Why did Britain industrialise first: resources or people?

The short answer

• Dear labour and cheap coal. British trading growth had raised wages, while Tyneside and Midlands coal offered exceptionally cheap energy. Investors could recover the cost of a machine that replaced expensive work with fuel more quickly in Britain than in France, India or China. That prospect encouraged experiments; improvements later made the machines attractive elsewhere.
• An Atlantic economy built on enslaved labour. Britain's North American and Caribbean plantations depended on enslaved Africans. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries about 12.5 million people were embarked on Atlantic slave ships, and British ships carried more than any other nation's in the late 1700s. The plantations sold sugar and cotton and bought British cloth and iron. Their trade also built ports, merchants and banks, whose capital and skills later served industry.
• A culture of useful knowledge. An idea had to reach the people who could build with it. London's Royal Society and provincial philosophical societies, or science clubs, brought gentlemen scientists into contact with instrument makers, clockmakers and millwrights, who built mill machinery. Cheap print and traveling lecturers carried knowledge further; an expensive, slow patent system allowed inventors to sell ideas. Joel Mokyr calls this network the Industrial Enlightenment and argues that it sustained improvements beyond individual discoveries.
• Farms, markets and a strong state. English farms fed a large population with a declining share of workers, leaving people for crafts and trade. By 1700 more than 40 percent of men worked in manufacturing, mining or building. Coastal shipping, rivers and turnpike roads, maintained with private tolls, connected a national market without internal customs barriers. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 made Parliament supreme over the monarch. Its property owners taxed heavily but predictably, borrowed cheaply and funded a navy to protect trade. Douglass North associated these conditions with secure investment.

What it changed

Indian cloth becomes the target. Indian calicoes established the standard: cheap, washable printed cotton. Britain's Parliament banned them in 1700 and 1721, protecting a home market in which British producers could imitate them. Chapter 2 follows machines developed to spin cotton as fine as Bengal's; eventually they allowed Europe to out-produce Asia in its own specialty.

Coal meets the steam engine. Early mine-pumping engines used so much fuel that a pithead, the top of a mine shaft, was a sensible place to run them: coal there was almost free. James Watt worked to make engines efficient enough for use farther away. Chapter 3 follows his engine, the canals carrying coal and iron made with coke, a fuel baked from coal. Cheap fuel supported the first engines, whose improvement extended their uses.

Slavery expands with the machines. British mills' growing appetite for cotton helped expand plantation slavery across the American South. Its enslaved population rose from about 700,000 in 1790 to almost four million in 1860. More cotton meant more land under cultivation and more forced labor. Chapter 2 follows the cotton to Lancashire; chapter 11 takes the story to the American Civil War.

A divergence begins. Industrial Europe and North America came to make most of the world's manufactured goods within a century and a half, while Bengal and the Yangzi delta lost textile export markets. The gap between rich and poor regions widened into what historians call the Great Divergence. Chapter 11 examines it and the epilogue asks who paid. The rich world's lead and the poor world's grievances date from these decades and continue to shape judgments between nations.