That's a really good post. I often think that a lot of economic historians really downplay how much of an economic jump the industrial revolution was.
I don't think it helps that history tends to be a subject studied by humanities students. Stories about politics, generals, battles and kings tend to be the bread and butter. There is little interest and almost no practical knowledge about industry, technology and manufacturing.
I would add to your list of folk beliefs the idea that invention and technological progress comes from science and the university system. Whereas in practice almost all of the new technology and progress came about in workshops with boys that worked as apprentices since their early teens. People like Whitworth, Maudslay, Aspdin, Wilkinson, etc are almost unknown by the general public yet are far more responsible for the world we live in today than say Newton, Einstein or Napoleon.
Agree inventions didn't come directly from science/the university system, but I do think there is something to the idea that there was a broad culture of progress/enlightenment in Europe and especially Britain at the time, which filtered down into the workshops. E.g. Joel Mokyr's The Enlightened Economy.
Maybe there is an argument culturally. But in terms of university and specifically 'science' I think the contribution is less than a rounding error, especially within the Industrial Revolution. None of the real progress is theoretical. It's improvements in accuracy, the advent or interchangeable parts, etc. These aren't filtered "down", they come explicitly from relatively young men working from a young age in an apprentice system building skills and coming up with new ideas and methods. The progress to make a steam engine, isn't theoretical, it's being able to mill cylinders accurately.
I don't have the details to hand but I think the steam engine is meant to be one of the few areas where science did make a difference, e.g. being done first by scientists e.g. Denis Papin, and then the knowledge disseminated in journals.
Are you talking about economists who ware historians or historians who opine about economics? The professoriate of historians is dominated by hyper specific folks who all believe that you cannot draw generalizable inferences from historic events. That there are no underlying trends or consistent human factors at play.
Both, my point is that neither camp of academics have a basic grasp of anything technical or practical and more importantly zero interest in its real history. You don't then have any real idea how critical any of the steps were, nor just how big a jump there was in manufacturing.
I enjoyed this. The Great Divergence was one of the main texts used when I did modern Chinese history at university (this was in 2001-2, so my profs were keeping us right up to date!). I was reading this, nodding along and thinking, yeah, that's what I think... and then realised it must be because that's what I was taught, based on Pomeranz's view.
I've certainly settled pretty heavily on the position that it was the depopulation of North America and subsequent resource bounty that provided the breathing space which the industrial revolution needed.
I was doing a history project with my son on the fall of the Han Dynasty, and they were achingly close to developing steel right back in 100-200AD... what institutional and economic factors give that little extra kick to drive a step change in technological capacity? And what factors inhibit those changes? It's such a vexed question.
Yeah I think Pomeranz is good, certainly far better than people like Frank or Hobson. I was also wondering about the resources question. IIRC he thinks that only American cotton production had the elasticity to scale in response to the explosive growth in British manufacturing capability, given that there was lots of available land, and slave labour could be moved to where it was most productive. I can see that this makes sense, and that American production would certainly be more elastic than that of India or Egypt with dense their populations and peasant labourers. But against this, of course the south were surprised in the civil war that they did not in fact have a monopoly on growing cotton, and it could also be sourced from India and Egypt. Could this have been possible too in the late 18th century in order to allow the British cotton cloth industry to grow without American cotton? I'm not sure, though there doesn't seem any particular reason why it couldn't be. I think Pomeranz does go into this but can't remember the details.
The coal powered steam engine though I can't see depending on the Americas, except for tangentially, re Robert Allen's argument though that the coal industry developed due to British success in trade driving demand for heating in London.
I don't have anything like the historical chops to work out whether there's any connection between colonial resources and the steam engine. It's all so contingent and accidental - the first working model is for a tin mine in the southwest, right? And it didn't work very well, but somehow Newcomen gets another couple of orders, and along the way he manages to make enough improvements to get something actually working...
It doesn't sound like this chain of events has anything to do with America. But the coincidence seems too big for me. Atmospheric engines have been developed over and over. There are models from Spain a hundred years earlier, and Song China 500 years earlier. But suddenly, the one experiment that gets industrialised was the one that happened in Britain, which had just had this windfall of an almost-empty continent. I'd love to believe that we succeeded where others had failed because of our charm, wit, and cooperative spirit, but have you met British people?!
