultural and religious predispositions which interacted
to carry the British economy forward and upward through centuries of
time to a plateau of possibilities from whence higher and sustainable growth
appeared and became irreversible. These 'preconditions' used to be analysed as the transition or evolution to 'capitalism'. That term (or '-ism')
went underground during the Cold War and was replaced by the 'rise of
commercial society', and latterly by an American label 'Smithian Growth'.
Smith ian growth allows for limited inputs of new technology, but basically
encapsulates the notion of long run economic development emanating
from: the integration of markets for commodities, capital, labour and useful
knowledge within national boundaries and through international trade. Its
central idea is that the creation of efficient institutions, legal frameworks,
law and order, the protection of property rights, the mobility of capital
and labour can lower transaction costs, promote commerce and exchange
and thereby lead (without fundamental transformations in production functions) to an accumulation of capital and population growth with gradual
rises in real incomes per capita. Merchants were harbingers of this early
modern process, particularly grand merchants, engaged in European and
pan-European trade. Merchants (Braudelian heroes) integrate markets;
coordinate proto-industrial production; supply credit; pressure governments for security of contract and for protection for commerce. Merchants
create and manage the institutions required to promote capital formation,
commerce, urbanisation and manufacturing. In the fullness of time (in
regions and states where conditions are favourable), the national economy
matures or 'grows up' into an industrial revolution based upon accelerated
technological change. In his perception the industrial revolution emerges
out of a very long prior process of Smithian Growth in Western Europe.
For at least a century (1651-1756) Britain enjoyed somewhat more widespread and sustained patterns and rates of Smith ian growth and thus moved
more rapidly than other regions of Europe (and East Asia) up to that
plateau from where technological progress and an Industrial Revolution
became potentially likely (and with hind-sight) all too probable. In short,
the industrial revolution has been represented as the culmination or 'final
stage' of very long and gradual processes of European commercialisation.
It is this kind of cyclical, slow growth punctuated by Malthusian problems
THE BRITISH
t1~DUSTRJAL
REVOLUTION AS A CONJUNCTURE IN GLOBAL HISTORY
127
and Boserupian upswings that Schmoller, Weber, Lipson, Braude!, Tilly,
Jones, Snooks, Komlos, Jones, De Vries and Van Zanden seem drawn to.
That is why they accord limited space in their narratives to the industrial
revolution as a conjuncture. They decline to present that transition either
as a structural break, or as a peculiarly British episode.
Yet the evolutionary approach to the history of modern industrialisation
cannot evade the fact that growth accelerated in Britain before many regions
of Europe (Holland, Rhineland, Saxony, Switzerland, Southern Netherlands, Bohemia, Northern France). Furthermore (and as we now appreciate), from the last five decades of serious post colonial research on the
economies of China, South India, Japan, Southeast Asia and the Ottoman
Empire it moved ahead of Asian regions as well.
Furthermore, the evidence is now overwhelming that all these regions
possessed the range of prerequisites and preconditions for Smithian growth
and in some places (e.g. Lingnan, Coromandel, Holland, Bohemia) capabilities were in place for centuries, and certainly several decades, before the
networks of communication, property rights, credit systems, legal frameworks, law and order etcetera were there to support British trade, commerce
and industrialisation.
Did Britain then appear as a latecomer and experience an intensive and
more pervasive phase of Smithian growth before the rest, a phase which
in some crucial respects carried the economy up to that plateau of possibilities for technological breakthroughs to occur? If so, why? What was there
on the off shore islands which differentiated Britain from its rivals and led
on to an Industrial Revolution?
It is becoming more and more difficult to find 'peculiarly British' preconditions for the encouragement of trade and commerce (comp..ared to that
observed for several regions of Europe and Asia), and impossible to substantiate the case that the matrix of laws, institutions and good order for
commerce and exchange was discernibly superior in Britain, compared to
other parts of Western Europe or even to maritime China, and Tokugawa
Japan.
Yet it remains the case that industrial growth accelerated in Britain over
the late eighteenth century; and that a cluster of inventions for the manufacture of textiles, the smelting and puddling of iron, the generation of energy
appeared and diffused first in the British Isles before elsewhere in Europe,
let alone Asia. Was there not after all something particularly 'hospitable'
about British institutions or especially conducive in British culture that
made it 'probable' that accelerated rates of growth and technical progress
would occur first in the Hanoverian realm?
