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First and Unique: Britain's Industrial Revolution, Part III

© Joseph Sramek

The industrialization of Europe was a major transformation that occurred throughout the nineteenth century. How this industrialization occurred and why it occurred the way it did throughout Europe have been questions numerous scholars have raised. Some argue, as David Landes does in his Unbound Prometheus, for Britain being the "model" of industrialization that other Continental European countries followed. Others, such as Alexander Gerschenkron in his Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective, argue the reverse: that there were no "models" or "deviants" but rather different industrializations depending on particular social, economic, cultural, and political factors unique to the various countries. Another major historiographical debate has centered round the "success" or "failure" of French industrialization vis-à-vis Britain’s. Here, Landes and others argue that France had an "unsuccessful" industrialization, whereas William Sewell in his Work and Revolution in France and others argue that French industrialization, instead of being "retarded," was merely different.

On these two related historiographical questions, I agree much more with Gerschenkron and Sewell than Landes. British industrialization, rather than being a "model," was actually unique in many ways. Britain had several social, cultural, economic, and political peculiarities that set its industrialization apart from other European countries. The same, of course, was true for France. Furthermore, neither path to industrialization was, in my view, intrinsically better or worse than the other or should be looked on as a "model." Yet the path that Britain and France each took in their industrializations was the best for those countries, given their unique social, economic, cultural, and political situations.

There were many unique social, political, economic, and cultural conditions in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries which led to its industrialization, conditions not found anywhere else in Europe. The British aristocracy was limited in the sense that it did not have as much social and political power in Britain as it did in the Continent and also because it was smaller. Only first-born sons inherited, so younger sons had to make a living another way and many opted toward business. Furthermore, as David Landes points out in his Unbound Prometheus, social and economic mobility were not just limited to those of the upper class, but extended farther in eighteenth century England than anywhere else. Furthermore, Landes convincingly shows that Britain was by the eighteenth century a single economic unit, without internal tolls or tariffs, a situation unique in mostly fragmented Continental Europe.

The existence of a large overseas empire by the 18th century also had an impact on the way Britain industrialized. The copious amounts of raw materials flowing in from the empire (i.e. cotton from the Thirteen Colonies and India, dyes from India, sugar from the Caribbean islands, and lumber from Canada) encouraged the development of manufacturing, particularly in the textile, shipbuilding and other industries. The existence of an overseas empire also provided a ready-made market to go along with an extensive domestic market, again unique. Furthermore, in addition to having ready market for manufactured goods, British industrialization also benefited from a readily available urban labor force. As a result of the various Enclosure Acts passed during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, many poor rural Britons were forced to migrate to the big urban centers where they formed a large pool of available labor to work in the factories. Yet at the same time, the British birth rate remained high, so the agrarian sector of the economy did not suffer noticeable decline until much later in the nineteenth century.