8. Why was Britain first? The industrial revolution in global context. In no way is the superiority of the British manufactures more strikingly shown than in the extent of the triumph it has gained over the cotton fabrics of India … The British manufacturer brings the cotton of India from a distance of 12,000 miles, commits it to his spinning jennies and power-looms, carries back their products to the East, making them again to travel 12,000 miles; and in spite of the loss of time, and of the enormous expense incurred by this voyage of 24,000 miles, the cotton manufactured by his machinery becomes less costly than the cotton of India spun and woven by the hand near the field that produced it (William Waterston, A Cyclopædia of Commerce, Mercantile Law, Finance, Commercial Geography (London, 1846), p.224) It is a commonplace of any history textbook that the world’s first industrial revolution took place in Britain. Yet this simple assertion leads quickly to the more complex question: why? What was unique about Britain? What qualities – political, economic, cultural, geographical, or ecological – did Britain possess that predisposed it towards early industrialisation? Or to put the question another way: what was missing in other countries so that their industrialisation was either delayed until the second half of the nineteenth century, or indeed had failed to occur by the century’s end at all? Considering pathways to industrialisation outside Britain is of course interesting in its own right, but it is also invaluable to any discussion of British industrialisation. Understanding the course of economic development in other parts of the world helps us to isolate which features of the British economy were critical to industrialisation, and which merely occurred at around the same time. The following chapter provides a global context for the economic transition that occurred in Britain in the nineteenth century. In the first place we shall look at the pattern of economic growth in Europe and consider when and why some of Britain’s neighbours underwent the transformation to industrial society. Then we shall look beyond Europe and ask why a number of highly developed Asian nations failed to make a similar leap to full-blown industrialisation before the end of the nineteenth century. Let us begin by briefly summarising the pattern of industrialisation that occurred in Britain. In previous chapters we identified two distinct stages of economic growth in Britain between 1700 and 1870. Throughout the eighteenth century population grew steadily and some parts of industry were revolutionised by technological innovations, particularly towards the century’s end. Yet, for all this, the profile of the economy changed relatively little: national income improved modestly and the structure of the workforce remained remarkably stable. The economy performed well, but improvements took place along traditional, organic lines. At some point in the first quarter of the nineteenth century, however, a new phase of growth began, characterised by an increase in the use of fossil fuels – coal in particular – in industry. The result was a sharp upturn in rates of population growth and urbanisation, in national income per capita, as well as a more significant restructuring of the workforce. Furthermore, in contrast to earlier periods of economic growth, which had eventually petered out and been followed by stagnation and decline, this growth continued through the rest of the nineteenth century, and has continued largely uninterrupted to the present day. The switch from wood, water, and wind to fossil fuels substantially increased the energy available within the economy and underpinned the British industrial revolution. To what extent can these events be regarded as a model that can be usefully applied to other parts of the world? It should be stressed at the outset that most accounts of European industrialisation have not placed a heavy emphasis on the importance of fossil fuels. Useful introductions to European industrialisation may be found in Colin Heywood, ‘The challenge of industrialisation’, in Pamela M. Pilbean, ed., Themes in Modern European History, 1780-1830 (London, 1995); Clive Trebilcock, ‘The industrialisation of modern Europe, 1750-1914’, in T. C. W. Blanning, ed., The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe (Oxford, 1996); Robert Lee, ‘Industrial revolution, commerce and trade’, in Stefan Berger, ed., A Companion to Nineteenth Century Europe (Oxford, 2000). See also, however, Rondo Cameron, ‘A new view of European industrialisation’, Economic History Review 38 (1985), pp.1-23. Through most of the second half of the twentieth century, economic historians tended to regard the British industrial revolution as part of a broader movement of European industrialisation, the beginning of a larger economic process that soon extended to mainland Europe in ‘a purely and deliberately imitative process’. Sidney Pollard, Peaceful Conquest: the Industrialization of Europe, 1760-1970 (Oxford, 1981), p.vi. A particularly influential interpretation of this process was provided by the historian and economist Alexander Gerschenkron, who in the 1960s placed especial emphasis on the extent of each country’s ‘backwardness’ when contrasted with Britain. He suggested that the entry costs for early industrialisers, in particular Britain, using relatively cheap and simple technology and with few competitors, were far lower than for those that industrialised later, who found themselves competing against nations with efficient industries using complex and expensive machinery. For this reason, Britain, as the industrial pioneer, was able to undergo a spontaneous economic transformation largely funded by the manufacturing sector. Other parts of Europe lacked this advantage, and the stimulus for industrialisation was provided by either banks or the state, depending on the extent of their ‘backwardness’. Gerschenkron labelled one group of western European countries – France, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and the western parts of Austria-Hungary – as ‘underdeveloped’, and pointed to the role played by banks and bank finance in propelling each of the nations towards industrial status. A second group of ‘backward’ countries in eastern and south-eastern Europe lacked altogether the kind of banking structures that had facilitated industrialisation in the ‘underdeveloped’ countries, and here energetic state interference provided the stimulus instead. By these different mechanisms, Gerschenkron posited a pattern of development spreading across Europe from the north-west to the south and east, determined to a large degree by the extent of economic, industrial, agricultural and fiscal development that had been attained in each country prior to the onset of the process. A very helpful introduction to Gerschenkron’s ideas may be found in Richard Sylla and Gianni Toniolo, eds., Patterns of European Industrialisation: The Nineteenth Century (London, 1991), pp.1-28. It must be admitted that Gerschenkron’s analysis, in particular his focus upon ‘backwardness’, or, more loosely, the pre-existing economic conditions, has proved a very fruitful framework for the investigation of European industrialisation, and his concept of relative backwardness continues to enjoy some limited support. At the same time, however, research in the past fifty years has also drawn attention to some of the limitations of this framework. In the first instance, his ideas have contributed to a heavy focus on the role of financial institutions and the state to industrialisation and corresponding neglect of other forces, such as population growth, technological change, and energy. More generally, the trend in the last two decades has been to move away from viewing Europe as a single economic area undergoing one unitary process to focussing instead upon the many different routes taken