Why Did the Industrial Revolution Start in Britain?

Abstract

The main goal of this paper is to provide an integrated overview of the literature devoted to identifying the causes of the British industrial revolution. Why did the industrial revolution, a fascinating and multifaceted event which brought about modern economic growth, occur in eighteenth-century Britain? This question has animated a lot of discussions among scholars and is still nowadays heatedly debated in the literature. This debate is reflected in the large spectrum of theories which aim at explaining the true origins of the British industrialization. The paper first sheds light on a rising debate concerning the evolution of British incomes per capita before the British industrial revolution and the "Great Divergence". The paper then investigates the proposed causes of the British industrialization, aggregating them into seven broad categories, i.e. (1) geography and natural resources, (2) demography, (3) agricultural progress, (4) demand-side factors, (5) trade and empire, (6) institutional and political factors, (7) science, technology, and human capital.

Psychological origins of the Industrial Revolution

“…This is the debate about the “Great Divergence” (Pomeranz 2009) between Europe and Asia, and also about the “Little Divergence” (De Pleijt & Van Zanden 2016) between northwestern Europe and the rest of Europe. A range of solutions has been proposed to explain these two divergences: geography and the abundance of coal (Wrigley 2013), better institutions (Acemoglu & Robinson 2012; North & Weingast 1989), an early specialization in the textile sector (Allen 2009b), greater human capital (Kelly et al 2014), the development of the Atlantic trade (Acemoglu et al 2005), and more (for a recent review, see Van Neuss 2015).…”

Analysis of Some Concepts Related to the Environment and Health With the N-Gram Method

“…This can be explained by the phenomenon of industrialization, which is an important cultural and economic change of humanity. According to traditional historians, the Industrial Revolution started in the second half of the 18th century with James Watt and Richard Arkwright's successive inventions and patents on steam engines, and subsequently affected all Europe, first in Belgium and France, and then the United States (Cardwell, 1972;Van Neuss, 2015). Later, Russia and Japan were affected by this revolution.…”

The Economic Forces Behind Deindustrialization: An Empirical Investigation

“…While the causes of the industrial revolution are still heatedly debated in the literature (see e.g. Mokyr, 1999;van Neuss, 2015), it is nevertheless widely recognized that the industrial revolution, a period that witnessed an unprecedented irise in the rates of efficiency advance (Clark, 2014), marked the starting point of modern economic growth, defined as the sustainable increase in GDP per capita, and accelerated the process of structural change. The growth of GDP per capita in successful countries has been accompanied with a fall in the agricultural share of employment and output, and a rise in the share of services.…”