Industrial Revolution quiz: 8 questions

Allen’s explanation starts with the prices inventors faced. In Britain, labor was expensive and coal was cheap. A machine that used coal to replace workers could therefore repay its cost more quickly there; in France, India and China, it did not yet pay.

The Acts were intended to protect English wool. By barring the Indian imports, they also left a large home market for cheap cotton cloth. British inventors set out to fill it by matching Indian quality at a lower cost.

Newcomen’s engine repeatedly heated and cooled the same cylinder, consuming fuel with every stroke. Watt condensed the steam in a separate chamber, saving about three-quarters of the coal. That saving made steam worth using far from the coalfields.

About 17 years. Chadwick gave the average as 38 for Manchester’s professional families and also 38 for laborers in rural Rutland. Deaths among infants and children in crowded towns without sewers pulled the averages down.

The attacks were selective. Knitters broke frames belonging to employers who paid low rates and spared the others; croppers attacked mills installing shearing frames. Eric Hobsbawm called this collective bargaining by riot.

The Zollverein, led by Prussia, brought eighteen states and about 23 million people into one market. Watch its dashed outline expand on the map: it eventually covers almost all of the future German Empire.

The state set the direction and took the initial risks, building enterprises before transferring most factories to firms such as Mitsui and Mitsubishi. Private mills, including the Osaka Spinning Company, then carried the growth forward.

About 85 percent, compared with under a quarter in 1750. China’s share moved in the other direction, from about a third to about 6 percent. Historians call this change in the distribution of manufacturing the Great Divergence.