by European nations, with each country fashioning its own distinct pathway to industrialisation according to local resources, and political and economic traditions. This emphasis upon the diversity of the industrialisation process has provided a useful corrective to the earlier tendency to gloss over differences and divergences in the search of a universal system, but it also risks splintering our appreciation of the forces underpinning industrialisation to the extent that it becomes difficult to discern any coherency in the process at all. In this chapter we shall seek to find a middle way, between on the one hand viewing European industrialisation as a unitary process following a universal pattern and on the other regarding the industrialisation of each nation as a discrete event unconnected to the manifold changes occurring in its neighbours. In order to do so, we shall shift the traditional terms of the debate, turning attention away from pre-existing conditions and the roles of capital, finance, and the state towards the energy economy instead. This provides a flexible way of understanding the many and diverse pathways to industrialisation followed by different European countries, whilst at the same time providing an organising framework within which the economic transformation of not just one nation here and another there, but an entire continent, can be properly comprehended. Given the constraints of space, our discussion is inevitably restricted in scope – with just four countries, Belgium, Germany, France and Italy receiving detailed attention. Nevertheless, these examples are sufficient to provide a clear sense of the pivotal, yet highly varied and unpredictable, ways in which the deployment of new sources energy transformed the European economy. Let us begin by considering the small north-western country of Belgium, the first continental country to undergo a process of industrial development recognisably similar to that of Britain. In fact Belgium did not exist as a nation state in the early nineteenth century and the territory corresponding to present-day Belgium was under first French, then Dutch, control. Belgium did not gain independence in the 1830s, nonetheless, we use the term Belgium for convenience and refer to the nation recognised by the Treaty of London, signed in 1839. Belgium, like Britain, had abundant coal reserves, as well as rich deposits of lead and iron-ore. No doubt for much the same reason, economic development in Belgium also followed a fairly similar pattern to that of Britain, with coal and heavy industry playing a pivotal role. Cameron, ‘New view of European industrialisation’, pp.1-23. Industrial growth during the eighteenth century had been slow but steady. In the east of the country, coal-mining, iron and lead production and a domestic metalworking industry, producing mainly nails and armaments, grew respectably; towards the west of Belgium, the domestic woollen and linen industries, based in Flanders, similarly expanded. Yet this growth proceeded along familiar lines and did not portend the more significant economic restructuring that was about to occur. Around the turn of the century, however, a striking and fundamental shift in the structure of the economy began to take place. Change after 1800 was so rapid that by the 1840s Belgium had clearly emerged as the most industrialised nation on the continent. As in Britain, industrialisation was accompanied by a clear realignment in the economic significance of the country’s different regions. Towards the south of Belgium the Hainaut province emerged as the centre of a rapidly expanding heavy industrial sector based around the neighbouring towns of Mons and Charleroi. At Mons, the coalmining industry underwent substantial growth through the eighteenth century, a response in part to growing demand for coal and in part to improved transport in the region. Meanwhile, Charleroi experienced industrial expansion from the 1820s following the introduction of iron-ore smelting and iron-processing, using the new techniques recently developed in England. As a result, the domestic iron manufacturing industry which had flourished in the town during the eighteenth century was joined by successful enterprises in iron–production and glass-making. These, of course, were fuel-intensive industries whose growth was made possible only by the abundant and accessible coal reserves in the region. The Mons-Charleroi region emerged from relative obscurity to become Belgium’s most dynamic industrial area, supplying coal, wrought iron and steam engines to France and Germany. Hilde Greefs et al, ‘The growth of urban industrial regions: Belgian developments in comparative perspective, 1750-1850’, in Jon Stobart & Neil Raven, eds., Towns, Regions and Industries: Urban and Industrial Change in the Midlands, C.1700-1840 (Manchester, 2005). Industrialisation in the two more established industrial regions, Liège province in the east and Flanders in the west, took a rather different form. In Liège province, the existing wool industry was gradually mechanised. Five mechanised wool-spinning factories were built at Verviers at the turn of the century, and the weaving and finishing processes were partially mechanised from the 1810s and 1820s. By 1810, just six firms out of a total of 144 were mechanised, yet they alone produced more than fifty per cent of the output. Ibid., p.216. No less significantly, however, this region also witnessed the rapid expansion of the coal and iron industries and the emergence of a machine-building industry in the town of Liège. In less than two decades the rise of heavy industry in Liège and its hinterland had, in the opinion of one writer, transformed it into ‘one of the most dynamic industrial regions of Europe’. Ibid., p. 217. In Flanders, however, the pace of industrialisation was considerably less impressive. Though Flanders had long been the centre of a flourishing textile industry, the transition to modern, mechanised production proved uneven and was largely delayed until the second half of the nineteenth century. Cotton spinning machinery was introduced around Ghent in eastern Flanders at the turn of the century, and from the 1820s, steam power and mechanised weaving were introduced as well, but manufacturers in the neighbouring towns and villages showed no interest in following this example. As wages were low and the new machinery was expensive, employers had little incentive to invest in the new, labour-saving machines. As a result, the region’s textile industry declined in importance relative to the new heavy industry in Hainaut province and centred around Liège. Herman van der Wee, ‘The industrial revolution in Belgium’, in Mikuláš Teich and Roy Porter, eds., The Industrial Revolution in National Context: Europe and the USA (Cambridge, 1996), 64-77; Joel Mokyr, ‘The Industrial revolution in the Low Countries in the first half of the nineteenth century: a comparative case study’, Journal of Economic History, 34/2 (1974), pp. 365-391. It would clearly be mistaken to suggest that industrialisation in Belgium took precisely the same form as it did in Britain, yet there is one unmistakable similarity: a steady rise in the amount of coal mined and used. As in Britain, this created a discernible shift in population and industry towards the country’s coalfields. The availability of coal opened the way for significant industrial growth in these regions, with a corresponding decline of industry in areas removed from the coalfields. Low wages helped to hold back the process of change in Belgium, particularly in Flanders; nonetheless, the shift towards a new resource base is clearly discernible. The only other European country to industrialise in a way that bore strong similarities to the British experience was Germany, though industrialisation here was largely delayed until after 1850. Germany, like Belgium, did not exist as a nation state