It was one of the most profound revolutions in human history—profound, and British. Agricultural productivity can be measured in a number of ways, but one of the simplest is this: take the total calories produced and divide by the number of agricultural workers (usually just male workers, as women split their time between farm and household chores). In 1800, farming performance in Europe was as follows:
Calories per male worker (Britain 1800 = 100)
Britain 100
Netherlands 51
Belgium 40
France 37
Germany 37
Austria-Hungary 28
Italy 28
Sweden 24
Spain 24
Britain wasn’t simply out in the lead, it was almost twice as productive as the nearest rival, three times more productive than France or Germany, four times more productive than the sluggards on the periphery. It would take an extraordinary amount of time for Britain’s rivals to catch up with the extent of her industrialization. In 1850, slightly over one fifth of Britain’s population was still working the land. In France and Germany, this proportion wouldn’t be reached until the 1950s.
So what happened? And why did it happen here?
The answer to the first question is both complex and simple. There were a host of causes: land reclamation, increased specialization, new crops, new rotational techniques, better pest control, improved breeds of animal, and more. That’s the complex answer. The simple one is that the age-old problem of nitrate deficiency was largely solved. Leguminous plants, including the pea family and clover, have the capacity to take nitrogen from the air and bind it into the soil in the form of nitrate salts. By using clover as fodder for sheep, farmers benefited from a double whammy: animals fed on a rich clover diet, while their fields self-fertilized through the magic of plant power. The insight became formalized in a new system of crop rotation, the ‘Norfolk four-course’, which rotated wheat, barley, clover and turnips. The new technique could as much as double farm output, and it caught on like wildfire. (An agricultural version of wildfire, that is: down on the farm, nothing changes that fast.) In the five hundred years up to 1750, the pattern of agricultural produce in Norfolk had been virtually static. In the hundred years after 1750, the Norfolk four-course ran riot, with turnips and clover accounting for over two-fifths of all crops grown.
Although accurate as far as it goes, this kind of answer is a little deceptive. After all, farmers had known for centuries about the magical properties of leguminous plants. In 1573, Thomas Tusser’s rhyming guide for farmers had included the memorable couplet:
Where peason [peas] ye had and a fallow thereon,
Sowe wheat ye may well without doong thereupon.
‘Wheat without doong’ was the trick at the heart of the Norfolk four-course, yet for centuries farmers had made little systematic use of the knowledge. What changed?
The answer was capitalism. The agricultural revolution took place in Britain (and not, say, France or Belgium or Holland or Germany) because British farming was by far the most capitalist. That capitalism was expressed in every aspect of British agriculture, notably the development of a genuine national market for food. Back in medieval times, markets had been largely local, so that there might be gluts in Gloucestershire at just the same time as there was dearth in Durham. As time went by, markets became regional, then national. Farmers could specialize in the crops that best suited their fields, ironing out inefficiencies and building up the extent of local knowledge and expertise. The result was that localized famines were essentially unknown in eighteenth-century Britain, in an age when they still ravaged the Continent.
Just as important was the long-drawn-out process of enclosure. Medieval farming had mostly operated under a common-field system. Though land was owned by individuals, a great deal of farming was conducted cooperatively, and common rights (such as the right to take firewood) extended over much of the land. Such a system had many merits, but it certainly made it harder for farmers to innovate, specialize or reap benefits from investment. So, little by little, the old open common fields were enclosed, with hedges, walls, fences and ditches. Almost half of English land had been enclosed by 1550, almost three-quarters by 1750. This great upheaval came about by largely legal means. If landlords wanted to remove any common rights over a bit of land, they generally had to pay for the privilege. If matters went to court, magistrates increasingly took the side of tenants, not landlords. Enclosure gave landowners full control over their land, with the result that capitalist investment and innovation became not just possible, but highly profitable.
Fanning these flames of change was demand that was both buoyant and challenging. By 1700, London consumed 200,000 tons of grain annually, requiring sophisticated supply networks to meet the demand. More challenging yet was the Royal Navy. The navy didn’t just need a lot of prime-quality food, it laid down strict standards of quality, quantity, packaging, preparation, delivery schedules and more. These were industrial demands, and they called forth an industrial response.
There, in a nutshell, is the answer to the question ‘What happened?’ Human history had long been pinned back by an inability to move much beyond subsistence living. Then along comes capitalist agriculture, and history can finally get to grips with industrialization, science, technology and all those other good things. But why Britain? It’s all very well to say that our farmers were the most capitalist, but why? French and German farmers were hardly less interested in profit. What made money here would, suitably modified for soil and climate, have made money there too. In short, capitalism may explain the mechanism of change; it can’t, on its own, explain the location.
