The Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England

R. M. Hartwell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351697033
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A number of changes in the English economy during the eighteenth century marked the inception of the modern industrialised world. Whether for the historian seeking explanations for past growth, or the economist in search of prescriptions for the future, the English industrial revolution is probably the most interesting historical example. This title, first published in 1967, brings together six articles on the industrial revolution, and explain why it actually occurred. This title will be of interest to students of history and economics.

1 Introduction

I

On any historical accounting the industrial revolution of England began one of the great discontinuities of history, marking ‘the great divide’ between a world of slow economic growth, in which population and real incomes were increasing slowly or not at all, and a world of much faster economic growth, in which population has increased at an almost frightening rate and in which there have been sustained increases in real income per head. In a stimulating book on The Economic History of World Population,¹ Carlo Cipolla has argued that mankind’s economic history can be written largely in terms of two revolutions which fundamentally altered the economic and demographic levels of human endeavour, and which on both occasions made possible long-term economic growth. These two revolutions were, first, the agricultural revolution of the eighth millennium B.C. which by 1500–2000 B.C. had converted man from hunter and food-gatherer to farmer; and second, the industrial revolution beginning in the eighteenth century which in two centuries radically reduced the proportion of the world’s population engaged in agriculture (80–90 per cent in 1750 to 50–60 per cent in 1950) and converted man increasingly from farmer into maker of services and manufactured goods. This conversion, which has been described generally as industrialization, has vastly increased the resources available to mankind and has allowed (perhaps caused) a population explosion. The agricultural revolution had also lifted the limits to population growth, so that in the 10 to 12,000 years which separated it from the industrial revolution, world population grew from what must have been a maximum of 20 millions in 10,000 B.C. to 750 ± 100 millions in 1750. With industrialization, however, population growth was much faster. By 1850 world population had grown to 1,200 ± 100 millions, by 1900 to 1,600 ± 100 millions, and by 1950 to 2,500 millions; at the present impressive rate of growth world population will double in the next forty years.

If the limit to world population of the pre-industrial revolution world was around 1,000 millions, the limit of the industrial world, in spite of much argument and calculation, has not yet been reckoned. So far world population under industrialization has increased at the same time as much of it has bettered its standard of living, but it is difficult not to foresee a situation in which further population growth will be possible only at the expense of a deterioration in living standards. This possibility poses one of the most interesting and unanswered questions in economic history: the extent to which a balance between income and population has restrained growth in the past, and the extent to which industrialization has represented an escape – perhaps the only escape – from ‘the Malthusian Trap’, the situation in which population growth has been limited by, and has also limited, economic growth. The industrial revolution in England, and in other countries which have industrialized, resulted in more people with more goods. In other words, the industrial revolution was an example of successful growth, the achievement of ‘the growth of output per head of population’.¹ This was its significant economic result, whatever the mechanism which enabled such growth, and however difficult the process of such growth is to analyse.

Economists and historians are both interested in economic growth. The economists are seeking prescriptions for growth, and look forward to the day when they will be able to draw up a blueprint for the growth of any particular economy. The historians, for a long time, did not consciously regard what they were studying to have been, in varying degrees, case-studies or aspects of economic growth (and, sometimes, economic stagnation or decline). The main reason for the economists’ interest in growth stems directly from their interest in the problems of the underdeveloped economies of the world. This interest has been stimulated, also, by realizing that the liberal economic philosophy of the nineteenth century, which reckoned that free enterprise and free trade would inevitably result in economic growth, of the Western pattern, all over the world, has not had that result; and also by the emergence of a different economic philosophy and a different social system which claim to be more efficient in promoting growth, a philosophy and a system which exists, for example, in Soviet Russia.¹ The historians’ interest in growth is prompted partly by the economist, but partly also by the realization that much of what they have been doing in the past has been the documenting and describing of economic growth.

II

With a quickening interest in growth, it was inevitable that both economists and historians should look more closely at the industrial revolution in England. Of all the historical examples of growth, none is more important or more interesting than the industrial revolution in England: it was the first industrial revolution; it led to the first example of modern economic growth; it was a growth achieved mainly without external assistance; it was growth in the context of a free enterprise economy; it was growth accompanied by a social and political revolution which were achieved with little violence; it was ‘the engine of growth’ for other economies, stimulating them by example, by the export of men and capital, and by trade. In spite of its obvious importance, however, surprisingly little effort has been made, by either historians or economists, to explain why the industrial revolution occurred. Indeed, on the causes of the industrial revolution there has been little formal debate, even though every historian who has written about the industrial revolution has talked about causes. In so far as there has been a modern debate, it has tended to be commentaries on, or reactions to, W. W. Rostow’s article ‘The take-off into self-sustained growth’ of 1956,¹ and his book, The Stages of Economic Growth of 1960.² Indeed, Rostow can reasonably claim to be the most influential of modern economic historians, whose phrase ‘the take-off’ has passed into everyday speech, and whose theories about growth (and the industrial revolution) have inspired a spate of literature, largely critical, of which contributions by the following historians and economists are the most relevant to the theme of this book: A. K. Cairncross, H. J. Habakkuk and Phyllis Deane, P. A. Baran and E. J. Hobsbawm, and A. Fishlow.³