during much of the period under discussion here. It came into being with the creation of the Kaiserreich in 1871. Once again, we use the term here for convenience and refer to the state created in 1871. In the first half of the century, the German economy was largely stagnant: real wages and national product per head had barely moved in the seventy years prior to 1850. Toni Pierenkemper and Richard Tilly, The German Economy during the Nineteenth Century (New York, 2004), graph 1, p. 14-15. In the following fifty years, it more than doubled from 265 marks per capita to 593 marks per capita; and in the following 14 years continued to rise sharply reaching 728 marks per capita. Richard Tilly, ‘German industrialisation’, in Sylla and Toniolo, eds., Patterns of European Industrialisation, table 5.1, p.96. The growth of industry was largely responsible for this impressive economic growth: the annual rate of growth of production was around 4.8 percent in the period 1850-73, helping to transform Germany into one of the world’s great industrial powers by the outbreak of World War One. As in Britain, economic growth was accompanied by both extensive population growth and significant restructuring of the workforce. The population of Germany (within the borders of 1871) almost tripled in the century following 1816. During the same period, the proportion of the workforce employed in agriculture, forestry and fishing declined steadily whilst those employed in industry, manufacturing, mining, and transport rose. Pierenkemper and Tilly, The German Economy, graph 4, pp.18-20, pp.103-4. As in Britain and Belgium, Germany possessed rich coal deposits and the great surge in Germany’s economic performance after 1850 can be closely tied to the exploitation of these deposits. The Ruhr valley, situated in Westphalia and Rhineland (Prussia), possessed extensive deposits of high-grade coal. This coal had been extracted since the thirteenth century at least, but in such small quantities that the region remained strongly rural in character even as late as 1850. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, the region’s minor coal industry entered a period of massive expansion, with coal output increasing by at least 33 times in just fifty years. Terry G. Jordan-Bychkov, Bella Bychkova Jordan European Culture Area: A Systematic Geography (New York, 1973; 4th edn. Lanham MD., 2002) Within a few decades, the region’s small rural mines, mostly employing primitive techniques and a few hundred men, had been transformed into very large establishments employing thousands of men and using expensive mining machinery. In a familiar pattern, the production of iron and steel moved into the area, using both the local iron ore and ore imported from Sweden and Lorraine. Much of the coal was put to use powering steam-engines. The number of steam-powered machines in Rhineland-Westphalia grew from 650, with a total of less than 19,000 HP to near 12,000 with a combined HP of 380,000 in the quarter-century between 1849 and 1975 – a twenty-fold increase in the power derived from steam. David Blackbourn, The Fontana History of Germany, 1815-1918: the Long Nineteenth Century (London, 1997), p.178. And as industry expanded, so did population flood in. The population of the Ruhr valley swelled from some 200,000 in 1831 to nearly 3,000,000 just eighty years later (1910), and in the process some of the Ruhr’s small towns – Duisburg, Dortmund, Bochum, Essen, and Oberhausen – were transformed into large industrial cities. James H. Jackson, Migration and Urbanization in the Ruhr Valley, 1821-1914 (Boston, Mass., 1997). The medieval town of Essen had a population of 5,000 in 1831 which had grown modestly to 10,000 by mid-century; by 1910 it had nearly reached 300,000. By the late nineteenth century, the region easily eclipsed Belgium as the most important industrial centre on the European continent. As in Belgium, German industrialisation departed from the British model in several respects, occurring both later and significantly more rapidly, yet strong continuities were also evident. The amount of energy available to German manufacturing was vastly increased by exploiting the nation’s rich coal reserves and this shift from organic to inorganic fuels largely underpinned the nation’s rapid economic growth in the second half of the nineteenth century. With their coal, steam-engines and heavy industry, Britain, Belgium and Germany all industrialised in a recognisably similar fashion. At the same time, however, it was clear by the early twentieth century that other countries without significant coal, steam or heavy industries were also undergoing the transition to industrial society. As the largest and most populous western European country in the eighteenth century, the experience of France has long been of particular interest. Geological fate determined that the French did not have the large coal reserves of Britain, Belgium, or Germany, and so it is perhaps inevitable that the French economy did not follow in the same tracks. Furthermore, the population of France followed a very different trajectory over the nineteenth century to that taken elsewhere in Europe. Population increased by rather less than a third in the first half of the nineteenth century, and in the second half of the century, it was largely stagnant. Georges Dupeux & Peter Wait, French Society, 1789-1970 (London, 1976), pp.1-2.. Noël Bonneuil, Transformation of the French demographic landscape, 1806-1906 (Oxford, 1997), pp.85-7. As a result, the occupational structure of the country changed only slowly and cities grew at a much slower pace. So modest were the nation’s accomplishments by 1914 that many scholars in the early twentieth century expressed doubt over whether an industrial revolution had even occurred at all. For a good survey of the historiography of French industrialisation, see; François Crouzet, ‘The Historiography of French Economic Growth in the Nineteenth Century’, Economic History Review, 56/2 (2003), pp. 215-242. See also Robert Aldrich, ‘Late-comer or early-starter? New views on French economic history', Journal of European Economic History, 16 (1987), pp. 85-100; Jeff Horn, The Path not taken: French industrialisation in the Age of Revolution, 1750-1830 (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2006). Revisionist historiography in the 1960s and 1970s, underpinned by research within the newly developing national accounts framework, suggested that these pessimistic interpretations were misplaced and argued that despite some very clear differences in economic structure, it was evident by the end of the nineteenth century that France was undergoing a process of industrialisation. New estimates of GDP suggested that the rate of growth of product per capita in France was not very different from that achieved in Britain. The most recent estimates indicate that by 1913, French GDP per capita was 71 per cent of the UK figure and 96 per cent of that for Germany. Ibid. The strong growth in the economy, particularly when measured against slow population growth led many scholars to argue that far from failing to industrialise, France had simply taken a different path to industrialisation. Patrick K. O’Brien, and C. Keyder, Economic Growth in Britain and France, 1780-1914: Two Paths to the Twentieth Century (London, 1978). Certainly, it is important to consider exactly how France had achieved such dynamic growth during the nineteenth century, and to question whether the history of France provides an example of a ‘different path’ to industrialisation, a path without coal. The earliest evidence of industrialisation in France dates from the late eighteenth century. The Napoleonic period witnessed the introduction of mechanised spinning in the cotton and wool industries, of a small machine-building industry, and of coke-smelted iron production; but industrial advance was limited throughout the