Only detailed comparative history can settle this kind of question. Meanwhile, it is no longer clear to historians that in Britain the environment
for business was clearly superior to frameworks found elsewhere in Europe
or in parts of Asia. Unless we are willing to fall back on the unconvincing
elaboration of differences in 'cultures' or 'mentalities', the search for clearly
128
\TRICK KARL O'BRIEN
'specified contrasts' which might have made the difference must continue.
That search will bring this discussion up-to-date and move us on to the
recent and illuminating debate about British economic growth between
Crafts and Harley, from the diametric camp on the one side, and Berg,
Hudson, Hoppit and Cuenca from a main stream Anglo-centric tradition
on the other.
The latter will welcome Ken Pomeranz, Jack Goldstone and the Californian School to their ranks because they have been concerned to rehabilitate
the industrial revolution from the depredations and denegations of diometricians who, they rightly perceive, have diminished the scale, scope and
significance, of that event as a seminal conjuncture in British, European
and World History. Rehabilitation is built upon several reaffirmations.
First by an unresolved attempt to argue that the discontinuity in growth
rates is more pronounced than their opponents suggest.
Secondly by repeating traditional views that the technological and organisational changes of the long eighteenth century were more pervasive and
in the long run (allowing for lags and time to mature) more significant
than econometricians could possible see or take into account in exercises
designed to measure shares of the growth rates (of industrial production,
agricultural output or for national income as an aggregate) attributable to
technological change. In short Berg eta! reject the methodological bases,
and theoretical assumption required to measure changes in total factor
productivities. They also pour scorn on the range and quality of data.
available for such exercises and fall back on examples - case studies of
regions, and particular, industries- to revitalise the old story that technological progress was pervasive over time, and that led the economy ever upward
and onward through an industrial revolution.
The rehabilitatorsinsist that the Industrial Revolution displayed balanced
growth, induced by widespread technological, cultural and organisational
change, rooted in commercial and scientific culture. It was a macro-economic event and, in all its essentials, British.
Their diametric antagonists stand on the numbers which do suggest that
technological change emerged gradually; took a long time to impact upon
rates of industrial growth and was confined, until the second and third
quarters of the nineteenth century, to just a few key sectors of the British
economy.
But if the Rehabilitation School are correct, then by implication, there
must have been something special or 'British' about that economy's long
run traJectory of Smithian growth. Landes is prepared to assert that British
institutions and culture became superior to other national frameworks for
economic activity and at promoting that kind of growth. That is why, in
his view, Britain experienced the First Industrial Revolution and why that
British conjuncture remains as a paradigm episode in the global history of
material progress.
Controversy continues, but ifthe diometricians and their numbers are
THE BRITISh
USTRIAL REVOLUTION AS A CONJUNCTURE IN GLOBAL HISTORY
129
convincing and whole swathes of British industry were not transformed
until later in the nineteenth century and technological progress was for
decades confined in its over all impact to iron smelting and to cotton
textiles, and the precocious release oflabour from agriculture, then a meta
problem remains on our agenda for both British and global history.
What was it that transformed those particular sectors of the British economy
and generated unbalanced growth and competitive advantages in world
trade as early as the late eighteenth century? For the sake of drawing
endlessly recycled debates to a provisional conclusion, I propose to accept
the cliometric representation of Britain's industrialisation, as a case of slow
transformation; confined for several decades to iron and to cotton textiles
and little else, except for the release of labour from agriculture into proto
('low productivity'), industry and to urban services. Four features of this
'British case' then requires further elaboration and firmer connexion to
this contested narrative. All four can be grouped under the heading of
'power'.
Power refers to: (a) energy, derived from coal; (b) to coercion, flowing
from massive and sustained investments by the Hanoverian state in the
Royal Navy; (c) to the deployment of state and monopoly power behind
the establishment of a cotton textile industry in England and (d) to geopolitical and geo-economic outcomes of nearly a quarter of a century of warfare,
flowing from the French Revolution.
Power in its kinetic and political forms has been restored to a place of
prominence in recent representations of the First Industrial Revolution
which thereby derogate and downgrade older stories, based upon the peculiarities of British culture, the superiority of its liberal institutions, the
triumph of private enterprise, and artisanal ingenuity. They emphasise
endowments (fecund soils as well as coal) and bring public inyesunent in
coercion by an aggressive state backed by jingoistic self-interested populace
into the golden triangle of the most up-to-date paintings of the Industrial
Revolution.
