what advantages in europe (and specifically england) have to benefit from the industrial revolution?
Why did the Industrial Revolution have place in eighteenth century Great britain and not elsewhere in Europe or Asia? Answers to this question have ranged from religion and culture to politics and constitutions. In a just published book, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, I debate that the explanation of the Industrial Revolution was fundamentally economic. The Industrial Revolution was United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland's artistic response to the challenges and opportunities created by the global economy that emerged after 1500. This was a 2 step process. In the tardily sixteenth and early on seventeenth centuries a European-wide marketplace emerged. England took a commanding position in this new order as her wool cloth industry out competed the established producers in Italia and the Low Countries. England extended her lead in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by creating an intercontinental trading network including the Americas and India. Intercontinental trade expansion depended on the acquisition of colonies, mercantilist trade promotion, and naval power.
The upshot of United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland's success in the global economy was the expansion of rural manufacturing industries and rapid urbanisation. East Anglia was the centre of the woollen cloth industry, and its products were exported through London where a quarter of the jobs depended on the port. Every bit a issue, the population of London exploded from 50,000 in 1500 to 200,000 in 1600 and half a million in 1700. In the eighteenth century, the expansion of trade with the American colonies and India doubled London'due south population again and led to fifty-fifty more rapid growth in provincial and Scottish cities. This expansion depended on vigorous imperialism, which expanded British possessions abroad, the Royal Navy, which defeated competing naval and mercantile powers, and the Navigation Acts, which excluded foreigners from the colonial trades. The British Empire was designed to stimulate the British economy–and it did.
The growth of British commerce had 3 important consequences. Commencement, the growth of London created a shortage of wood fuel that was only relieved by the exploitation of coal. Figure 1 shows the existent price per 1000000 BTUs of energy in London from wood and coal in this period. In the fifteenth century, the two fuels sold at the aforementioned price per million BTU's which meant that the marketplace for coal was limited given its polluting character. Equally London grew later 1500, the price of woods fuels rose and by the end of the sixteenth century, charcoal and firewood were twice the price of coal per unit of free energy. With that premium, consumers began to substitute coal for wood. Instead of a wood burning hearth in the eye of a large primal room, houses were congenital with narrow fireplaces and chimneys to burn coal. The coal burning business firm was invented. It and then paid to mine coal in Northumberland and ship it down the declension to London. The coal merchandise began. On the coal fields (in Newcastle, for instance), Uk had the cheapest energy in the globe. Energy was more than expensive on the European continent and particularly expensive in People's republic of china (Effigy 2).
Figure ane.
Effigy 2.
Second, the growth of cities and manufacturing increased the need for labour with the issue that British wages and living standards were the highest in the world. Figure 3 shows the wages of labours in leading cities in Europe and Asia from 1375 to 1875. The wages have been deflated by a consumer toll index and so that they prove the purchasing power beyond space as well every bit over time. A value of ane means that a labourer employed full time, total yr could earn merely enough to keep his family at a subsistence standard of living of 1940 calories per adult male equivalent per day. The upkeep used to ascertain the consumer price index is set up so that almost of the spending is on food and near of that is on the cheapest carbohydrate available (oatmeal in northwestern Europe, polenta in Florence, sorghum in Beijing, millet chapatis in Delhi). Only tiny quantities of meat, oil, cloth, fuel, and housing are included in the budget. After the Blackness Death in the mid-fourteenth century, the standard of living of workers everywhere was high; they typically earned 3 or four times subsistence. In the ensuing centuries, population growth in Europe and Asia led to falling real wages, and so that about workers concluded up in the eighteenth century earning but enough to purchase the subsistence standard of living. The only countries to avert that fate were U.k. and the Low Countries. Their populations, in fact, grew more rapidly than those elsewhere, but this effect was offset past the booms in their economies due to international trade. Workers in London and Amsterdam did non, all the same, purchase four times as much oatmeal every bit they needed for subsistence. Instead they upgraded their diets to beef, beer, and bread, while their counterparts in much of Europe and Asia subsisted on quasi-vegetarian diets of boiled grains with a few peas or lentils. Workers in northwestern Europe besides had surplus income to buy exotic imports like tea and saccharide as well as domestic articles like books, pictures, watches, and better apparel.
Figure 3.
Third, the growth of cities and the high wage economic system stimulated agriculture. The stiff demand for nutrient and particularly meat, butter, and cheese led to the conversion of arable to pasture, convertible husbandry, and the production of provender crops (beans, clover, turnips), most of which raised soil nitrogen levels and pushed up the yields of wheat and barley. The urban demand for labour led to the affiliation of small holdings into large farms, which employed fewer people per acre, a development also entailed by the conversion of ploughed land to grass. Agronomics was revolutionised because cities expanded, rather than the reverse equally historians have often maintained.