Napoleonic Wars and substantial progress was delayed until the return of peace in 1815. After this date, France’s industrial sector, led by the textile industry, underwent more significant innovation and expansion. Mechanised cotton spinning and printing were introduced and spread quickly; and cotton weaving, though it remained unmechanised, nonetheless expanded. The wool and linen industries performed strongly, also on the back of a mix of mechanised and unmechanised processes. With mechanisation came factories and the emergence of a recognisably modern industrial sector. François Crouzet, History of the European Economy, 1000-2000 (London, 2001). But alongside this modern industrial growth, a much larger cottage industry coexisted, transformed by the introduction of new technologies and new fuels to a much lesser degree. France’s largest industry remained the silk industry centred on the country’s second city, Lyon, yet as one scholar has noted, ‘The organisation of the [silk] trade and methods of production hardly changed between 1815 and 1870’. Alan S. Milward and S.B. Saul, The economic development of Continental Europe, 1780-1870, i. (London, 1973). Silk production expanded considerably between 1815 and the 1860s, largely on the back of the Jacquard loom, invented and perfected in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. The loom was operated by skilled weavers, usually in their own home, though sometimes in small workshops instead. Admittedly factory production was introduced in the winding and throwing stages of silk production which led in time to the construction of hundreds of small mills located on the waterways scattered around Lyon. Yet the numbers employed were relatively modest when contrasted with the much larger army of silk-weavers in Lyon and the surrounding countryside and did little to alter the overwhelmingly rural and domestic character of the silk industry as a whole. Raymond A. Jonas, ‘Peasants, Population, and Industry in France’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 22/ 2 (1991), pp. 177-200. See also C. Sabel and J. Zeitlin, ‘Historical alternatives to mass production’, Past and Present, 108 (1985), pp.133-176, esp.144-5. Not only was the mechanisation of the textile industry in France incomplete, mechanisation where it did occur was it was also less frequently accompanied by the introduction of powered machinery. The Jacquard loom, whilst a significant technological innovation in its own right, was hand-powered and did not require a fuel source at all. Much of the rest of France’s textile manufacturing was powered by water rather than by steam. As we have seen, waterpower remained an important source of power in British industry down to 1850, yet France necessarily relied on it to a far greater extent, not only down to mid-century, but well beyond as well. In the early 1860s, about two-thirds of France’s industrial establishments were using waterpower, whilst one third used steam; and even so late as 1899, over half of the horsepower of newly installed engines came from hydraulic motors. François Crouzet, ‘France’, in Teich and Porter, eds., The Industrial Revolution, p.41; Cameron, ‘New View’, p.14 With waterpower remaining such a critical fuel resource in France, considerable effort was also inevitably devoted to improving its efficiency, and the French took the lead in improving waterpower technology throughout the nineteenth century. Rotative water engines driven by water pressure and column-of-water engines, for example, improved the efficiency with which watermills could harness the energy of rivers, and further significant improvements followed the invention of the water turbine by Benoît Fourneyron in the 1820s. Terry S. Reynolds, Stronger Than a Hundred Men: A History of the Vertical Water Wheel (Baltimore, 1983). As ever, the organic economy should not be too glibly equated with technological stagnation. Technological progress could – and in nineteenth-century France certainly was – achieved within the context of the organic economy. This ongoing dependence on waterpower helps to explain some of the peculiarities of nineteenth-century French economic development. In contrast to Britain, where factory production tended to move to large cities placed close to coalfields, in France production remained scattered in much smaller, often rural, settlements situated on fast-flowing rivers, and this in turn underpinned the growth of small craft workshops rather than large factories. Jonas, ‘Peasants, population, and industry’; Crouzet, History European Economy. Indeed only the Nord-Pas-de-Calais region in the northern tip of France, which diversified from agriculture into coal-mining, textiles, iron and food-processing, bore any resemblance to the English industrial counties of Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire. Ibid. Yet rather than view the craft and cottage economy of France as a different pathway to industrialisation, it is arguably more helpful simply to view it as economic growth taking place within the organic economy. With a series of significant improvements to technology, waterpower, and industrial organisation, substantial growth in the French economy was achieved. At the same time, however, there were limits to the growth that could be reached along traditional organic lines. For all the improvements made to water power, for example, it nonetheless remained geographically restricted and irregular and unreliable, particularly during dry seasons. It also remained limited in the energy it could provide. It was rare for watermills to provide more than 20-30 horsepower and there was a limit to the number of watermills that could be squeezed onto one stretch of river. Reynolds, Stronger Than a Hundred Men, pp.325-7 How long could manufacturing have continued to grow on these lines? History teaches us that so long as any form of manufacturing enterprise was unable to increase its energy input, its output was likely sooner or later to reach a ceiling to growth. Of course, growth in the organic economy did not preclude growth in the inorganic economy, and it is perhaps in this respect that the strongest case for a French ‘industrial revolution’ can be made. French coal reserves were typically small and expensive to mine; they also tended to be located far from centres of industry. The coal industry nonetheless underwent considerable expansion in the nineteenth century and it is clear that industrialists were endeavouring to exploit domestic coal deposits to the full. France was producing 1 million tons a year in 1820 which had risen to 8.3 million tons in 1860 – indeed they were exploiting a higher percentage of their reserves than any other nation. Peter K. Stearns, The Industrial Revolution in World History (Boulder, 1993), p. 45. In addition, France imported coal - about one third of the coal it used in the nineteenth century was imported from abroad. Cameron, ‘New View’, figure 1.a, p.12., pp. 13-14; F. Crouzet, Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies in Franco-British Economic History (Cambridge, 1985), pp.414-441. Whilst these quantities were relatively modest contrasted with those of some other European countries, they were nonetheless sufficient to open the possibility of further economic growth along new lines. With a considerably smaller fuel resource base than its competitors, fuel had to be used somewhat differently, and so France followed that ‘different path’ that historians have identified. Owing to high fuel costs, French manufacturing did not travel far down the fuel-intensive heavy industry route taken in Britain, Belgium and Germany. French iron smelting from coal would never have been competitive on the global market, so despite some experimentation with coke-smelting and -refining techniques, the French continued to smelt iron from charcoal, a fuel which they possessed in relative abundance well into the nineteenth century. Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 229-35. Of course, the reliance on charcoal limited the expansion of the industry, and French iron production was outstripped after about 1800 by that of Britain, Belgium, and later Germany. Rather than manufacture steel, France imported it where necessary, and reserved its coal for uses where the returns were higher. As a result, France industrialised without developing significant industries in mining, iron, steel and ship-building, and in this respect it did indeed follow a rather different path from other early industrialisers. In the event, France industrialised not simply in the absence of a significant sector in heavy industry, but also without ever fully exploiting the power-systems that had been so central to industrialisation the other side of the Channel – coal and the steam engine. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, European and American scientists and engineers were developing a new power source – electricity – and in switching to this, France largely by-passed the coal-driven steam engine. See, in particular, Jordan Goodman and Katrina Honeyman, Gainful Pursuits: the Making of Industrial Europe, 1600-1914 (London, 196-202). Electricity can be generated by many means – coal, oil, tides, rivers, sunlight, wind, or (more recently) nuclear reaction – and is therefore a potentially more accessible fuel source to coal-poor nations. It was certainly more attractive to France, and underpinned the nation’s steady acceleration in industrial growth from the end of the nineteenth century until the outbreak of World War One. Hydro-electricity provided cheap energy for the northern Alps, the Rhone valley and Lyon, and underpinned the growth of a number of new, energy intensive industries: paper-making; the automobile and aeronautical industries; the chemical and electrical industry, electrochemistry and electrometallurgy industries. Ibid., pp. 198-200. See also François Caron and Barbara Bray, An Economic History of Modern France (London, 1979), 144-6; Alan S. Milward and S.B. Saul, The development of the economies of continental Europe 1850-1914 (London, 1977); Xavier de Planhol, Paul Claval and Janet Lloyd, An Historical Geography of France (Cambridge, 1994); M. Henri Morsel, ‘Les industries électrotechniques dans les Alpes françaises du Nord de 1869 1921 in Pierre Léon, l’Industrialisation en Europe au XIXe siècle (Lyon, 1972). Framing France’s economic development over the nineteenth century in this way helps to resolve one of the problems that generations of historians have puzzled over: how it was that industrialisation in France looked so different from the British experience, yet managed to achieve such impressive results. Much of the manufacturing growth that France achieved in the nineteenth century was not modern industrial growth at all, but growth based upon improvements to the organic economy – similar indeed to Britain’s economic growth during the eighteenth century. As such, it must be doubted that this growth could have continued long into the twentieth century. In fact, the French economy was spared the usual fate of growth within the organic economy, that is growth followed by stagnation and decline, by turning first (though to a rather limited degree) to coal, and then (more emphatically) to electricity. France did indeed take a different path to industrialisation, but it nonetheless shared a core similarity with other industrialising nations: a fundamental shift in the ways in which energy was provided and used throughout the economy. The flowering of industrial growth in late nineteenth century France on the back of electricity generation also illustrates why linking industrialisation to new power sources is such a powerful concept. It provides a framework for understanding the broad processes at work in the transition from pre-industrial to industrial economy, yet is not prescriptive about the exact route that any given nation should take. There was nothing special or defining about the British pathway to industrialisation: it was based upon exploiting coal not because of any qualities intrinsic to coal, but simply because coal was relatively cheap and abundant. Nations with a similar resource endowment followed a similar path, whilst those without necessarily took a different route. They key to industrialisation was not coal per se, but the untapping of a new source of energy. This process can be illustrated more fully by one final example: that of Italy. In contrast to France, which throughout the nineteenth century was a relatively prosperous, trading nation, Italy remained a poor and largely agricultural nation down to the 1870s. Only the northern regions, Piedmont, Liguria, and Lombardy, underwent much industrial development, with a successful silk industry, the introduction of mechanised spinning in the cotton and wool industries, and the emergence of a metallurgical industry, producing primarily ships and weapons. This scattering of industrial enterprise in the north of Italy was too limited in extent to transform the Italian economy, and GDP grew slowly and real wages remained low. Vera Zamagni, The Economic History of Italy, 1860-1990 (Oxford, 1993), pp.36-43. Furthermore, Italy was a nation entirely lacking in coal reserves. The high price of importing coal – coal cost between 5 and 8 lire for one quintal in Italy compared to about 0.7 lira a quintal in England – rendered coal-powered technologies wholly uneconomic to Italian industrialists. Thus in contrast to France, which made significant inroads in exploring the advantages of working with new fuels, Italy remained largely committed to the old way of doing things. Yet the absence of early experimentation with coal and steam engines did not ultimately hold back the Italian industrial revolution. In the century following unification in 1871, industrialisation spread decisively and rapidly, albeit unevenly, throughout the country, so that Italy had emerged as one of the richest manufacturing nations in Europe by the 1980s. As in France, electricity provided the key to this development. In 1890, the electricity industry provided 11 million kWh of energy; by the outbreak of World War One, this had climbed to 2 billion and was on a par with the levels of electricity production in Britain and France. Ibid., pp.92-4. Electricity provided the fuel needed for the nation’s increasingly successful steel, transport, engineering, electromechanical industries. The use of electric motors, rather than steam-engines, also helped to shape Italy’s industrial landscape, encouraging the proliferation of small machines located in small, scattered factories and workshops. Italian industrialisation was thus a world away from the German model, with its huge, vertically integrated industrial plants and very large urban conglomerations in the Ruhr valley; yet time has proved it to be no less viable an alternative. In fine, the example of Italy provides yet another pathway to industrial status, underscoring both the diversity of the process and the central importance of harnessing new sources of energy if industrialisation is to succeed. Before leaving European examples of industrialisation, it is important to note one other key difference between Britain and much of the rest of Europe. In the case of Britain, the switch to coal, as we noted in the last chapter, invariably involved developing and investing in new technologies, and this was an expensive process. Many European countries were noticeably slower to shift towards new forms of powered production not simply because fuel was expensive, but also owing to the fact that local wages were low. We have already seen this in Belgium, where cotton producers in eastern Flanders took little interest in mechanised spinning for several decades because it remained cheaper to hire extra workers than to invest in the latest technology. A similar dynamic operated in Italy through most of the nineteenth century: with wages low and coal extremely expensive, there was no incentive to substitute workers with fuel-hungry machines. Robert Allen has recently demonstrated that many manufactures across Europe found themselves in exactly the same situation: it was simply not cost effective to purchase labour-saving British technology at great expense when extra labour could be cheaply bought. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution, pp.203-12, 229-35 This implies that the underlying structure of the economy, especially wage levels, was of particular importance in determining the alacrity (or otherwise) with which industrialists began to exploit novel sources of power. Industrialisation therefore occurred not only where there was power, but also where there was a strong incentive, usually in the form of high wages, to use that power. The economic history of Europe in the nineteenth century broadly fits with the account of Britain’s industrial revolution developed here, namely that industrialisation involved a sharp increase in energy consumption. But how far can these ideas be applied to the rest of the world? How well can the global pattern of industrialisation be fitted to this European pattern? It is interesting to note that for much of the twentieth century, these questions received rather little scholarly attention. A generation of historians took it for granted that only western Europe possessed the economic, cultural, and political qualities needed for successful and early industrialisation, so research into the global history of industrialisation turned upon whether Europe followed the British path, or why it was England (and not France, or Belgium, or Germany), that underwent the world’s first industrial revolution. For many scholars, the possibility that any of the so-called Third World countries might have industrialised around the same time as, or even before, Europe and the United States seemed too remote to warrant serious investigation. This belief was expressed with particular confidence in a series of influential books by the historian Eric Jones. Eric Jones, European Miracle: Environment, Economies and Geopolitics in the History of Europe and Asia (Cambridge, 3rd edn. 2003); Idem., Growth recurring: Economic change in world history (Oxford, 1988); Jones argued that despite some episodes of significant economic growth outside Europe prior to Britain’s industrial revolution, Europe enjoyed unique and superior political systems and cultural norms long before the onset of industrialisation. Europeans were ‘peculiarly inventive’, prudent in matters of family formation, and particularly blessed with ‘special features of site, location and resource endowment’: these qualities laid the necessary early foundations for the subsequent great economic and material advances associated with industrialisation. Jones, European Miracle, pp.226-7. And despite the criticisms that Jones’ ‘Eurocentric’ position attracted in the years following publication, many writers have continued to find this account of longstanding differences between Europe and the rest of the world persuasive. See, for example, James M. Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians (New York, 2000), pp.73-112. David Landes successful Wealth and Poverty of Nations, published in 1998, for example, boldly declared that for ‘the last thousand years Europe (the West) has been the prime mover of development and modernity’. D. S. Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why some are so rich and some are so poor (New York, 1998), p.xxi. See also the discussion in Jack Goody, Capitalism and Modernity: the Great Debate (Cambridge, 2004), pp.27-49. In the past two decades, however, a new generation of world historians has begun to challenge this Eurocentric perspective and forced us to contemplate the possibility that the European economy was not so unique in the eighteenth century as the older historiography would have us believe. R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca and London, 1997); K. Pomeranz, The great divergence: China, Europe, and the making of the modern world Economy (Princeton, 2000); Susan B. Hanley, Everyday Things in Premodern Japan: the Hidden Legacy of Material Culture (University of California Press, 1999); P. Parthasarathi, The Transition to a Colonial Economy: Weavers, Merchants and Kings in South India, 1720-1800 (Cambridge, 2001). These revisionists have pointed to important economic parallels between parts of Europe and other parts of the world – the Yangtze delta in China, the Kanto plain in Japan, Bengal and Gujerat in India – as late as about 1750. Far from being economically stagnant, or ‘backward’, it is suggested, these areas were all undergoing extensive economic change during the period from roughly 1600-1800 and had economies that did not look very dissimilar from those of parts of Europe with free markets, a substantial manufacturing sector, commercialised agriculture, and relatively high living standards. Pomeranz, Great Divergence, p.8. Indeed, some historians have gone considerably further. Andre Gunder Frank, for example, has claimed that productivity was higher in parts of Asia than in Britain until the late eighteenth century, and that owing largely to the economic might of India and China, Asia was at the centre of the world economy until at least that date. The world economy, he argues, remained ‘dominated by Asian production, competitiveness, and trade’ through the eighteenth century; Europe, by contrast, was only a ‘marginal player’. A. G. Frank, ReOrient: The Silver Age in Asia and the World Economy (Berkeley, 1998), pp. 126-30, 179-97. Whilst some of these claims are hardly less controversial than the Eurocentric ones they seek to repudiate, it is nonetheless clear that this challenge from revisionist historians cannot be ignored. By stressing the extent of growth and the sophistication of the most advanced parts of Asia on the eve of Britain’s industrial revolution, the inevitability of Britain’s sudden and decisive economic lead begins to appear rather less certain, and extending our study of industrialisation beyond Europe’s shores can only serve to deepen our understanding of the broad processes of industrialisation. Whereas Eric Jones gloomily concluded that China, despite coming ‘within a hair’s breadth of industrialising in the fourteenth century’, subsequently headed down a ‘dead-end’ path to economic stagnation, recent reassessments of the Chinese economy have reached considerably more upbeat conclusions. Jones, Economic Miracle, pp. 160, 202-22. R. Bin Wong, for example, has suggested that between the sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries the Chinese economy, far from stagnating, entered a period of sustained and significant expansion. The domestic cotton and silk industries in the lower Yangtze region near Shanghai grew particularly strongly, though the pottery and paper industries also underwent growth. In addition, this period witnessed the development of a commercialised agriculture, mainly of rice, but also of tobacco and indigo. Wong, China Transformed. Pomeranz, Great Divergence Furthermore, Wong stresses, whilst the market economy developed most rapidly along the Yangtze delta, it was not confined to here. The eighteenth century also witnessed the expansion of commercial agriculture and domestic manufacture in many other parts of south and southeast China. The evidence from population growth, living standards and life-expectancy appears to confirm that the Chinese economy performed strongly throughout the eighteenth century. The population of China more than doubled between 1700 and 1800, rising from around 150 million souls to 320 million, thereby adding a population twice the total of Europe in 1700. Jack A. Goldstone, ‘Efflorescences and economic growth in world history: Rethinking the “rise of the West” and the industrial revolution’, Journal of World History, 13/ 2 (2002), pp. 323-389, p.351. Yet despite this very substantial increase in numbers, Chinese living standards remained remarkably buoyant through the century. Kenneth Pomeranz has calculated that Chinese calorie consumption – obtained largely from rice, and supplemented with fruit and vegetables and a little protein from meat, fish and eggs – was broadly similar to that of eighteenth-century England. Kenneth Pomeranz, ‘Standards of living in eighteenth-century China: regional differences, temporal trends, and incomplete evidence’, in Robert C. Allen et al, eds., Living Standards in the Past: New Perspectives on Well-Being in Asia and Europe (Oxford, 2005), pp.23-54. Lack of data undermines attempts to measure wage levels, but Pomeranz argues that studies of material possessions lend further support to the claims of relatively high living standards in eighteenth-century China. Ibid. See also James Z. Lee and Feng Wang. One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities, 1700-2000 (Cambridge, MA, 1999). Studies of mortality are also bedevilled with inadequate data, yet one recent survey concludes that life expectancy for males in China was comparable with that of European males and that the evidence for deteriorating mortality is not compelling. William Lavely and R. Bin Wong, ‘Revising the Malthusian Narrative: The Comparative Study of Population Dynamics in Late Imperial China’, Journal of Asian Studies, 57/3 (1998), pp. 714-748, esp. table 3A., pp720-24. Whether measured as real wages, as calorie consumption, or as life expectancy, therefore, the evidence appears to suggest that Chinese living standards were higher at the century’s end than its beginning. These results have led Wong and Pomeranz to conclude that the most advanced parts of China were on a par with Britain down to about 1800, and it was only thereafter that Britain followed a completely different trajectory. The ancient nation of India presents a very example to China, but recent revisionist historiography points to the strength and sophistication of the early modern economy here as well. In the seventeenth century, India was a relatively urbanised and commercialised nation with a buoyant export trade, devoted largely to cotton textiles, but also including silk, spices, and rice. By the end of the century, India was the world’s main producer of cotton textiles and had a substantial export trade to Britain, as well as many other European countries, via the East India Company. The Indian cotton industry produced immensely popular and fashionable printed fabrics and had penetrated the British market so successfully by the late seventeenth century that domestic producers were arguing for protective legislation prohibiting the import of all printed calicos from India. X Stephen Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta, ‘Lancashire, India and shifting competition and advantage in cotton textiles, 1700-1850: the neglected role of factor prices’, p.8.; Frank Perlin, ‘Proto-Industrialization and Pre-Colonial South Asia’, Past and Present, (1983) 98. Compare also with the quote at the head of this chapter from William Waterston, A Cyclopædia of Commerce, Mercantile Law, Finance, Commercial Geography (London, 1846), p.224 Indeed, cotton manufacture was so successful in eighteenth-century India that nationalist historians in the early twentieth century argued that India had been on the cusp of an industrial revolution of its own, a revolution that was only interrupted, prevented even, by the imposition of colonial rule. For a more recent example of historical research in the Indian nationalist tradition see: Amiya Bagchi, ‘De-industrialisation in India in the nineteenth century: some theoretical implications’, Journal of Development Studies, 12 (1976), 135-64. A far more benign interpretation of the impact of colonisation may be found in Irfan Habib, ‘Potentialities of capitalistic development in the economy of Mughal India’, Journal of Economic History (1969), 29/1, pp. 32-78. Though few historians today accept the suggestion that India was on the brink of industrialisation prior to colonisation, the strength of India as a manufacturing and trading nation should not be underestimated. Once again, wage levels have been used to support the claims of development. Parthasarathi has argued that in the eighteenth century, the weekly wage of those employed in textiles and agriculture in the cotton producing regions of southern India could purchase a roughly similar quantity of local grain (in this case, rice) as the wages that the equivalent British labourer could purchase. Whilst conceding that money wages tended to be low, Parthasarathi argues that the cheapness of grain in south India ensured that the Indian worker enjoyed a comparable standard of living to his British counterpart. Nor, he stresses, should the cheapness of rice be too quickly dismissed, for this provides evidence for a highly efficient agricultural sector. He concludes: ‘Agricultural productivity, not oppressed labourers, was the secret to South Asia's pre-eminent position in the world textile trade’. P. Parthasarathi, ‘Rethinking wages and competitiveness in the eighteenth century: Britain and South India’, Past and Present (1998), 158, pp.79-109. Of course, it is widely recognised that neither China nor India became industrialised nations in the course of the nineteenth century, but how far can our explanation of Britain’s industrial revolution be used to explain the lack thereof in Asia? Is it convincing to suggest that China and India did not follow Britain and Europe down the path to industrialisation because they lacked the coal deposits necessary to sustain a switch from organic to inorganic fuels? The difficulty with this explanation is that both China and India in fact compared extremely favourably with many European nations in terms of their coal deposits. Both countries possess extensive coal reserves – they are the world’s first and third coal producers in the present day. Much of this coal was admittedly located in regions far from their eighteenth-century centres of industry, yet these difficulties were hardly insurmountable. P. H. H Vries, ‘Are Coal and Colonies Really Crucial? Kenneth Pomeranz and the Great Divergence,’ Journal of World History, 12/2 (2001), 407-446. France’s far more meagre coal deposits were also inconveniently located, but producers worked around the coal shortage by mining what they could, improving transport infrastructure to facilitate its transportation, importing coal from abroad, and developing hydro-electricity when the opportunity presented. Could not India and China have done likewise? In any case, the absence of coal need not have prevented industrialisation, which turns upon not coal, but increasing energy use, by whatever means appropriate. Either nation’s power base might have been increased through a combination of different resources, different technologies, and different industries. It seems that given that Britain’s resource endowment was hardly unique, her industrial revolution cannot be explained simply by gesturing to the fortuitous presence of generous coal deposits. The question of real interest therefore becomes: why did British industrialists go to the considerable expense and inconvenience of extracting that coal from the ground and investigating ways of putting it to use in industry? And why did their Chinese and Indian counterparts not do likewise? To understand the very different pathways taken by these three economies through the nineteenth century it is necessary to reconsider the claims that strong resemblances existed between them. Comparing pre-modern economies is fraught with problems. In chapter two, we rehearsed at length the difficulties surrounding Crafts’ measurements of GDP in eighteenth-century Britain, yet