For example, good fortune, or God, provided Britain with an abundant
source of energy in the form of accessible supplies of coal. Coal not only
supplied a range of heat intensive industries with cheaper fuel, it was a
land and labour saving resource and substituted for trees and for the reafforestation of agricultural land. The warmth provided by coal meant
labour required fewer calories of basic food to perform manual and other
tasks. Feedbacks, spin-offs and externalities from coal were all highly significant. For example, the transportation of coal required ships and seamen
(available as a reserve army of sailors in time of war). Coal stimulated
massive corporate invesunent in the network of canals (and later railways)
which carried the home market and the capital market to higher levels of
integration. Connexions from the mining of coal to the development and
perfection of steam power are familiar and perhaps the most important
spin off to flow from the possession and use of coal.
130
'>ATRJCK KARL O'BRJEN
THE BRITISH
131
public investment (as a late comer and free rider), in the violence and
protection required to emerge as the lead power and economy in a universe
of competing mercantilist states.
One way or another - at the beginning of a new century- the heroic
quintessentially British industrial revolution as a seminal episode in world
history has been reconfigured. The industrial revolution 'aint what it used
to be'. Even David Landes now accepts that the British example 'was not
a model for the rest of the world given its originality and particular circumstances, it could not be that. But it was both a stimulus and a source of
knowledge and experience both negative and positive'.
Amenl But how long will it take for other historians (let alone communicators of national myths) to recognise that most of the originality and circumstances behind a long cycle of accelerated growth in the history of just
another Eurasian region rested ultimately on kinetic energy and geopolitical power?
How and why Britain rather than Holland, France, Switzerland, Flanders,
Saxony established Europe's large scale mechanised cotton industry requires geopolitical rather than economic answers. (Although historians
must recognise that Britain possessed considerable capacity to manufacture
woollen and linen textiles before cotton came on the scene.) The geopolitical story of cotton is one of Asian trade, conducted by a quasi public
corporation (the East India Company) and of serious military and naval
rivalry with Holland and France. Indeed the matrix within which the cotton
textiles evolved into a large scale mechanised industry involved trade with
India, the infamous traffic in slaves, import substitution, the pacification
of Ireland and the crucial invention of roller spinning by the son of a
Huguenot refugee - Monsieur Louis Paul of London. In short the history
of the establishment of the paradigm case of large scale reorganised textile
production in Britain remains inseparable from mercantilism, imperialism,
and connexions with the rest of Europe.
The connexion to geopolitical rivalry would be totally unsurprising to
the generations of Europeans who lived through the Age of Revolution
1789-1815. During these years of disturbance, havoc and destruction flowing
from the French Revolution, 'convergence' in productivity levels across
European economies became unusually difficult to achieve. As an island,
Britain and its foreign trade was spared the disruption that afflicted its
rivals and its economy prospered at their expense.
Conclusion
At stake in current and unresolved debates about the First Industrial Revolution is how to reconfigure an 'episode' or 'conjuncture' in British history
that Anglo-American historians (and many canonical social scientists) have
long considered to be a if not the seminal discontinuity in the history of
civilisation. By representing Britain's Industrial Revolution as slow growth;
as a case of unbalanced and strictly confined technological change and
innovation, cliometricians and other revisionists accept: that it was a' discontinuity'; that the first industrial revolution was proceeded by an evolutionary
process of Smithian growth and that several important mechanical inventions appeared first in Britain.
They reject traditional views which held that the discontinuity was abrupt.
They proclaim that the political, legal, cultural and entrepreneurial conditions for Smithian growth were commonplace across several regions on the
Eurasian landmass and that Britain had not been proceeding along some
unique or exceptional historical trajectory all of its own since the Middle
Ages. They demonstrate that several of the technological breakthroughs
(macro inventions) that occurred were European, if not Eurasian in origin.
The new story maintains that Britain's early start and sustained lead
towards the status of the worlds ftrst successful industrial market economy,
depended to a very large degree up<m natural endowments and timely
USTRlAL REVOLUTION AS A CONJUNCTURE IN GLOBAL HISTORY
I
I
,~-J......_
132
\TRJCK KARL O'BRIEN
Note
*
I am grateful to the Editors of Itinerario for publishing this unreferenced lecture in roughly
the form I delivered it to their Conference on the European Miracle. I have appended a
select bibliography of references (including my own published work) that I consulted and
used for purposes of constructing that lecture. I apologise to any scholar whose work has
been inadvertently missed from a hurriedly composed bibliography.
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