Success in international trade created U.k.'s high wage, cheap energy economic system, and it was the leap board for the Industrial Revolution. High wages and cheap energy created a demand for technology that substituted upper-case letter and energy for labour. These incentives operated in many industries. Pottery, for instance, was manufactured in both England and China. The pattern of the kilns differed greatly, still. English kilns were cheap to build but very fuel inefficient; much of the energy from the burning fuel was lost through the vent pigsty on the top (Figure 4). The typical Chinese kiln, on the other paw, was more expensive to construct and, indeed, required more labour to operate. Figure 5 shows how heat was drawn into the chamber on the left and then forced out a hole at floor level into a second chamber. The process continued through many chambers until the air, by then denuded of most of its heat, finally exited up a chimney. In England, information technology was not worth spending a lot of money to build a thermally efficient kiln since energy was so cheap. In China, notwithstanding, where energy was expensive, it was cost effective to build thermally efficient kilns. The technologies that were used reflected the relative prices of capital, labour, and energy. Since it was costly to invent engineering, invention besides responded to the same incentives.
Figure four. English kiln
Figure 5. Chinese kiln
The famous inventions of the Industrial Revolution were responses to the high wages and cheap energy of the British economy. These inventions likewise substituted capital and energy for labour. The steam engine increased the use of upper-case letter and coal to heighten output per worker. The cotton mill used machines to raise labour productivity in spinning and weaving. New technologies of iron making substituted cheap coal for expensive charcoal and mechanised production to increase output per worker.
These technologies eventually revolutionised the world, but at the beginning they were barely profitable in United kingdom, and their commercial success depended on increasing the utilise of inputs that were relatively inexpensive in United kingdom. In other countries, where wages were lower and free energy more expensive, it did not pay to use applied science that reduced employment and increased the consumption of fuel.
The French authorities was very active in trying to promote advanced British applied science in the eighteenth century, but its efforts failed since the British techniques were not price constructive at French prices. James Hargreaves perfected the spinning jenny, the first auto that successfully spun cotton wool, in the late 1760s. In 1771, John Holker, an English Jacobite who held the mail of Inspector General of Strange Articles, spirited a jenny into France. Demonstration models were made, but the jenny was simply installed in large, state supported workshops. Past the late 1780s, over 20,000 jennies were used in England and only 900 in French republic. Also, the French government sponsored the construction of an English style iron works (including four coke blast furnaces) in Burgundy in the 1780s. The raw materials were acceptable, the enterprise was well capitalised, and they hired outstanding and experienced English engineers to oversee the project. Nevertheless information technology was a commercial flop because coal was too expensive in French republic.
Since the technologies of the Industrial Revolution were only assisting to prefer in Britain, that was also the only state where it paid to invent them. The ideas embodied in the breakthrough technologies were simple; the hard problem was the engineering challenge of making them work. Responding to that challenged required research and development, which emerged as an important business practice in the eighteenth century. It was accompanied by the appearance of venture capitalists to finance the R&D and a reliance on patents to recoup the benefits of successful development. The Industrial Revolution was invented in Britain in the eighteenth century considering that was where it paid to invent it.
The success of R&D programs in eighteenth century Britain depended on another feature of the high wage economy. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the growth of a manufacturing, commercial economy increased the demand for literacy, numeracy and trade skills. These were caused through privately purchased education and apprenticeships. The high wage economy not but created a demand for these skills, but also gave parents the income to buy them. As a result, the British population was highly skilled (by international standards), and those skills were necessary for the loftier tech revolution to unfold.
The Industrial Revolution was confined to Britain for many years, because the technological breakthroughs were tailored to British conditions and could non exist profitably deployed elsewhere. However, British engineers strove to meliorate efficiency and reduced the use of inputs that were cheap in Britain also as those that were expensive. The consumption of coal in steam engines, for example, was cutting from 45 pounds per horse power-60 minutes in the early eighteenth to merely 2 pounds in the mid-nineteenth. The genius of British engineering undermined the country's technological lead by creating 'appropriate technology' for the earth at large. By the heart of the nineteenth century, avant-garde technology could be profitably used in countries similar France with expensive free energy and Bharat with cheap labour. Once that happened, the Industrial Revolution went world broad.
Source: https://voxeu.org/article/why-was-industrial-revolution-british
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