The Path to Sustained Growth: England’s Transition from an Organic Economy to an Industrial Revolution by E. A. Wrigley (review)

Wrigley is deservedly renowned as both an indefatigable collector and as an insightful analyzer and synthesizer of primary data. All of his skills are amply demonstrated in this brief volume. The title, and particularly the subtitle of the volume, announce a broad intention to document the unique change in human societies—the simultaneous attainment of unprecedented increases in material welfare and population growth— that began in early modern Britain and reached fruition in the late nineteenth century. A hallmark of that Industrial Revolution was the extensive use of energy from fossil fuel in the form of coal. Wrigley sees this move from dependence on organic processes as the defining feature of the transition to sustained growth. As he notes in his final paragraphs, current concern about the impact of fossil fuel on global climate gives this focus a modern relevance.

The volume revolves around the process by which society largely replaced and greatly augmented the limited flow of energy available from plant photosynthesis. Wrigley gives the long history of the replacement of organically based energy with fossil fuels considerable attention. First, the widespread use of coal for domestic and industrial heat liberated land from managed woodland. Wrigley sees the creation of mechanical energy from coal as a particularly significant part of the transformation to an inorganic economy. Accordingly, he gives the origins of the steam engine and railway a place of prominence. This work is not, however, a history of technological invention but focuses on broader themes. As such, it deserves to find a place as an excellent overview of the social processes that transformed Britain from Queen Elizabeth I’s time to Queen Victoria’s. The theme of feedbacks provides an organizing framework. It is predominantly negative for the organic economy in the Malthusian unequal race between population and land resources but more likely to be positive for the inorganic energy regime, given the Smithian benefits of specialization, enlarged markets, and induced technological change.

It is surprising, given the underlying significance of the organic economy’s limitations in Wrigley’s scheme, that much of his discussion before the Industrial Revolution chronicles the organic economy’s successes. In particular, Chapter 4, about urban growth and agricultural productivity, documents the remarkable rise in British agricultural productivity during the early modern period, which occurred entirely within the framework of the organic economy, supporting a remarkable increase in English urbanization (particularly in the size of London). This development was an exceptional episode of positive feedback within the organic economy. Specialization and exchange engendered technological advance. Similarly, although hardly surprisingly in a work by Wrigley, the European marriage pattern is given a central role in England’s success within the early modern organic economy.

Although the volume will serve as an excellent textbook for understanding the British Industrial Revolution in a long perspective, it goes well beyond an inspired synthesis of available literature. Specialist readers will find much of interest in it. Throughout the book, Wrigley presents detailed regional breakdowns of population change and occupational status to illuminate his arguments. These data, from censuses and earlier sources that he has been instrumental in presenting for decades, allow him to provide information distinguished by regions with differing economic characteristics. Thanks to Wrigley, this information is now available at the sub-county level, usually at the hundreds’ level but at times as finely grained as the individual registration district.

In Chapter 5, Wrigley explores the change in occupational structure by economic regions from the late eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, leading him to argue that it warrants a more optimistic assessment of changing real wages than many studies suggest. Chapter 8 offers an examination of the information about occupational structure in the 1831 census that permits an unusually close geographical analysis. Specialists will appreciate the valuable data and the suggestions for...