It's not much of a historical argument, I know. And I fear I am very much just the vessel of the zeitgeist from the time when when I was learning history at school. When a better argument comes along, I will try to remain open to it.
- Coal mining industry with mines that flooded frequently
Various cultures had the former to a certain extent, and a coal mining industry existed in China, but I think Pomeranz at least thought that Chinese coal mines didn't flood.
Fair enough. Again, so much coincidence and accident! If those are the key factors, then it really puts the lie to theorists like Weber, who want to build big cultural narratives to explain differences in development.
People think of the “Middle Ages” as being stagnant, but Europe changed a lot during them.
I think this is partially because so much of the extra productivity went into population and the basic method of warfare and politics didn’t change radically (knights and castles).
*I think most peoples view of “the Middle Ages” is really the high Middle Ages (1000 to 1300).
If you compare Europe of the high Middle Ages to the song dynasty then yeah it looks backward.
Have the people who disparage European climates as cold and miserable even looked at climactic data for western Europe, let alone lived there? Western Europe has a remarkably mild climate, especially compared to the extremes of temperature you see in the northeast or upper midwest of the United States, where is where I suspect a lot of people who say this nonsense live. Germany, France, the Low Countries, and the UK have much better climates than New England or eastern Canada at similar latitudes, cooler in summer, warmer than winter, and massively agriculturally productive. In the pre-industrial era western Europe was neck-and-neck with the Yellow River valley in China for the most fertile soils and longest growing seasons in the entire world. It is only when you go north into Scandinavia or east into the steppe that the climate becomes harsh (the upper midwest and northern Great Plains of the US has a climate fairly comparable to Siberia. Yes, *that* Siberia).
E: One thing also to note is that while European armies tended to be small, Europeans led the world from the High Middle Ages in fortifications and siege warfare. One reasons the Mongols and various Islamic empires could not make much headway into Central Europe was that, even though they often defeated European armies in the field, digging each individual German lord out of his castle one by one was next to impossible and often not worth the rewards even when successful.
E2: This also shows that, like many dialectical antitheses, this current "decentering" of Europe shares a common false assumption with the original thesis, which is that there must be one and only one "center", when that map shows clearly *three* centers of the world economy in 1500 (the Frankish/Germanic realms, India, and China).
Super interesting. It’s striking that the attempts to quantify the differences have proven more credible than a number of the more traditional histories you mention.
Well, they have their own problems, but the advantage is it seems they are trying to be more objective. I think this is an advantage of the goal of this sort of research being to 'try and produce more accurate datasets', when purely qualitative research in this area needs to 'have an argument', and therefore seems to have to come down on one side or the other of the debate.
I think a big part of the problem are the geographical categories chosen.
Europe is a continent, not a society. There were large differences between Agrarian societies such as what is now France, Spain and Germany and the Commercial societies like the city/states of Northern Italy and the Low Countries.
Same for Asia. Chinas was clearly the most advanced Agrarian society in Asia, but it was not representative of the rest of Asia.
While Agrarian societies in Europe and Asia strongly resembled each other, it was the Commercial societies of Northwest Europe that were distinct. They evolved long before colonialism and laid the foundations for the Industrial Revolution.
I think an example of the rising wealth and power of Medieval Europe was the fact that Mongols suddenly ran into stiff resistance when they hit Central Europe. They only barely defeated the Kingdom of Hungary in 1241. Poland was able to repulse a Mongol invasion in 1287. The Serbs did it again in 1291, and by the 1300’s Europe was able to take the fight into Mongol held territory.
This is great, a deep dive into why (as I like to remind people) Britain wasn't strong because of the empire but had an empire because it was strong.
That's a really good post. I often think that a lot of economic historians really downplay how much of an economic jump the industrial revolution was.
I don't think it helps that history tends to be a subject studied by humanities students. Stories about politics, generals, battles and kings tend to be the bread and butter. There is little interest and almost no practical knowledge about industry, technology and manufacturing.
