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Industrialization
How did Industrialization become the
economic embodiment of the
Enlightenment?
The World in 1750
• We used to think it was due to a unique European ingenuity; then
people who could do research in Chinese, Persian, Hindi, etc
demonstrated Europe’s advantage only developed in the very late
1700s
• They all have comparable living standards and GDP per capita in
1700s
• Proto-Industralization: “Cottage industry,” increased
commercialization, increased division of labor
• Problem?
• Certain materials become scarce
• Late 1700s, affecting densely populated and developed
regions of Europe, Africa, and Asia
What was special about
(Northern) England?
• England finds a way out of the problem
the rest of the expanding world economy
in the 1700s by leveraging two things:
1. Slavery and the New World
2. Coal
Increase of
Slave Labor
• Europeans set up large slave
plantations in the American,
Caribbean, and Brazil
• What do slaves make?
• Cash crops
• What do they not make?
• Food and clothing for themselves
British Slave
Trade
• Height of Slave Trade: 1700-1800
• British control not only their own slave trade but
the Spanish slave trade most of the 18th century
• Manufactured cloth notably lesser quality than
hand- woven; British ability to sell huge quantities
to slave owners makes mills in England profitable
• Significance: We now know that slavery and the
black experience is at the very root of
industrialization and capitalism!
Coal in England vs Other Parts of the World
England and the First
Industrial Revolution
• England has access to a NEW TYPE of periphery to help
expand its economy
• What about the innovative English spirit and the new
technology and science that led to the revolution?
• What about the Steam Engine?
The Steam
Engine in
England
• English coal mines were
below the high English
water table and tended to
flood
• Began building steam
engines to pump out water
• Scotsman James Watt
invents a machine to do
just that, 1776
Concluding Thoughts
• Over a period between 1750 and 1830, England pulls away from
the rest of Europe and the world in economic power during the
“First” Industrial Revolution
• Parts of China, Japan, India, and other parts of Europe had a
similar potential but didn’t have England’s unique advantages
• Lots of the innovations of the industrial revolution were things that
had been invented multiple times previously, they just didn’t make
sense or weren’t practical until England’s unique case
• Industrial Revolution was a global story of utilizing resources
across the globe and has immediate global effects, hence the
“Global Industrial Revolution”
