It seems remarkable that many technological improvements came together in Britain in such a short period of time. The development of the steam engine, the water frame, a real understanding of iron production, large scale production of sulphuric acid, etc.
Why did all these technological advances come together so quickly?
And, why did this all happen in Britain? Certainly Britain had a large empire, but then, so did other nations like France. Britain also had large amounts of coal and other minerals, but so did the likes of China. Why Britain?
Historically they were in the right place at the right time with the right political and economic climate to have it all come together. I think it DID happen, if at a smaller scale, in places like France as well, but politically they had…issues (China was never in the running…they had THEIR industrial revolution in IIRC the Han dynasty era and it was all down hill from there :)).
There are a huge number of issues involved. Economic, environmental, social, technological. Was China too big and too spread out? Was it too conservative in compairons? Did Britain just have the right minerals (coal?) and the climate to want it? What influence did the French and british academies or science have on it, if any? Was the pre-industrialization of coal mining even related to the actual industrial revolution later on?
And moreover, everyone is going to like and dislike something about it. Atheists may not like that Christian-inspired social progress was a big factor in growing education and helping people reach for more. Some may not like that the new conceptions in free thinking and open questioning of old beliefs helped spread ideas more than was previously possible. Then you have the old which-was-worse: agricultural poverty and urban poverty questionstinking up the joint.
The first industrial steam engine was built in in Cornwall in 1714, a century before the purported beginning of the Industrial Revolution.
It’s a matter of things reaching critical mass - a large amount of divergent scientific developments coming together at a certain point of time when somebody can use them to make lots of money. Why Britain? Maybe because between the Royal Academy and Adam Smith, the UK already had the world’s finest collection of scientists and economic visionaries. Maybe because Britain, being a maritime nation, already had an economy based on trade rather than agriculture. Maybe the lack of a standing army meant a redily available workforce. Or maybe all of the above.
Britain (well England) was an early adopter of the central bank concept, and the modern insurance industry sprung up in London in the late 17th-century along with stock trading on the Dutch model so there was a pretty sophisticated financial environment in place for investment in bleeding-edge high tech startups by the time the Industrial Revolution was gathering pace.
One thing that occurs to me is the low importance of slavery economically in Britain, sliding eventually towards outright hostility. As we saw with the American South, large scale slavery tends to be hostile to industrialization.
Also, there’s also the theory that one reason is that Britain didn’t suffer as much as mainland Europe in the Napoleonic Wars. Rather like how America didn’t suffer as much damage in WW I and II, and prospered for it.
Also, I recall reading years ago that Britain actively tried to keep industrial technology a secret, and that an early American intelligence success was in acquiring such things as steam engine plans from them.
Isn’t there also the domino effect of once one thing was developed (the steam engine) and were an industry, there were obvious purposes it could be put to, and then other industries, both tangentially and directly related to steam, began to develop naturally.
I’ve just been watching a series of documentaries hosted by Mark Williams called Industrial Revelations, and he covers the way things just naturally evolved as a step by step development from one discovery, to the uses it could be applied to, and then to the new needs that emerged from them.
I don’t know if this book has come up for discussion on this forum, but “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond will go a long way to answering the question.
More broadly, you can ask why did Europe undergo the exponential increase in science and technology that led to the modern era? One educated guess is that Europe was where movable type printing happened to catch on. (The Chinese had tried it but it was impractical without an alphabetic system of writing.) Judging by how many printing presses were established within a few decades of it’s invention, it led to the greatest “information explosion” since the invention of writing. Innovations in any field of science could circulate in months instead of years or decades.
There were several preconditions that made the industrial revolution possible:
Probably second only to printing was the discovery of coking. Coking is baking coal in an airless oven so that most of the volitile impurities are driven out, leaving mostly carbon and ash. This made it possible to use coal as fuel in smelters, glass furnaces and kilns. Without coke, there wouldn’t be enough fuel for all the energy intensive new technologies. Particularly it made the mass production of cast iron possible.
Another precondition was the establishment of water-borne commerce. Europe has a highly convoluted coastline, and many navigable rivers. Shipping goods is much cheaper and easier than carting them overland. With the establishment of colonies in the western hemisphere and the opening of trade with the east, a huge potential market opened up. If you were close enough to a port, it was now possible to mass produce on a scale that simply wasn’t economical before. Before the industrial revolution proper took place, there was already a well established global system of mercantile trade.
As Connections author James Burke pointed out, if you have lots of coal mines and lots of iron mines, you need to keep them pumped out. This led, thanks to the expansion of nascent science, in tinkering with various schemes involving steam powered vacuum pumps. So the discovery of coking leads to expanded use of coal, mass production of cast iron, and steam pumps made of cast iron and powered by coal to keep the mines pumped out. The big breakthrough was when a steam powered device was built that could generate mechanical power and transmit it to machinery, rather than just serving as a pump. James Watt is credited with the first machine that meets this criterion. And of course once you have a reliable source of mechanical power, you can build powered machine tools to make, among other things, better steam engines… and so it goes.
I think it’s because we perfected cast iron processes before anyone else - in the early 18th century (see the history of Coalbrookdale). Once that was in place, it created the raw material resource and mass production processes that could be easily applied to any new inventions that came along.
The technology revolution did not happen in China or India, it did not happen in Caliphate, Ottoman empire or in 16th century Spain. There were precursors of industrial revolution in Nothern Italy and Holland but it did not gather the momentum.
One can also ask why did it take so long - when considering the technological heights of Roman and Bysantine empires.
My guess is that what one needs is a cofluence of things: a fairly rich and technologically advanced society that is also friendly to free enterprise, one that can take on protestant working ethics (and is deeply moral tone) without the tyrany of church or king. In England the aristocracy was fairly inefficient in business and the “new rich” eventually surpassed the land-owning gentry financially but because of the intermarriage and conscious emulation there was less conflict between the two and upward-mobile business types could get ahead based on the merrit rather than priviledge.
I think more interesting question is how come Japan industrialised so rapidly in 19th century when it was so backward and poor country originally when compared to China.
Since ancient times (when they learned writing, city planning and government methods from the Chinese) the Japanese have shown a national genius for learning things from foreign cultures, and making them distinctly Japanese in the process. Industry is just one more example.
Also, after the Meiji Restoration, Japan had a government committed to modernization. The Manchu emperors of China resisted it, fearing (and not without grounds) that it would destabilize their society.