Just as British industrialization can be explained in large part because of unique British social, economic, cultural, and political conditions, the same is true for French industrialization. Unlike Britain, France did not have a substantial overseas empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and thus did not have the same kind of market for products. Furthermore, the domestic market was not as large as Britain’s because French urban growth was much slower. Whereas by 1850, half of all Britons lived in urban areas, the same was not true of France until 1930.
In addition, and very important for French economic and industrial development, French population growth sharply declined around the time of the French Revolution. Tom Kemp in his Industrialization in Nineteenth Century Europe convincingly shows that while Britain was able to maintain her agrarian sector while at the same time having a large pool of urban workers, France did not have this population luxury. Furthermore, and related, France did not have Enclosure Acts as Britain did but exactly the reverse: as a result of the French Revolution era land settlement, the feudal lands were broken up and divided more or less equally among the peasantry. This, Clive Trebilcock convincingly shows in his The Industrialization of the Continental Powers, led to the development of a much more conservative, small town peasantry that was resistant to rapid economic change. Lastly, France had long-standing dominance in the silk industry, furniture and other high-end artisanal production which continued throughout the nineteenth century.
As a result of these unique factors, French industrialization occurred in a much different way than Britain’s. Production scale was much smaller and as William Sewell points out in his Work and Revolution in France, it continued to be heavily artisanal. As a result, the industries which were focused on were different. Whereas British industrialization focused on low-end mass-produced manufactured goods, French industrialization focused on hand-made luxury production, particularly in the siken industry, furniture building, and later on in the early twentieth century, automobile manufacturing. Lastly, industrialization was a much slower process in France because her population growth was slower. Unlike in Britain which by the 1870s, as Jose Harris shows in her Private Lives, Public Spirit, Britain was undergoing agrarian decline, no such dramatic transformation took place in France throughout the nineteenth century.
In conclusion, I would posit that the answer to how a country industrializes is a very simple one, but one that is often overlooked. A country’s industrialization ultimately plays on a country’s strengths; a country industrializes in the fashion that makes most sense to do so. Britain industrialized rapidly because it had the labor force and markets, and it focused on mass-produced manufactured goods because it had copious amounts of raw materials and a ready made market for manufactured goods.
Go To Page: 1 2
