How the Industrial Revolution came aboutHow then are we to explain the Industrial Revolution? We should begin perhaps with another, rather different revolution, the so-called Glorious and Bloodless Revolution of 1689. The long years of religious turmoil which began with Henry VIII’s divorce, and went through the Reformation, the Civil War and an uncertain Restoration, were now over. The country was fed up with religious extremism and began to invent the quiet dozy Church of England. Politics too were asleep. Having chopped one king’s head off, restored another, then having ejected a third, and finally brought in a foreigner and his Scots wife (whose own Mother had had her head chopped off), Kings and Queens knew that they reigned only on sufferance. The rising Parliament was split between the Houses of Lords and Commons, and both, though occasionally noisy, were essentially limited in their role. In the country as a whole there was no obvious ruling class and the curse of the classical world – a disdain for industry and commerce had thankfully been avoided. We had what might be called an Open Society. And that, is surely the secret of the Industrial Revolution. We might also consider the geography of the Industrial Revolution. If capitalism were to be the right explanation, we would expect the Industrial Revolution to be concentrated around the sources of capital – which in England would mean London. In fact one of the major characteristics of the Industrial Revolution is that it sprang up everywhere, often in new centres well outside London: one thinks of Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Newcastle and Glasgow - all of them places that were of little consequence prior to the Industrial Revolution. Indeed it is not just these mega towns that flourished – it was the minor towns and indeed villages where industry and commerce bloomed – and virtually always without need of outside ‘capital’. If capitalism were to be true, the map of England would be very different. There is no one grand single explanation for the Industrial Revolution. Certainly it is not Capitalism which is to take a very small aspect and to puff it up into a principle cause. Nor is it monetarism – this is a case where money was ‘neutral’ and behaved as a smooth running mechanism which because it worked so (comparatively) smoothly can be basically ignored: inflation had its ups and downs, but by and large the troubles on this score were all minor ones and money was fairly stable throughout. Indeed the main problem was that not enough small change was minted and thus private tokens were issued, quite extensively in local areas in the 17th and 18th centuries. Instead there are lots of little things that made the Industrial Revolution a success. Society was right and the incentives were all in place for experimentation. A lot of the features were what might be called negatives. Religion was weak and rarely hindered change - unlike the rest of Europe. Politics too were weak: one recalls Gilbert and Sullivan’s glorious jibe:
- which sums up politics in much of the 18th and 19th centuries. The road to success for a poor boy or indeed for a middle class boy was not through politics – the curse of the third world today when politics by far the best route to power, success and indeed money. Similarly war offered little route to advance, and the parson was traditionally the fool of the family. If you wanted to do well, why not go into business? Furthermore, unlike in the Roman empire, there was little opposition to business. I must be careful how I tread here, for a quick perusal of Jane Austen may appear to demonstrate the reverse: nice girls marry nice men and businessmen are somehow vulgar. Yet this attitude persists in all societies everywhere, especially among novelists, and the point of Jane Austen is not that this attitude exists, but that it is so weak, and the nice girls often find that nice men are those with money – and money often derives from business. But the essence of success is surely where we began in the first place: it is the product of the Open Society. One might even use that much misused word ‘liberty’: people were amazingly free to mind their own business and to grow that business successfully. I am always amazed in the way that the Railway companies and the Canal companies before them were allowed to dig up half of England with the protests mostly suppressed. Railways in the 19th century spread more rapidly than did motorways in the 20th. The incentives for an industrial revolution were all there and the drawbacks were few, and thus all over England and in southern Scotland too, the Industrial Revolution went ahead everywhere. The Open Society and its friends First draft, 19th April 2006 |