Britain’s statistical record for eighteenth-century industry is considerably more robust than that of either China or India. It is in part for this reason that much of the discussion about economic development turns upon the more indirect measure of real wages (though as we shall see in more detail in the following chapter, the measurement of these is in fact far from straightforward). And the most recent studies of real wages suggest that the similarities between Europe and other core areas may not have been so great as the revisionists have argued. A recent comparison of real wages in China and Britain indicates that Pomeranz’s optimism about wage levels in eighteenth century China is unwarranted. X Allen plus others. Wages, Prices, and Living Standards in China, Japan, and Europe, 1738-1925 . in lots of places on the web. Ask which is best to cite. Allen et al’s research concludes that money wages in China’s great eighteenth-century cities – Beijing, Suzhou and Canton – ‘were certainly lower than wages in the advanced parts of western Europe’, and much closer to those paid in the poorest parts of central and southern Europe. They afforded peasants a basic subsistence diet, and left little in the way of disposable income. The evidence for relatively low wages throughout most of China implies that some very real and significant differences between the Chinese and British economies existed. So long as labour was plentiful and cheap two things followed. Firstly, as most of the population had very little disposable income, there was no mass market for consumer goods, and the stimulus for manufacturing growth that was present in Britain was therefore absent. Secondly, low wages gave manufacturers very little incentive to innovate, to look for alternative ways of structuring business, to explore the possible advantages of working with new fuels or new technologies. With cheap, plentiful labour, manufacturers could easily expand their production by simply employing more hands. Here then is a possible explanation for why the complex restructuring of industry that was required if coal was to replace wood and that occurred in Britain towards the end of the eighteenth century was not replicated in China until the late twentieth century. Recent calculations of real wages in India also strongly reinforce this conclusion. Broadberry and Gupta have revisited Parthasarathi’s claim that wages in eighteenth-century Britain and India were broadly equivalent by distinguishing between ‘grain wages’ and ‘silver wages’ – the former being wages measured in terms of the amount of grain they could buy; the latter in terms of the silver content of the currency in which they were paid. S.N Broadberry, and B. Gupta, ‘The early modern great divergence: wages, prices and economic development in Europe and Asia, 1500-1800’, Economic History Review, 59/1 (2006), pp.2-31. Broadberry and Gupta’s analysis reveals that Indian workers did indeed enjoy relatively high grain wages, though this was not a consequence of a particularly developed agriculture sector. It was simply a consequence of large numbers working in agriculture and of the fact that yields in rice-growing regions are in any case higher than those of grain-growing ones. A high proportion of the population working in agriculture should not be taken as evidence of agricultural sophistication, but quite the reverse: it implies that agriculture depended upon relatively backward, labour-intensive techniques. The silver wages, meanwhile, provide a fairer indication of the state of development of the economy, and these, they suggest, were considerably lower in India than in Britain – about four times or less the British levels. They were low, they suggest, because overall development of the economy was quite low, which indicates that the differences between the British and Indian economy was already firmly in place long before the onset of the eighteenth century. ‘In short,’ they conclude, ‘India was not on the same development level as Britain during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.’ Ibid., p.18. Broadberry and Gupta have also compared the consequences of a low-wage economy in India with Britain’s high-wage one. Broadberry and Bishnupriya Gupta, ‘Lancashire, India’, High labour costs, they argue, provided the spur for technological advances in the Lancashire cotton industry which, as we have seen, led to a very sharp and dramatic improvement in labour productivity in the industry. This forms a very stark contrast to the technology used in India, where poorly-paid, highly-skilled workers continued to spin and weave using very cheap and simple equipment. Once again, we encounter the obstacles to change that a low wage economy presented: with low wages there was simply no incentive to innovate. Investing in expensive machinery made little sense when more hands could be employed at little extra cost, so manufacturers adhered to the very same practices and processes that had worked for the generations before them. [Insert image 8.1 Illustrated London News 20 October 1855, p.473, Indian Spinning near here] This discussion of Asia helps to clarify some of the forces at work when Britain began to industrialise at the turn of the nineteenth century. If the absence of Asian industrialisation cannot be explained by simple reference to the lack of coal, then so it follows that Britain’s success was owing to more than the presence of coal. As we noted in the previous chapter, switching from wood to coal was far from straightforward. The two fuels are not interchangeable, and a series of complex technological innovations needed to be introduced if coal was to replace wood for industrial purposes. Britain, like many parts of the world, possessed the coal; more uniquely, however, it also had a very strong incentive, in the form of high wages, to experiment with ways of using that coal in novel contexts. This in turns suggests that in order to understand Britain’s industrial revolution fully we need to look at the development that took place within the organic economy during the eighteenth century. Population growth, urbanisation, occupational change, agricultural improvement, and technical advance had all helped to make the British economy look quite unique by the late eighteenth century; by this date Britain was, by world standards, an exceptionally prosperous nation. The avenues for further growth upon the existing organic lines, however, were also becoming constricted, and the economy faced a serious setback if it did not look beyond the existing ways of doing things. This century of development provided a critical impetus for the world’s first industrial revolution, and is central to understanding why the world’s first industrial revolution took place in this small country, and at this particular point in time. More generally, the evidence for economic growth and change across the globe in the two centuries after 1700 that has been presented here provides broad support for the account of industrialisation that has been offered in previous chapters, that is that Britain’s industrial revolution was characterised above all by a sharp increase in the amount of energy used in the economy, itself the consequence of the switch to coal and the deployment of new technologies Linking industrialisation to an increase in the amount of energy used in the economy is a powerful and flexible concept. Different nations, each with their own unique resource endowment, found different ways of tapping new sources of energy, hence the success with which some nations industrialised without coal and without steam engines. Nonetheless, linking industrialisation to energy use provides a way of connecting diverse pathways to industrialisation and provides a framework for understanding the great economic and social transition that occurred across Europe between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. PAGE 179