The Transformation of the World (139 page)

Not all these theories pose exactly the same questions, nor do they all use the term “Industrial Revolution.”
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What they share (with the exception of North and Thomas) is a rough chronology that situates the great transition between 1750 and 1850. Some emphasize the depth and dynamism of the break (Marx, Polanyi, Rostow, Landes)—we might call these the “hot” versions. Others are “colder,” in identifying a long prehistory and a rather slow transition (Schumpeter, Bairoch, North and Thomas). The point of departure before the transformation is variously characterized as the feudal mode of production, agrarian society, traditional society, or premodernity. And the (provisional) endpoint is defined alternatively as capitalism in general,
industrial
capitalism, the scientificindustrial world, or (in Polanyi, less concerned with industry as such than with regulatory mechanisms in society) dominance of an unfettered market.

Last, the theories differ in the extent that their originators actually applied them to the whole world. Theoreticians are mostly a little more expansive than
historians. Marx expected the homogenizing advance of capitalism as a revolutionary force destructive of feudalism in many parts of the world; only in his later years did he hint at the possibility of a special path in Asia (the “Asiatic mode of production”). Of the more recent writers, Rostow, Bairoch, and Gerschenkron were most inclined to express themselves on Asia, for example, although Rostow did so in a very schematic manner, taking little account of national peculiarities. By no means did all of the above theorists focus on the question of why the West developed dynamically and the East (ostensibly) remained static—that is, the “Why Europe?” question so much discussed since the late Enlightenment. Only North and Thomas (rather implicitly) and David Landes (especially in his later writings) considered it central.
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Bairoch did not view civilizations as closed, monadic spaces but, like Fernand Braudel, studied in great detail the interaction between economies, applying the category “underdevelopment” to both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He did not, as Rostow did around the same time, assume that the whole world would eventually follow the same development path but placed the emphasis on divergences. Gerschenkron had no problem in applying to Japan his model of compensatory catching up from a position of backwardness; nonindustrialization interested him as little as it did Schumpeter (apart from the latter's interpretation of imperialism as driven by premodern impulses).
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The multiplicity of theories put forward since Adam Smith's pioneering work on the wealth of nations (1776) mirrors the complexity of the questions, but it also prompts the sobering conclusion that Patrick O'Brien drew in 1998: “Nearly three centuries of empirical investigation and reflection by the very best minds in history and the social sciences has not produced any kind of general theory of industrialization.”
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O'Brien naturally regretted this as an economist, but he was not too unhappy as a historian. What grand outline could do justice to the diversity of the phenomena yet retain the simplicity and elegance of good theory?

The British Industrial Revolution

Growth in GDP of 8 percent a year, such as China recorded around the year 2000 (against a paltry average of 3 percent in the industrial countries since 1950), was completely unimaginable in nineteenth-century Europe. Insofar as Chinese growth is driven by industrial expansion, and only secondarily by the “postindustrial” sector of services and telecommunications, the Industrial Revolution has been continuing with increased force. Industry has never been as revolutionary as it is today. To be sure, this is not the concept of Industrial Revolution used by historians
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—that is, a complex process of economic construction that took place on the main island of the British Isles between 1750 and 1850. Anything else, they argue, should be called “industrialization,” first of all in the formal sense of decades-long growth of more than 1.5 percent a year in real per capita output and, in the ideal-typical case, matched or exceeded by rising income levels among the population.
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Such growth occurs on the basis of a new energy regime, which
develops fossil fuels for material production and makes better use of traditional sources. Another characteristic feature is that in the organization of production in large mechanized enterprises, the factory does not radically displace all other forms but acquires a dominant position.

Industrialization mostly stands under the aegis of capitalism, but this is not necessarily so. In the twentieth century, a number of “socialist” countries carried out successful industrialization for a time. It would also be excessive to think that industrialization must permeate every sphere of a national economy; this may appear self-evident today, but it was almost never the case in the nineteenth century. Completely modernized “industrial societies” did not exist in any part of the world, and apart from the United States, Britain, and Germany few other countries came close to qualifying as “industrial” on the eve of World War I. On the other hand, large-scale factories and many pointers to industrially generated growth were to be found in mainly agrarian societies such as India, China, Russia, and Spain. We should therefore speak of industrialization even if the process was limited to a small number of sectors or regions.

Not all roads to the wealth of nations lead through industry. Successful economies such as those of the Netherlands, Denmark, Australia, Canada, and Argentina shared with highly industrialized countries the application of new technologies in all branches of production and transportation, and it is true that in the late nineteenth century roughly one-half of their economically active population was employed outside agriculture. But we would search in vain there for “industrial belts.” Nor did every large military apparatus have an industrial foundation to sustain it in the long term. The key economic fact of modernity is not industrial growth per se but the general improvement in the conditions of human existence (shown by rising life expectancy, for example), along with increased polarization in terms of wealth and poverty among various regions of the planet.

The Industrial Revolution happened in England. Only there did the conditions permitting a new level of economic performance come together in a particular combination. The key factors that played a role in this can be easily enumerated (without regard for their intricate connectedness): a large national economic territory without tariff divisions; internal peace since the middle of the seventeenth century; favorable geographical conditions for transportation, especially along the coasts; “the cheapest energy in the world”;
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a highly developed tradition of precision engineering and toolmaking; extensive colonial trade bringing in raw materials and providing export markets; an unusually productive agricultural sector, making it possible to release manpower from the countryside; a high-wage economy of long standing that generated demand; an interest in improvement among large parts of the social elite; and a decidedly entrepreneurial spirit among small circles, especially of religious dissidents.
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From this long list, three points may be singled out by way of contrast with other countries.