I would add to your list of folk beliefs the idea that invention and technological progress comes from science and the university system. Whereas in practice almost all of the new technology and progress came about in workshops with boys that worked as apprentices since their early teens. People like Whitworth, Maudslay, Aspdin, Wilkinson, etc are almost unknown by the general public yet are far more responsible for the world we live in today than say Newton, Einstein or Napoleon.
Agree inventions didn't come directly from science/the university system, but I do think there is something to the idea that there was a broad culture of progress/enlightenment in Europe and especially Britain at the time, which filtered down into the workshops. E.g. Joel Mokyr's The Enlightened Economy.
Maybe there is an argument culturally. But in terms of university and specifically 'science' I think the contribution is less than a rounding error, especially within the Industrial Revolution. None of the real progress is theoretical. It's improvements in accuracy, the advent or interchangeable parts, etc. These aren't filtered "down", they come explicitly from relatively young men working from a young age in an apprentice system building skills and coming up with new ideas and methods. The progress to make a steam engine, isn't theoretical, it's being able to mill cylinders accurately.
I don't have the details to hand but I think the steam engine is meant to be one of the few areas where science did make a difference, e.g. being done first by scientists e.g. Denis Papin, and then the knowledge disseminated in journals.
Anton Howes here on Substack would have a lot to say on this too.
Yep I'm a fan of his
Are you talking about economists who ware historians or historians who opine about economics? The professoriate of historians is dominated by hyper specific folks who all believe that you cannot draw generalizable inferences from historic events. That there are no underlying trends or consistent human factors at play.
Both, my point is that neither camp of academics have a basic grasp of anything technical or practical and more importantly zero interest in its real history. You don't then have any real idea how critical any of the steps were, nor just how big a jump there was in manufacturing.
I take it you don’t know Robert Allen.
I enjoyed this. The Great Divergence was one of the main texts used when I did modern Chinese history at university (this was in 2001-2, so my profs were keeping us right up to date!). I was reading this, nodding along and thinking, yeah, that's what I think... and then realised it must be because that's what I was taught, based on Pomeranz's view.
I've certainly settled pretty heavily on the position that it was the depopulation of North America and subsequent resource bounty that provided the breathing space which the industrial revolution needed.
I was doing a history project with my son on the fall of the Han Dynasty, and they were achingly close to developing steel right back in 100-200AD... what institutional and economic factors give that little extra kick to drive a step change in technological capacity? And what factors inhibit those changes? It's such a vexed question.
Anyway, interesting post, thank you.
Yeah I think Pomeranz is good, certainly far better than people like Frank or Hobson. I was also wondering about the resources question. IIRC he thinks that only American cotton production had the elasticity to scale in response to the explosive growth in British manufacturing capability, given that there was lots of available land, and slave labour could be moved to where it was most productive. I can see that this makes sense, and that American production would certainly be more elastic than that of India or Egypt with dense their populations and peasant labourers. But against this, of course the south were surprised in the civil war that they did not in fact have a monopoly on growing cotton, and it could also be sourced from India and Egypt. Could this have been possible too in the late 18th century in order to allow the British cotton cloth industry to grow without American cotton? I'm not sure, though there doesn't seem any particular reason why it couldn't be. I think Pomeranz does go into this but can't remember the details.
The coal powered steam engine though I can't see depending on the Americas, except for tangentially, re Robert Allen's argument though that the coal industry developed due to British success in trade driving demand for heating in London.
I don't have anything like the historical chops to work out whether there's any connection between colonial resources and the steam engine. It's all so contingent and accidental - the first working model is for a tin mine in the southwest, right? And it didn't work very well, but somehow Newcomen gets another couple of orders, and along the way he manages to make enough improvements to get something actually working...
It doesn't sound like this chain of events has anything to do with America. But the coincidence seems too big for me. Atmospheric engines have been developed over and over. There are models from Spain a hundred years earlier, and Song China 500 years earlier. But suddenly, the one experiment that gets industrialised was the one that happened in Britain, which had just had this windfall of an almost-empty continent. I'd love to believe that we succeeded where others had failed because of our charm, wit, and cooperative spirit, but have you met British people?!
It's not much of a historical argument, I know. And I fear I am very much just the vessel of the zeitgeist from the time when when I was learning history at school. When a better argument comes along, I will try to remain open to it.
