Industrial Revolution · 1870
Did Europe industrialise by copying Britain?
The seminar question: “Did continental Europe industrialise by imitating Britain, or by finding its own path?”
Belgium led the continent: John Cockerill opened an ironworks at Seraing in 1817, and in 1835 the Brussels–Mechelen line became the continent’s first state-built steam railway. In the German states the Zollverein customs union of 1834 created one market, and from the 1840s railways and Ruhr coal powered a boom.
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The coal belt from Mons through Charleroi to Liège gave Belgium a foundation for industry. Coal had been worked there for centuries, and Liège already possessed a metalworking tradition. When British machinery arrived, it entered a region with fuel and people whose skills could be put to new uses.
The short answer
- Coal and old industrial skills. British techniques could take root quickly where several resources met. The Sambre–Meuse valley had mined coal and worked iron since the Middle Ages; Flanders, Saxony and Alsace already had textile trades. Coal or fast water supplied power, established crafts supplied skills, and water transport connected producers to customers. The map places hatched coalfields close to red districts. Where one of these advantages was absent, industry arrived later.
- Borrowed machines and migrant experts. Britain tried to guard its lead by prohibiting artisan emigration until 1824 and textile machinery exports until 1843. Neither rule stopped knowledge from traveling: machines were smuggled, men moved, and continental entrepreneurs visited Lancashire to see what they could copy. British mechanics, engineers and navvies—the laborers who dug canals and railways—built mills and railways from Liège to Rouen. The Cockerills, a Lancashire family of mechanics, made Belgium’s first spinning machines and built the Seraing ironworks. Irish mining engineer William Mulvany worked in the Ruhr; English contractor Thomas Brassey’s railway gangs worked in Normandy. Their experience enabled followers to avoid some of the costly experiments the pioneers had already made.
- Governments built markets and railways. Private investors were not always ready to bear the first risks. Governments could create markets and transport before industry had fully developed. Belgium planned its railways; Prussia, the largest German state, led the Zollverein, which removed taxes on goods moving among its German members, much as the European Union does today. Prussia also operated state mines in the Saar and Silesia. France laid out its main railway lines in an 1842 law, then leased them to private companies. Friedrich List gave intervention an economic argument. Infant industries, he held, needed protection while they were too young to compete. State action could give them the conditions and time to grow.
- Peace and new borders after 1815. Europe’s great powers made peace at Vienna in 1815, after Napoleon’s defeat, ending a generation of war, blockade and occupation. Capital, goods and people could cross borders again. But the borders themselves had changed, placing industrial resources under different governments. Prussia, the largest German state, gained the Rhineland and Westphalia, including the Ruhr and the Saar. The new Kingdom of the Netherlands gained the coal and iron of Liège and Hainaut; Belgium broke away in 1830. The diplomats at Vienna had, largely without realizing it, helped decide which states would possess coal for the industrial age.
THE TURNING POINT
Cockerill at Seraing, 1817. At Seraing, British knowledge met Belgian resources. John Cockerill, born in Lancashire and trained in his father’s Verviers workshop, secured the backing of William I, king of the Netherlands when it still included Belgium. He made a factory from the former summer palace of the prince-bishops of Liège, the churchmen who had ruled the city until 1795. Using local coal, local workers trained in British methods produced iron, steam engines, locomotives and ships. The works also trained engineers who carried what they learned across the continent. Seraing shows why Britain’s restrictions on exporting machinery and skilled workers could not keep industrial knowledge within its borders: engineers carried it with them. Industrialization had become a European process.
What it changed
Germany overtakes. By joining markets before political unification, the Zollverein tied smaller German states to Prussia, the largest. Ruhr coal and railway orders supplied the industrial foundations on which a united Germany, created in 1871, overtook Britain in steel and chemicals by the 1890s. Economic unification contributed to political unification; the new empire’s strength would depend on science and big business as well as coal.
The workers’ question crosses borders. The Silesian weavers’ revolt of 1844 gave the suffering of industrial workers a lasting public voice. German writer Heinrich Heine turned it into a poem, and half a century later Gerhart Hauptmann wrote the play The Weavers (1892). Governments faced the workers’ question too. In the 1880s Germany’s chancellor Otto von Bismarck introduced insurance against sickness, accidents and old age, partly to undercut socialists. Protecting workers had become a European political question, shared by workers and feared by governments.
A model for late developers. Later industrializers could draw on List’s argument for sheltering infant industries—those too young to face foreign competition—and on Germany’s partnership of banks and state. The United States raised tariffs to protect its factories. Japan’s Meiji leaders, in power from 1868, studied Germany and used the state to found industries, though Western unequal treaties barred Japan from raising tariffs until 1911. Both pursued active policies rather than relying on the free market recommended by Britain from its secure lead. List compared that advice to kicking away a ladder after climbing it.
The full answer, argued
The first continental steam engines, spinning mills and railways were British in design, often British-built and sometimes British-run. The Cockerills’ Seraing ironworks and English contractor Thomas Brassey’s railways in Normandy show how people carried this knowledge; entrepreneurs looked to Lancashire as a standard. Imitation was central to the beginning. The machines, however, entered societies with different resources and institutions. Belgium and Prussia, the largest German kingdom, used governments to plan railways and run mines. German banks financed heavy industry on a scale British banks never attempted. Friedrich List defended protectionism—sheltering young industries behind tariffs—against Britain’s recommended free trade. France developed more gradually around skilled work, a path economic historians Patrick O’Brien and Caglar Keyder argue suited its resources. Alexander Gerschenkron helps explain why a later start could produce different methods. Followers could borrow established technology while creating institutions suited to their own circumstances. They copied British patents and joint-stock companies, firms owned by many shareholders, selectively as well. Continental Europe combined borrowed technology with institutions of its own, a combination later industrializers from the United States to Japan would repeat.
An interesting fact
Germany’s first railway locomotive arrived in pieces from Newcastle. Robert Stephenson & Co. built the Adler, or Eagle, and shipped it to Bavaria for the six-kilometre Nuremberg–Fürth line, which opened on 7 December 1835. The company sent an English driver, William Wilson, because nobody in Bavaria knew how to drive a locomotive. It paid him more than its own director. Wilson trained German drivers and stayed in Nuremberg until his death in 1862. A locomotive did not immediately make every train steam-powered. Coal was expensive, so horses pulled most trains on the line for years. Germany could import a railway before it could fuel one cheaply.
This is the study layer of Industrial Revolution in Europe, chapter 7 of The Industrial Revolution, 1750–1914; the full index of the atlas is here.
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