Why Did the Industrial Revolution Happen in Britain? ~ Robert Allen (Great Divergence #3)

<p>Why was industrial modernity born in Europe and not, say, China? This is one of the most consequential questions about the origins of the modern world. Yet asking “why Europe” can mislead. The Industrial Revolution was not a European event. It was a British event.</p><p>So why was the steam engine invented in Britain, and not France or Italy?</p><p>Oxford professor Robert Allen has worked for decades trying to understand this question. </p><p>Allen believes that to understand the path to modernity, we must forget grand generalisations about the West. Instead, he asks us to zoom in on two very specific dynamics that shaped the British economy in the 1700s: cheap fuel and expensive workers. Together, they jolted Britain into a path where ever more work was streamlined with the help of machines and fossil fuels — a path that we are still walking on, with AI and robotics simply the latest sightings on this long march of modernity.</p><p>In this episode, we discuss the surprising revelations that led Allen to his theory. We discuss the reasons that British wages were high, and we discuss recent scholarship suggesting that this wasn’t the case–or at least, was not the cause for the Industrial Revolution. We also discuss the more humane side of wages, tracing the history of worker wellbeing from the Black Death to today. </p><p>As always in this series, we finish with our guests’ reflections on the future.</p><p><br /></p><p><strong>LINKS AND REFERENCES</strong></p><p>Do you prefer reading to listening? You can find<a href="https://onhumans.substack.com/p/why-did-the-industrial-revolution" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">⁠ a summarised essay</a> ⁠of this conversation, with a bibliography, at our series page:<a href="https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/news/podcasts/" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">⁠ ⁠https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/news/podcasts/⁠⁠</a></p><p><br /></p><p><strong>GREAT DIVERGENCE: THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD</strong></p><p><em>This episode is part of a series produced by Warwick University’s</em><a href="https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">⁠⁠<em> </em>⁠<em>CAGE Research Centre</em>⁠⁠⁠</a><em> in collaboration with</em><a href="https://onhumans.substack.com/about" target="_blank" rel="ugc noopener noreferrer">⁠⁠<em> </em>⁠<em>On Humans</em>⁠⁠</a><em>, searching for explanations to why W