I think the crucial factors were:
- Ability to build steam engines
- Coal mining industry with mines that flooded frequently
Various cultures had the former to a certain extent, and a coal mining industry existed in China, but I think Pomeranz at least thought that Chinese coal mines didn't flood.
Fair enough. Again, so much coincidence and accident! If those are the key factors, then it really puts the lie to theorists like Weber, who want to build big cultural narratives to explain differences in development.
People think of the “Middle Ages” as being stagnant, but Europe changed a lot during them.
I think this is partially because so much of the extra productivity went into population and the basic method of warfare and politics didn’t change radically (knights and castles).
*I think most peoples view of “the Middle Ages” is really the high Middle Ages (1000 to 1300).
If you compare Europe of the high Middle Ages to the song dynasty then yeah it looks backward.
Theres a huge absence of data to assume economic productivity and population in 1500 for many regions.
I highly doubt the accuracy of Angus Maddison’s work. Though interesting.
Have the people who disparage European climates as cold and miserable even looked at climactic data for western Europe, let alone lived there? Western Europe has a remarkably mild climate, especially compared to the extremes of temperature you see in the northeast or upper midwest of the United States, where is where I suspect a lot of people who say this nonsense live. Germany, France, the Low Countries, and the UK have much better climates than New England or eastern Canada at similar latitudes, cooler in summer, warmer than winter, and massively agriculturally productive. In the pre-industrial era western Europe was neck-and-neck with the Yellow River valley in China for the most fertile soils and longest growing seasons in the entire world. It is only when you go north into Scandinavia or east into the steppe that the climate becomes harsh (the upper midwest and northern Great Plains of the US has a climate fairly comparable to Siberia. Yes, *that* Siberia).
E: One thing also to note is that while European armies tended to be small, Europeans led the world from the High Middle Ages in fortifications and siege warfare. One reasons the Mongols and various Islamic empires could not make much headway into Central Europe was that, even though they often defeated European armies in the field, digging each individual German lord out of his castle one by one was next to impossible and often not worth the rewards even when successful.
E2: This also shows that, like many dialectical antitheses, this current "decentering" of Europe shares a common false assumption with the original thesis, which is that there must be one and only one "center", when that map shows clearly *three* centers of the world economy in 1500 (the Frankish/Germanic realms, India, and China).
Econ history? On my substack? What an age to be alive.
You're an important voice. If I can implore you: please keep thinking and writing. These pieces are important.
A great read, thanks
Super interesting. It’s striking that the attempts to quantify the differences have proven more credible than a number of the more traditional histories you mention.
Well, they have their own problems, but the advantage is it seems they are trying to be more objective. I think this is an advantage of the goal of this sort of research being to 'try and produce more accurate datasets', when purely qualitative research in this area needs to 'have an argument', and therefore seems to have to come down on one side or the other of the debate.
I think a big part of the problem are the geographical categories chosen.
Europe is a continent, not a society. There were large differences between Agrarian societies such as what is now France, Spain and Germany and the Commercial societies like the city/states of Northern Italy and the Low Countries.
Same for Asia. Chinas was clearly the most advanced Agrarian society in Asia, but it was not representative of the rest of Asia.
While Agrarian societies in Europe and Asia strongly resembled each other, it was the Commercial societies of Northwest Europe that were distinct. They evolved long before colonialism and laid the foundations for the Industrial Revolution.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/understanding-commercial-societies
I think an example of the rising wealth and power of Medieval Europe was the fact that Mongols suddenly ran into stiff resistance when they hit Central Europe. They only barely defeated the Kingdom of Hungary in 1241. Poland was able to repulse a Mongol invasion in 1287. The Serbs did it again in 1291, and by the 1300’s Europe was able to take the fight into Mongol held territory.
But, but Wakanda!
Well written and researched.
Most of the slanders against Medieval Europe come from Protestantism and long predate the founding of the United States.
Hello there Will, I see your posts often in my feed, and I must say I do enjoy what you share.
I thought I’d introduce myself with one of my latest works, you may enjoy it:
https://open.substack.com/pub/jordannuttall/p/tartaria-in-the-18th-century?r=4f55i2&utm_medium=ios