The fundamental answer has to be that the shift away from medieval farming structures was a deeply challenging one. Although the rewards to society, taken as a whole, were huge, the individual losers (smaller farmers and beneficiaries of common rights) were more numerous than the principal winners (larger landowners). In Britain, the system had enough flexibility and fundamental fairness to permit change, as witnessed by all those magistrates who took the side of the tenant when the landlord wasn’t behaving himself. In France, by contrast, the social and legal system inhibited change. What was more, in Britain it was pretty clear that if you grew more, you’d get to profit from your extra output. In states that were less protective of the individual and of property rights, small farmers may have worried that the state or local lord would simply appropriate any excess. The English, and later British, model—consultative government, concern for the individual, and the rule of law—allowed change to happen and, to a reasonable extent, ensured that it happened equitably. This combination of fairness on the one hand and commercial freedom on the other lay at the heart of British agricultural success. It has lain at the heart of much else in Britain’s distinctive history too.
A WAVE OF GADGETS
We tend to think of history as being about progress. There are setbacks and fallow periods, of course, but on the whole, things get better. Inventions get invented, then refined and disseminated. Bad forms of government compete with good forms of government and are forced to give way. Economic progress, in the end, will always triumph over economic backwardness.
To be sure, it’s never hard to find evidence for such views, but at the same time it’s easy to be overly impressed by the local and the partial: Venetian glassmaking prowess, say; English watermills or Chinese gunpowder. The simple fact is that if one’s viewpoint is sufficiently global, sufficiently long term, then the most striking fact about human history is how little the human condition altered over a timescale of millennia. The graph on the next page comes from one of the most audacious exercises in historical enquiry, the attempt to plot human output per capita since the dawn of history.*
For a thousand years since the birth of Christ, nothing changed. Gains in one location were extinguished by losses in another. World population grew, but not much. For the next five hundred years, there was the first whisper of sustained growth
, but still only at the rate of one twentieth of one per cent per year. Since the average per capita income in AD 1000 was still only $436 (at 1990 prices), that twentieth of one per cent still left untold millions in grinding, awful, frequently lethal poverty.
The next three hundred years, to 1820, were the same: incremental change, but not nearly enough. World GDP per person was $667 in 1820. Even in western Europe and its offshoots (notably the USA), average living standards were still little more than $1,200 per person, or just three-fifths of Indian living standards today. In short, even in the world’s wealthiest countries, poverty was still grinding, still awful, still killing. In less than two centuries since that time, the world has changed out of all recognition. To be sure, there are areas of the world where poverty is still hideously prevalent. But even in Africa, life is far better now than it was: African GDP per capita is currently around $1,500, or higher than any country managed in 1820, with the sole exceptions of Britain and the Netherlands. Just as much to the point, the huge, populous and once terribly poor nations of India and China are growing fast, and helping many millions out of poverty as they do so. Industrialization may have given rise to many challenging side effects, but that shouldn’t blind us to its astonishing success: it has plucked humanity from millennia of atrocious living standards; it has done so with astonishing speed; and it is (increasingly) doing so on a genuinely global scale.
Maddison’s data make it clear why the Industrial Revolution mattered; they shift attention away from the intricacies of cotton processing and focus it firmly on the main issue, namely the coming alive of humanity, the extraordinary, unprecedented release of human potential. Yet beginnings matter too. The Industrial Revolution had a time and place of origin. The time was around 1770, the place Great Britain.
The chronology of those early changes can be speedily dealt with. In the 1760s, Britain had a cotton industry, but it was no big deal. Exports totalled just a couple of hundred thousand pounds, or just a few per cent of the much larger and long-established woollen industry. The products were poor, no match in price or quality for Indian rivals. Even to apply the term ‘industry’ to British cotton manufacture is a tad misleading. There were no cotton factories, little mechanization, not even many full-time workers. Most of the work, whether spinning or weaving, was done by part-time agricultural labour. During harvest time, when women could earn better money for less work in the fields, yarn shortages became acute. Then came what one apocryphal schoolboy accurately called ‘a wave of gadgets’. Kay’s flying shuttle and Paul’s carding machine, though both invented earlier, came to be widespread during the 1760s. Then, in the mid-1760s, a weaver and carpenter named James Hargreaves came up with the crucial breakthrough: the spinning jenny, a machine whereby turning one wheel could spin eight threads not one. From one to eight: the factor of productivity change was already huge, but it didn’t stop there. Hargreaves’ 1770 patent called for sixteen spindles. By 1800, 120 spindles were common. The innovation heralded a wave of synergistic innovations: Arkwright’s water frame (which produced a stronger thread), Crompton’s mule (which combined the best of Arkwright and Hargreaves), and the use of steam to power the new machines.* The consequences were transformative. By 1812, the cotton industry accounted for 7 or 8 per cent of national income, and almost two-fifths of exports. More than that, something new had been invented: the notion of the factory, where workers looked after a range of machines driven by a central power source. The very concept of work had begun to shift.