First
. In England, as a result of economic growth all through the eighteenth century, there was exceptionally high demand for “upmarket products,” somewhere between the basic necessities and rare luxuries. The gradually developing middle classes became bearers of a consumption that was not, as in continental Europe, confined to the aristocracy and wealthy members of the mercantile elite. French observers, in particular, were repeatedly struck by the existence in Britain of something like a mass market for commercial products.
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Second
. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Britain was more involved in overseas trade than any other European country, more intensely even than the Netherlands. The North American colonies were increasingly important outlets for the British Isles, whose internal market alone could not absorb the growth in production. Conversely, Britain's international trade and sea links, whether colonial or not, provided access to key raw materials such as cotton, which at first came mainly from the West Indies and later was produced more cheaply by enslaved Africans working on newly developed land in the Southern states of the United States. Such trade was not the ultimate cause of the Industrial Revolution, but it was an important factor without which the technological innovations would not have had their full economic impact; the inputs of the Industrial Revolution would have been much more expensive to acquire. In the nineteenth century, Britain supplemented its role as “workshop of the world” with its function as chief organizer and distribution center of the trade in raw materials and semifinished products required for industrialization in continental Europe—an intermediate position that also had roots in the early modern period. These connections still await thorough investigation. But it is clear that the Industrial Revolution cannot be explained if we ignore the world economic context and especially the fact that Britain had already been highly successful in the Atlantic and later the global economy during the quarter millennium before 1760.
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Third
. France and China, too, were countries with major scientific traditions and copious technological experience. In England and Scotland, however, the separate milieux of “theorists” and “practical men” were brought closer together than anywhere else. A common language of problem solving was gradually found, Newtonian physics was a way of thinking that could easily be translated into practice, and institutions such as patent law were created to consolidate the groundbreaking new processes. Britain thus developed for the first time what is another defining feature of industrialization: the normalization of technological innovation. Unlike in earlier epochs of history, waves of inventiveness did not suddenly break off or come to nothing. “Major” inventions did not come by themselves but rather in clouds or clusters. They were part of a process involving small steps and improvements and had spinoffs and follow-ups of their own. Techniques were acquired through ongoing practical effort. No really important knowledge was lost. This incremental stream of innovation, and its conversion into a technological culture, began in a country where an unusually high and widespread level of competence had already been achieved in the
early eighteenth century before it was stabilized in the Industrial Revolution. But that country was not sealed off from the rest of the world. In the eighteenth century, scientific and technological knowledge circulated all over Europe and across the North Atlantic, and technological leadership, once attained, did not remain an English monopoly. In a number of spheres, French, German, Swiss, Belgian, or American scientists and engineers soon caught up and even overtook their British colleagues.
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If a utopian sketch of the coming Industrial Revolution had been drawn in 1720 for a seasoned observer, and if he had then been asked where it was most likely to occur, he would certainly have mentioned England and, in addition, the Netherlands and Flanders, northern France, central Japan, the Yangtze delta, and perhaps the areas around Boston and Philadelphia. All these regions displayed new forms of economic dynamism: a general and rapidly spreading emphasis on hard work and commercial endeavor; a high and still rising agricultural productivity; a developed market specialization among farmers, often bound up with sophisticated processing techniques; a considerable orientation to export markets; an efficient textile production, organized partly in peasant households and partly in large “manufactures.” The institutional framework for all this was free (nonservile) labor, some property guarantees for productive capital, and a “bourgeois” business climate that included trust among market partners and faith in contracts. By 1720 England was ahead in many respects, but neither then nor later was it a unique case, an island humming with activity in a sea of agrarian stagnation.

This hypothesis has not yet been sufficiently verified for all of the regions just mentioned. Discussion today invokes the concept of an “industrious revolution,” based on the observation that while output grew during the Industrial Revolution, real incomes did not increase at the same pace. According to the theory, a similar trend had been operating in northwestern Europe, Japan, and colonial North America in the century before industrialization: households were raising their consumption demand and were prepared to work harder to fulfill it; people produced more in order to consume more. The Industrial Revolution was then able to link into this demand-driven dynamic. At the same time, the burden on manual workers was probably already increasing before the Industrial Revolution and did not suddenly shoot up when happy peasants disappeared into dark satanic mills.
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Continuities

One aspect of the putative “industrious revolution” is the “protoindustrialization” that was invented as a concept in the early 1970s. Put very simply, this refers to the expanding production of goods in village households for translocal markets.
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Typically outside the framework of the old municipal guilds, it was organized by urban entrepreneurs (in the “contracting out” system, for instance) and presupposed a manpower surplus as well as a readiness
for self-exploitation in the village family. It was at its most thriving where the local power structure allowed peasants some scope for “entrepreneurial” decisions, but there were also cases where “feudal” landowners encouraged a degree of household industry and the collectivism of the village commune did not stand in its way.
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Various forms of proto-industry have been detected in many countries, including Japan, China, and India, as well as in Russia, where the cotton and ironmongery trades have been especially well examined.