In a sense, all historical writing is revisionist. In their writing, most historians attempt to show that some aspect of history has been slighted, ignored, or undiscovered, and they have come up with a remedy. Sometimes, though, revisionist history is very powerful.
In his 1992 book The Stripping of the Altars, Eamon Duffy offered a revisionist view of the Protestant Reformation in England. His goal was to “contribute a shovelful of history to the burial of the venerable historiographical consensus” about the English Reformation.[1]
That consensus (which echoes the “whig version” of history challenged by Herbert Butterfield) pictured an open-minded, modern religion (Protestantism) replacing a superstitious, populist “folk” religion (Catholicism). Historians, says Duffy, were under the sway of A. G. Dickens, the “doyen of English Reformation studies,” who disdained what Duffy calls “late [Catholic] medieval piety.” Duffy’s 654-page volume (which I am reading for a class this fall) was designed to restore respect for Catholic England, and apparently it did.
Not quite so successful was Kenneth Pomeranz’s daring challenge to the then- (and perhaps still) prevailing notion that only Europe could have started an Industrial Revolution. He argued in his 2000 book The Great Divergence that between 1750 and 1800 China (especially the Yangzi basin) was roughly on a par economically with northwestern Europe (especially England).[2] The Industrial Revolution took place because of unique circumstances favoring England: primarily, its world-wide colonies. Pomeranz claimed that England had freed itself from the limits of its agricultural land by controlling colonies that produced food and cotton, with slavery keeping costs down.
Pomeranz’s book was immediately challenged by Philip Huang, a scholar specializing in China.[3] Huang argued that the Yangzi basin’s output per acre was increasing but at the expense of enormous increases in labor. Chinese families had to work ever harder just to subsist. No Industrial Revolution was likely from that quarter. Robert C. Allen supported the idea that China’s living standards were going down.[4]
I found Huang’s argument convincing (although of course I know little about Chinese agriculture). But I can’t so quickly dismiss some of Pomeranz’s other arguments. Perhaps Britain’s colonies supplied cheap agricultural products (tea, coffee, cotton) while also providing a market for manufactured products (especially cotton clothing) that no other country had. Trade with the colonies was protected by the British Navy, guided by British politics, and dependent on slave labor.
Prominent historians such as Patrick O’Brien and Stanley Engerman have been dubious about the impact of slavery. If slavery produced extra profits that fueled industry (known as the Eric Williams thesis[5]), how important could, say, an additional 7 per cent of GDP be?[6] But it appears the Industrial Revolution needed very little capital to get started, so a little more might have mattered. And it’s been long argued that British farmworkers who migrated to cities played an essential role in launching the Industrial Revolution. By reducing the amount of farming needed in Britain, the colonies may have had an important impact.
I don’t have answers, but here is my current view: England was the source of the Industrial Revolution for a myriad of reasons. One may have been its ability to move workers into factory production, and the reason for that may have had to do with the British colonies and their slave labor. More discussion of this would be beneficial.
Some revisionist history succeeds and some fails, but it is all provocative.
Notes
[1] Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), xiv.
[2] Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
[3] Philip C. C. Huang, “Development or Involution in Eighteenth-Century Britain and China? A Review of Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great Divergence,” Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 2 (May 2002), 501-538.
[4] Robert C. Allen, “Agricultural Productivity and Rural Incomes in England and the Yangtze Delta, c. 1620-c. 1820,” Economic History Review 62, no. 3 (2009), 525-55.
[5] Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).
[6] Pomeranz, 186, citing Patrick O’Brien, “European Economic Development: The Contribution of the Periphery,“ Economic History Review 35, no. 1 (February 1982), 1-18.
Economic historians (economists first, historians second) Joel Mokyr and Deirdre McCloskey link British entrepreneurship to culture and political liberties, but most historians are quite cautious. You touch on a lot of issues here, and sensitive ones, such as how far back those liberties go (well before 1215—but to Anglo-Saxon times?) and on the motive for colonialism. The French, too, wanted to have an Empire but don’t seem to have been that good at getting it (just as they lagged behind England’s industrial innovation). Joyce Appleby is a historian who tackles some of these issues (including slavery) in The Relentless Revolution.
Do any of these historians consider the increasing liberties of British citizens as a generator of the creativity and entrepreneurship that the Industrial Revolution required?
This liberating of human resources may have been the driving engine that fueled not only exploration but colonization. We might also consider that British colonies might have been better governed than those of other countries.