The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (review)

Victorians struggled to make sense of the rapid economic changes through which they lived: the emergence of the first predominantly urban society, the shift from agriculture to industry, and the rise of steam power. In his Lectures on the Industrial Revolution in England (1884), Arnold Toynbee lamented the social consequences of economic change; on the other hand, Samuel Smiles celebrated the work of inventors and industrialists. The implications of the Industrial Revolution were central to moral and political arguments in Victorian Britain. What light does Robert Allen's new interpretation cast on these debates?

Allen is an optimist, arguing that Britain was the first economy to experience an industrial revolution because it had higher wages than other parts of Europe or Asia, linked with low energy costs. This cost structure meant that it was economically rational for industrialists to use cheaper energy and capital to replace expensive labour, resulting in the development of the steam engine, coke blast furnaces, and new textile machinery. Smiles, it would seem, had a point, and Allen provides detailed case studies of these transformative inventions, along with a chapter on the social background of the inventors. Although British workers did not fully share in the benefits of the Industrial Revolution, they enjoyed high incomes, and new technology meant that incomes continued to grow throughout the Victorian period.

Allen's interpretation of these technological developments differs from Joel Mokyr's recent study of the Industrial Revolution, The Enlightened Economy, which stresses the "preceding changes in the mental world of the British economic and technical elite" during the scientific revolution ([Yale University Press, 2010], 85). Mokyr sees the "macro-inventions" as the work of a few highly trained, literate men who linked science and production through a culture of experimentation to create an "industrial enlightenment" (136; Mokyr, 10). Allen disagrees: in his view, the initiating force of industrialization was demand for technological change resulting from high wages and low energy costs, which made it feasible to adopt expensive and initially inefficient macro-inventions. His analysis of seventy-nine important inventors leads him to conclude that the "Industrial Enlightenment was mainly an upper-class cultural phenomenon with little relation to production" (251). The inventors did undertake experiments, but Allen attributes the practical shift to workable from unworkable methods to "local learning" (141), often a collective enterprise as industrialists watched each other. In his view, the supply of inventors was itself the product of increased wages in Britain, which led to literacy, numeracy, and commercial values.

The explanation of high labour costs in Britain is the crucial variable. In The Great Divergence (1980), Kenneth Pomeranz dates England's industrial advantage over parts of Asia to around 1800. Allen disagrees, arguing that "the path to the Industrial Revolution began with the Black Death" (21). Decimation of population led to higher wages and allowed arable fields to be turned to pasture for the production of high-quality wool, thereby fostering the development of "new draperies" that led to commercial expansion and the growth of cities (19). The growth in international trade initially occurred within Europe, but extended to America and Asia in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whereas other European economies experienced a fall in wages as population recovered, wages in Britain remained high as a result of international commercial success, the major reason for the unusually rapid growth of cities—above all London—and hence demand for coal and food. Productive agriculture and coal mines were consequences, not causes, of urban growth. In Allen's view, causation ran overwhelmingly from expanding world trade to the growth of urban manufacturing. High wages led to better diet, health, and work intensity; to greater literacy and numeracy; to demand for consumer goods; and to the need (and also capacity) to replace expensive labour with new technology.

Allen does not entirely reject culture and politics, but he largely sees them as consequences of urbanisation and high wages...