Why did Europe industrialise first?

DocJamore is secretly mentioning this, channeling Robert Allen's explanation of the Great Divergence. Per Allen, Western Europe managed to be the center of world trade in the Early Modern era and this led to high wages in England and the Low Countries, spurring industrialization.
Oh, that's an interesting explanation. I never thought of it that way but it's an explanation that makes perfect sense
 
It's still a topic very much debated, and being perfectly honest here, it would require far more than a forum post to adequately answer.

Personally, I think it was a great number of factors that actually enabled the UK to have an Industrial Revolution. Certainly the availability of capital, development of proto-industrial capacity, attitude toward science as well as access to resources such as coal were of crucial importance. What seems apparent to me is that what the British (or more correctly, those in the Northwest and West Midlands of England, as well as the Central Belt of Scotland) had what previous candidates for industrialisation had was technology.

Technology is often associated with science for good reason, but the two are not always so closely linked as one would imagine. Technological innovation had been a feature of many societies since before civilization, and for the most part it gradually accumulated and was not forgotten (there were exceptions such as concrete). Sometimes for its full usefulness to become apparent, certain technological innovations require others. The steam engine was useless without the various technologies developed between Hero's original invention of it and its use in the factories, trains and mines of industrialising Britain. Keeping this in mind, the technological improvements and innovations of Britain that enabled industrialisation came not from the "centre" but from relatively backward areas such as Lancashire. The resources of the growing yet small cities of Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow were those that took Britain on its first steps toward industrialisation, though they were no doubt aided by the highly advanced national market.

Personally, I remain unconvinced that it was inevitable that industrialisation would start here, though after a certain point, it was highly likely to. Had war scuppered the UK's pre-industrial development, had Scotland remained an independent and relatively antagonistic nation rather than joining with England in the UK, then chances are that the melding of minds and capital may not have happened until later, maybe delaying things by decades. Enough to ensure that the industrial revolution started elsewhere? I'm not sure.

If we are talking of a European "whole", then my annoying answer is that Europe industrialised first because the UK did. I realise the post has been a bit rambly and nonsensical (I am a bit tired) but the industrial revolution as a whole can be characterized as being "sparked" in a way that proto-industrial development of all kinds wasn't. Many parts of the world took semi-independent or independent steps towards the development of national markets, manufacturing, and so on, though there was only one industrial revolution, which spread far too quickly for us to see whether another one may have occurred elsewhere.
Lots of small states which are weak on their own in Europe as opposed to the single hegemonic super states dominating India and East Asia at the time, the small ones look for any advantage they can get to get ahead of the rest while the super states just tell the surrounding smaller ones to behave or else.
The problem with this is that India after Aurangzeb was most definitely not dominated by a hegemonic state, and had not been for a great amount of its history before the Mughals. China admittedly is a different case, but the Qing dominance over its neighbours did not appear to hamper economic development in the core commercial areas of China such as modern Jiangsu province.
 
China was a land based empire at the physical limits of horse based technology.
The West was a series of sea based empires. Sea based technology had some clear areas of improvement and there was pressure to do so.
 
M-C-M? People sell goods for money almost everywhere in the world.

Compare to the reintroduction of serfdom in central Europe as a market response to oceanic trade. People sell goods for money often. What doesn't happen is money taking on the form of money capital in concentration and financialisation, nor goods taking on the form of commodities as reliable reserves of moving value in standardised bulk forms. Or show evidence of increasing mercantilism in China in the 400 years to 1800? Because I'd be interested.

yours,
Sam R.
 

Albert.Nik

Banned
From what I can say, Britain,France,Germany,Spain,Portugal,Italy are and were the most cosmopolitan regions in the Old World! Exchange of knowledge,challenge of long held notions and beliefs,other exchanges,etc happened here! It is also the perfect climate in this region that nowhere else had. So naturally,after the Renaissance,Industrialization happened due to the want of resources and that is how W.Europe and it's derived countries are ahead. Perhaps we can discuss the OTLs of different migrations and settlements in the Old and the New World to butterfly the Industrial revolution to somewhere outside Europe.
 
Geography is often cited as an important factor. And I agree. But another often overlooked factor is culture.

Since ancient Greece, Europe developed a culture that was simply more conducive to technological advancement. It was a culture of questioning and inquisitiveness.

OTOH, China had a more static and rigid Confucian culture that resulted in stagnation and decline over time.

Europe did have stagnating and dogmatic forces at work as well. But the stagnating Catholic Church was broken by the Protestant Reformation. This led to the "Protestant Work Ethic" phenomenon that was crucial to European advancement.
 
I don't think the industrialization in itself meant that much, it was not the first time we saw a improvement in manufacturing processes and a move to production on scale. But it fell together with development of scientific methods, which allowed much more orderly improvement in the manufacturing technics the moment they had developed and a move to other fields of manufacturing. I suspect if a workable stream engine had been developed in 13th century Britain, it would simply have lead to it to continue being used in coal mines and little else, and we would only have seen slow improvements to it over the centuries. England and much of Europe at the time was pretty much the perfect place to introduce the stream engine, there was large use of mills all over Europe to manufacturing on scale, what was needed was a mill not depended on wind, water or muscles, but again if not for the scientific method it would have been next to impossible to move the steam engines from mines to other uses.
 

