R. M. Hartwell - The Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England

The Industrial Revolution, as Dr Hartwell stresses, marks one of the great watersheds in the history of human society. The elemental conditions of any countrys population before the modernization of its economy has been poverty: life on the margins of subsistence as an inescapable fate for the masses of any nation. A minority, enjoying the economic surplus produced from land or office, trade or taxes, may well be able to live in extreme luxury. There may well be magnificent cultural monuments and very wealthy religious institutions. But, with low productivity low output per head in a traditionally conducted agriculture, in any economy which has agriculture as the mainspring of its national income and the main source of employment the economic system as a whole does not produce much above subsistence needs. And most of what is produced beyond the immediate consumption needs of those who produce it, flows into various forms of conspicuous expenditure and consumption rather than into productive investment. The population as a whole, whether of medieval Europe or nineteenth-century India, lives close to the tyranny of nature, under the threat of harvest failure or disease. Increasing numbers in these circumstances, if there is a shortage of fertile land workable under the traditional methods, will eventually bring checks. Even if one looks to late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England as the golden age of the labourer as did Thorold Rogers it is to see good purchasing power for wages in the aftermath of a decimation of population, which is as though one would advocate the solution of Indias present difficulties by famine and disease and count it a success to raise per capita income by lessening the number of people alive rather than by expanding the economy. Even if population establishes an equilibrium with resources, through various types of social control, it will be an equilibrium at a very low level of real income. National poverty of this sort cannot be solved by the redistribution of income, only by enlarging the total output of the economy. And to increase the national income as a whole, and productivity per head, means changing the nature of the economic system. For this reason the Industrial Revolution, which focused the initial stages of this rapid transformation in Britain (though not, of course, denying the long economic evolution of Western Europe through to the eighteenth century) is a fundamental divide in the economic development of the country, marking a break with a tradition of economic life and a pace of change which had lasted for centuries and which, in certain essential characteristics, had been universal across all countries of the globe up to that time. It is not accidental that the actual term was given currency in the early nineteenth century in France by an economist who explicitly claimed that since the late eighteenth century deep-seated changes of this nature were affecting Britain as fundamental in their effects upon the national life, although operating in a less dramatic way, as the political upheavals which had changed the face of France in 1789.

Any term used to represent a complex historical process runs a semantic hazard when it becomes common currency the Renaissance and the Baroque no less than the Industrial Revolution. To a degree the criteria used to designate the term remain subjective, and hence raise no more problems methodologically than those of ascertaining whether the data fit appropriately into the chosen boxes. But the choice of criteria itself comes into question. As long as the term Industrial Revolution is interpreted loosely, to mean technical changes which transformed productive processes (or a single process) in an industry, then its origins become lost in the mists of time. Technical changes of this order, although varying dramatically in pace and extent, form a continuum in economic history, so that, thus defined, the concept is universalized, potentially robbed of limitations as to time and space. (The earliest of a succession of Industrial Revolutions, thus conceived, is that of the late Bronze Age.) Only when one adopts the more rigorous definition of the beginnings of higher growth rates of industrial production generally (involving technical change, rising investment, and productivity) and of the onset, through this, of cumulative structural changes in the economy, with the complex of relationships that lie behind this, does the term take on a more specific significance.