As all this was going on, mostly in Lancashire, a second industry—iron—was undergoing radical change. Iron had long been made in Britain, but it was an industry in difficulty. To make iron, you need a source of carbon in order to reduce the metallic oxides thereby transforming the ore into a pure metal. In Britain, charcoal acted as both fuel and carbon source, and the resultant demand for charcoal was vast. Blast furnaces would be set up in areas of woodland, then often move on once those woodlands were depleted. For large-scale industry to develop, it needed to be able to stay put and grow big. An alternative solution was to replace charcoal by coke (charcoal made from coal). The first coke-based ironworks to produce a commercially viable product seems to have been Abraham Darby’s plant at Coalbrookdale, as far back as 1709. The local coal was, however, particularly well suited to this kind of process, and though coke-based iron smelting gradually increased, a breakthrough hadn’t happened. Then, in 1775, Watt’s steam engine was put to work driving the bellows of the blast furnaces—the first time it had done anything but pump water. The new power made all the difference. Coke smelting could now be made to work reliably and efficiently. Cheap cast iron was now within reach, which was the good news. The bad news was that cast iron isn’t all that useful. It’s brittle and difficult to draw into rods or wire. For many eighteenth-century purposes—ploughshares, hoes, cutlery, tools—cast iron was simply useless. Then, in 1784, Henry Cort patented a process for puddling (iron-speak for stirring) and rolling the molten metal. The process eliminated the carbon impurities of cast iron, producing a top-quality wrought iron. Unfortunately for Henry Cort and fortunately for everybody else, he was ruined by the bankruptcy and suicide of one of his creditors, and was consequently unable to protect his patent. Without the monopoly effect of patent protection, Cort’s process spread like wildfire. From the 1760s to the late 1780s, iron production doubled. In the two subsequent decades, it quadrupled.
If cotton produced the first factories, it was iron which produced the first industrial giants. John Wilkinson’s conglomerate comprised collieries, tin mines, iron foundries, forges and logistics infrastructure. The cotton industry may have mechanized, but its machinery was often wood-built and water-powered. The new ironworks were recognizably modern in their insatiable need for fossil-fuelled power, their scale and their use of iron machinery, such as Wilkinson’s 1782 steam hammer, which could strike 150 blows a minute.
Iron was also significant in another respect. The cotton industry was (and would remain) almost entirely unconnected to the rest of the economy. The raw materials came from abroad. The products often went abroad. Woven cotton was not a raw material in any industrial process. The industry was amazing, but isolated. Not so with iron, which lay at the very heart of things. Growth in iron drove backwards into the related industries of coal mining, steam engines, canal building and (before long) railways. It drove forwards into entirely new industries: machine tools, railways and all those other industries that access to new iron machinery made possible. Cheap, reliable metal made it possible for engineers to dream in iron, the way once they’d been forced to dream in wood. Tolerances and specifications began to become exact, not approximate. The new iron age was the dawn of the machine age proper.
So much for what happened. The next obvious question is why? Why Britain? Why the 1770s? Why not some other place, some other time? These questions, or versions of them, feature in virtually every book about the Industrial Revolution, yet they’re rather odd questions to ask; akin to wondering why Google is an American company. The point about Google is that of course it’s American, just as eBay, and Amazon, and Yahoo!, and Oracle, and Intel, and Microsoft, and Apple, and Dell, and IBM, and a gazillion others are American too. Google could have sprung up somewhere else, but it’s not surprising that it didn’t. America is the rule, anywhere else the exception. Something similar is true of Georgian Britain. Why did it host the Industrial Revolution? Because, on every major count, Britain was the country most likely to do so. Of hundreds of possible answers, here are my personal top ten.
One: Britain was already the wealthiest country in the world (barring Holland), and the most strongly growing. (The Netherlands was in decline through the eighteenth century.) If you were seeking a sudden step-change in the frontier of economic possibility, you’d expect it to come from the country that was already farthest out on that frontier, and pushing ahead fastest.
Two: Britain had by far the most capitalist, productive and fast-changing agriculture in
the world. Since, prior to industrialization, agriculture was by far the biggest industry everywhere, it would almost be simpler to say that Britain was way ahead of the game in the one industry that really mattered. The habits nurtured in agriculture—experiment, investment, profit-seeking, genuinely capitalist deployment of labour and capital—were precisely those needed for successful industrialization. What’s more (to sneak a further reason into my top ten), Britain’s aristocratic rulers were as keen on the agro-capitalist game as anyone else. In other countries, noblemen would have thought the intricacies of cattle breeding or turnip-based crop rotations as being preoccupations fit for a peasant. In Georgian Britain, noblemen got cow muck on their riding boots and could talk turnips with the best of them.
Three: Britain had the largest proto-capitalist class of any nation in the world. The term needs a little explanation. In pre-industrial Europe, most manufacture was carried out by rural residents, making stuff at home, and being paid on a piece-rate basis for their efforts—genuine cottage industry, in fact. Merchants supplied the raw materials and picked up the finished goods. Different areas specialized in different trades: Birmingham in buttons and fittings, Oxfordshire in blankets, Leicestershire in stockings, Norwich in woollens, and so on. In 1500, England was typical of most of Europe in its distribution of labour. It had three-quarters of its population working the land, just under a fifth in this rural non-agricultural labour, and a small fraction (7 per cent) living in cities. Fast-forward to 1800 and the picture was transformed. England’s populace was divided in approximate thirds between city, agriculture and rural non-agricultural. No other country had such a low proportion of agricultural workers; no other country, conversely, had such a large pool of mini-manufacturers, ready and waiting for a new way to organize things.*
This Little Britain Page 19