Other general discussions about the causes of the industrial revolution in England are to be found also in the now vast literature on economic development.⁴ This literature, however, is for and by economists and administrators interested in the problems of the contemporary underdeveloped world; as such it is not so much concerned with a systematic historical analysis of English economic growth as with extracting from English experience some of the secrets of successful growth. There is no doubt, however, that the economists’ preoccupation with growth has jolted the historians into a more careful and more explicitly theoretical analysis of the causes of English growth. Nevertheless, there is still only one book which has taken ‘the long view of British economic growth’, British Economic Growth, 1688–1959. Trends and Structure by Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole, in which, also, an ingenious attempt is made to describe ‘the mechanics of eighteenth-century growth’.¹ Before this, perhaps the only important general essay on the causes of the industrial revolution was by T. S. Ashton, in the first chapter of his remarkable classic, The Industrial Revolution, of 1948.² Indeed, a general consideration of the various attempts to explain the industrial revolution, in the form of a reasonably comprehensive and critical survey of the writings of economic historians on the subject, was not published until 1965³ (in the article ‘The Causes of the Industrial Revolution. An Essay in Methodology’, reproduced in this volume). Since then, however, at least four further general contributions have appeared: Phyllis Deane’s The First Industrial Revolution,⁴ D. S. Landes’ ‘Technological Change and Development in Western Europe, 1750–1914’,⁵ M. W. Flinn’s Origins of the Industrial Revolution,⁶ and Charles Wilson’s England’s Apprenticeship, 1603–1763,⁷ the last volume being by far the most important recent attempt to explain the origins of English industrialization.

Debate on the causes of the industrial revolution before this very recent literature took the form, usually, of argument about mono-causal explanations, with each contribution expounding or criticizing a particular theory of growth. The result was a series of confrontations, each ending in indecision or confusion.⁸ In so far as multi-causal explanations were attempted, these were not challenged so much as rivalled; each explanation consisted of a list of relevant ‘factors’ or ‘forces’ for growth, but not of an explicit model of growth with functionally related variables. These lists varied in content and comprehensiveness, but because their constituent elements were not related in an explanatory mechanism, there were no obvious criteria by which one list could be judged superior to any other for explaining why the industrial revolution occurred when, where, and how it did. The lists were non-operational and qualitative, and so there was little reason to choose between them.¹ Nevertheless every attempt to determine the causes of the industrial revolution, to relate cause and effect, did assume, at least implicitly, a model of growth; for example, as in the most popular theory, a simple capital accumulation model, in which increasing capital formation led to the industrial revolution.

The main weaknesses of the historians’ approach, however, were, first, a failure to define ‘the industrial revolution’, and second, a failure to use economic theory to make explicit the growth models being used (and, consequently, the relevant variables in those models, and the relationships between variables). Obviously a term which was used to describe overall change in an economy and society over a century presented the historian with an almost impossible task of explanation. The very magnitude of the problem of determining cause and effect on this scale led inevitably to irresponsibility; almost any factor which was changing could be, and was assumed to have been a relevant variable of growth, and prejudice operated with rationality to favour this variable or that, and thus to increase speculation rather than understanding. Obviously, therefore, it is now necessary to specify the problem we are investigating; i.e. to define the economic phenomenon whose causes we are seeking. Then, and only then, can we set about the problem of explanation, of constructing an appropriate economic model of the industrial revolution in England.

III

It is surprising that so little thought has gone into a definition of ‘the industrial revolution’. In so far as the words constitute no more than ‘a handy phrase for describing a period’,¹ then no precise definition is possible (or necessary). The requirements of the economic historian, however, demand a definition of the industrial revolution which both isolates its essential economic characteristics and which also locates it in time. Undoubtedly, the industrial revolution was an example of what is now called ‘economic growth’, and its essential characteristic was an unprecedented and sustained increase in the rate of growth of the output of goods and services. This seems so obvious that we must ask why the historians have not always looked at the industrial revolution in this way. The reason is that they were long inhibited by preoccupation with the problems of distribution and consumption rather than with explaining the increase in output. The increase in output was assumed rather than examined; it was a datum and attention focused on how the output was distributed. On distribution, also, there was another assumption: that, even though output grew, the consumption of the mass of the people declined. Of course it is possible for output to grow while consumption declines, but it is not a necessary consequence of the growth of output. However, there was no explicit consideration of the models of growth compatible with declining consumption.²

Thus two large assumptions, relatively unquestioned, inhibited research both into the process of growth and also into what happened to consumption and distribution during growth. There was instead a concentration of interest on ‘the social costs’ of industrialization,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1 EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
• 2 H. HEATON: Industrial Revolution
• 3 R. M. HARTWELL: The Causes of the Industrial Revolution: An Essay in Methodology
• 4 P. DEANE: The Industrial Revolution and Economic Growth: The Evidence of Early British National Income Estimates
• 5 E. A. WRIGLEY: The Supply of Raw Materials in the Industrial Revolution
• 6 E. W. GILBOY: Demand as a Factor in the Industrial Revolution
• 7 F. CROUZET: England and France in the Eighteenth Century: A Comparative Analysis of Two Economic Growths
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY