The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (review)

Robert C. Allen's The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective is a very interesting and persuasive book, the fruit of mature and impressively wide-ranging scholarship. It's a must-read for historians dealing with the Industrial Revolution or economic history more generally, and provocative as well for early modernists. Allen aims to show why the Industrial Revolution began first in Britain—had to begin there, he claims—and why further technological adjustments were essential for the phenomenon seriously to take root anywhere else. The questions are classic and the answers not entirely new, but never before have solutions been so carefully and systematically advanced and interpretive alternatives so directly eliminated.

Allen's effort succeeds on a number of levels, including of course the compelling argument itself. He has mastered details of a number of industrial and preindustrial technologies (particularly concerning the steam engine, cotton manufacture, and the use of coke), combined with a fair amount of quantitative evidence, and produced an account easily and even pleasantly readable by the uninitiated. This book will be a fine example of historical argument for a variety of advanced history students, as well as established professionals. It also impressively includes the now-essential global dimensions: Allen situates British developments in the preindustrial expansion of global commerce. He also offers a host of imaginative comparisons to highlight British distinctiveness, not only vis-à-vis France or the Low Countries, and briefly the United States, but also concerning China and India.

Any summary of the argument risks oversimplification, because the book tosses up a variety of insights. Fundamentally, however, Allen believes that industrialization had to happen in Britain, and only there, because of established high labor costs and—with growing use of coal to heat rapidly growing urban commercial centers—energy costs that were not only lower than elsewhere, but a great deal lower. High wages entered directly into business calculations, but they also generated an unusually well-educated labor force which was in turn the source of responsive technological innovations. Other places simply lacked this labor/energy combination, which, however, for Britain simply compelled the series of inventions that launched the Industrial Revolution outright. It would take several decades for continued technological refinements in Britain to make factory production economically rational, even for lower-wage areas (or for the new United States, another high-wage society).

Not content with the positive explanation, Allen also demolishes alternatives, and his argumentation is consistently interesting and mostly persuasive. Science and the Enlightenment didn't hurt, but they were not involved in direct causation; Britain's political system was irrelevant. Population growth figures in, but mainly as part of the demonstration that British commercial growth and wage levels were high enough to sustain even additional workers. Agricultural change was vital, but again it was commercial growth attracting labor out of the countryside, not agricultural prods, that really counted.

A presentation so confident and sweeping invites debaters' quibbles, but I hasten to add that these are not intended as refutations, just matters for further discussion. A few connections may need additional evidence. The embrace of education, as against a large literature that attempts to debunk this link, makes good sense, but the comparative data rest principally on name-signing literacy, which may or may not adequately reveal the kind of educational attainment relevant to technology. A few comparisons might also be fleshed out, to show more conclusively still how British response to global commercial opportunity had already become unique before the mid-eighteenth century. Allen is very careful about cultural claims, and arguments about the nonessential role of "modern" culture really deserve attention. But one still wonders—unfairly, because this pushes back to the causes of causes, and not the argument itself—why Britain responded so distinctively to preindustrial opportunity, compared to its continental rivals; a few references to an unusual aftermath following the population loss of the Black Death and some of the interesting comparisons to the Netherlands help...