As I have stated before, historians are often influenced by what’s going on around them when they write about the past. In the 1950s and 1960s, the newly-independent countries looked as though they might experience their own industrial revolutions. That led to an interest among historians in the early Industrial Revolution. [1]
Economists caught the enthusiasm, too. They viewed the great potential of these countries and expected an Industrial Revolution—what W. W. Rostow called these countires’ “take-off.” [2] But that period of enthusiasm was followed by disillusionment. It turned out that many countries failed to achieve the take-off that seemed right at their doorstep.
I suggest that the economists were looking at the wrong things.
More than 20 years ago in an article for the Journal of Private Enterprise [3] I wrote about economists’ views of development as reflected in Paul Samuelson’s famous textbook. (That’s the one you probably read in your first economics class if you are of a certain age.)
I looked at Samuelson’s treatment of international development in four editions of the textbook, 1951, 1961, 1964, 1985. In them he reveals both his own views and those of other leading development economists.
You probably have heard of Robert Owen. He was a nineteenth-century British political activist (1771-1858) known for his “utopian socialism.“[1] He started communities that eschewed private property, including a colony in New Harmony, Indiana.
In those communities, he said, “the necessaries and comforts of life [will be] enjoyed by all in abundance,” and they “will ever be the abode of abundance, active intelligence, correct conduct, and happiness.”[2]
“Owenite” communities didn’t last for long.
Owen is rightly admired, however. He had a simple philosophy. He believed that all people are the products of both their inherited characteristics and their environment. If the environment is nurturing, they will develop into worthwhile beings, no matter what their economic surroundings. He held this view so strongly that, as a manager, he never punished anyone (except possibly for drunkenness) and was never visibly angry toward people. He knew their circumstances had made them as they were.
Had he stuck with being a businessman, he might have changed the world.
In the mid-1970s, while browsing in the Chicago Public Library, I came across The Rise of the Western World by Douglass North and Robert Thomas. [1] This short book tells a fascinating story of how property rights, trade, and limited government led to prosperity in the West (prosperity that eventually spread around the world).
Since then I’ve read many books about the success of the West and specifically about the Industrial Revolution, which started in England around 1760 and is generally viewed as continuing till 1830. I personally rate the Industrial Revolution as equal in importance to the discovery of agriculture.
So it will come as no surprise that, as a graduate student in history, I am studying the Industrial Revolution. In fact, I am studying labor conditions in the Industrial Revolution. Yes, the labor conditions that Charles Dickens wrote about in his novels Hard Times and Oliver Twist.
On the one hand, the Industrial Revolution was an exciting time. As a British schoolboy supposedly said, “About 1760 a wave of gadgets swept over England.”[2] New inventions, especially in the textile industry, appeared one after another, enormously improving productivity, reducing costs, and launching an age of material success.
On the other hand, labor conditions were tough. The new factories needed workers and brawn was not required. Women and children could work and monitor the machines—and they did.
The seventeenth century in Europe was bloody and violent. Some examples: a continental war that went on for thirty years (1618-1648), three British civil wars (1639-1651), naval wars between England and the Netherlands (1652-1674), and military efforts to rein in France’s Louis XIV and the Spanish Hapsburgs.
At the same time, however, economic changes were quietly occurring, laying a foundation for the Industrial Revolution. That’s the little-known subject of this post.
“What happened in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was a wholesale shift of industry, including rather sophisticated sectors, from city to countryside,” writes Jan de Vries in his informative book Economy of Europe in an Age of Crisis, 1600-1750.[1]
This shift from cities to rural areas is not the typical “Industrial Revolution” story, which says that peasants were forced off the farm and into the cities, making them available for burgeoning industrial factories. To some extent that did happen later, but manufacturing in England and other parts of western Europe started in rural areas, not cities. Here’s how, according to de Vries.
Ah, France. The country most visited by tourists. The home of wine, perfumes, and fashion. The only major European country the United States has never fought against. The country that played a critical role in our war of independence and whose sacrifices here helped bankrupt it and thus ushered in the French Revolution.
France is our friend, yet Americans sometimes ridicule or disdain the French—they are a safe target since relatively few French people chose to immigrate here. In 1995 an episode of “The Simpsons” called the French “cheese-eating surrender monkeys,” and in 2009, only 62 percent of Americans had a favorable view of France, compared with 77 percent for Britain.
For historians, especially economic historians, France doesn’t fare too well, either. The Industrial Revolution, which occurred roughly between 1750 and 1850, started in England, not in France. Answering the question “why” sometimes means arguing that there was something “wrong” with France.