Albert.Nik

Banned
I agree with @polyharmonic ! But for culture to develop in the best possible way,the factor loops back to the Geography of its origin point. Balkans,Italy,Levant and Asia Minor, Alexandria,Cyrene,France is the extent of Ancient Greece and all of these have excellent Geographical advantages and hence gave an opportunity to interact with many other cultures, assimilating some, assimilating into some,etc and kept growing. In the Mediaeval era,this was slowed down due to plague and invasions. So Greeks could expand easily into Persia,Bactria,Central Asia and India North although these were lost to Scythians and Persians later. All these led to the development of the European Science and Philosophy which sealed off the Industrial revolution. When you see India for example,they were limited by the Himalayas from getting expanded or Assimilated and the hence the Subsequent religious solidification. Even China,Tocharians,Russians were limited due to Geography either. Persia didn't get enough opportunity to do so as did the Native Americans.
 
Compare to the reintroduction of serfdom in central Europe as a market response to oceanic trade. People sell goods for money often. What doesn't happen is money taking on the form of money capital in concentration and financialisation, nor goods taking on the form of commodities as reliable reserves of moving value in standardised bulk forms. Or show evidence of increasing mercantilism in China in the 400 years to 1800? Because I'd be interested.

I guess nobody here understood what you mean. Will you express yourself more clearly?
 
I agree with @polyharmonic ! But for culture to develop in the best possible way,the factor loops back to the Geography of its origin point. Balkans,Italy,Levant and Asia Minor, Alexandria,Cyrene,France is the extent of Ancient Greece and all of these have excellent Geographical advantages and hence gave an opportunity to interact with many other cultures, assimilating some, assimilating into some,etc and kept growing. In the Mediaeval era,this was slowed down due to plague and invasions. So Greeks could expand easily into Persia,Bactria,Central Asia and India North although these were lost to Scythians and Persians later. All these led to the development of the European Science and Philosophy which sealed off the Industrial revolution. When you see India for example,they were limited by the Himalayas from getting expanded or Assimilated and the hence the Subsequent religious solidification. Even China,Tocharians,Russians were limited due to Geography either. Persia didn't get enough opportunity to do so as did the Native Americans.

If we're doing culture, it's a wonder we're talking English here and not Arabic as they took most of the Greek culture after the fall of Rome. Most of the even older culture was not from Europe (those backwards mud-living people) but from the Eastern Mediaterranean

From what I can say, Britain,France,Germany,Spain,Portugal,Italy are and were the most cosmopolitan regions in the Old World! Exchange of knowledge,challenge of long held notions and beliefs,other exchanges,etc happened here! It is also the perfect climate in this region that nowhere else had. So naturally,after the Renaissance,Industrialization happened due to the want of resources and that is how W.Europe and it's derived countries are ahead. Perhaps we can discuss the OTLs of different migrations and settlements in the Old and the New World to butterfly the Industrial revolution to somewhere outside Europe.
Sure, but Britain+France+Germany+Italy+Spain+Portugal is like 2/3rd of Europe. If you'd been in a village of Sarthe in the XVIth century, I doubt you'd call it cosmopolitan.
Plus if it's about cosmopolitanism, then we had nothing over the Indian Ocean trade network
 
Britain was loaded with cash due to the empire.

Britain had a large capitve market in the form of it's colony's which it could force to buy British goods.

Yet Belgium was the first continental country to industrialise, despite having no empire.



And certain parts of Europe happened to be both favourably positioned relative to the Americas but also gifted with very conveniently located coal.
fasquardon

Favourably positioned for just about anywhere.

I once saw a set of maps showing the world centred on various places. They all, of course, included many countries, but the hemisphere centred on Europe included almost all the habitable land area. In that sense Europe is indeed "the centre of the world"
 
There's so many different theories(there;s at least 20+ theories already cited in this thread), and most of them aren't mutually incompatible. Of course many of the theories are likely wrong, but if even just a fifth of them are right then that invites the possibility that industrialization was an extremely unlikely process.

Hell. Maybe the Fermi Paradox bottleneck lies not with the emergence of sentient life nor with the survival of industrial civilization, but instead with industrialization?
Dwight Schrute?
 
"First" is the wrong way to go about it. Industrialization, as one historian has said, was a "peculiar path," and was by no means inevitable in Europe itself. The better question is "Why did Europe industrialize at all rather than succumb to Malthusian pressures like China did?," which is a very good question and which still has no clear answer.

And of course, the question then devolves to "Why did China not develop Mercantile capitalism?"
But they did. As the final book on Harvard's series about Imperial China, The Great Qing: China's Last Empire by William T. Rowe, points out, eighteenth-century China was the single most commercially developed nation on earth. Historian Gilbert Rozman has also done important work on preindustrial urbanization patterns and market development, and that research, too, suggests that China was the first nation on earth to reach the most highly developed state of market integration possible without industrialization (this was achieved in China by around 1500, decades to a century earlier than the economic centers of Europe).

which allowed advances in a range of disciplines especially science from the the 15th century onwards.
The impact of science on the early (eighteenth-century) Industrial Revolution is greatly overstated.

London and Amsterdam were paying the highest wages in the world by 1700.
The question of Jiangnan vs. English wages has been fiercely disputed recently, with the side positing that the two were largely equal still a strong contender.

European smithing and metallurgy had finally reached the quality required to build steam engines.
The technical capacity to build steam engines was always there, including in China (where the basic ingredients were present arguably by Han times).

4. Calvinist culture being more lax on usury allowed for people to make larger loans. Capitalism really took off once usury stopped being seen as taboo.
China had no usury taboo.

Peas. There was a significant shift in the European diet during the 11th and 12th centuries involving a move to legumes as a staple. This lead to a far higher iron content and subsequent increase in life expectancy. However far more importantly it caused a significant drop in infant and maternal mortality during childbirth allowing allowing fewer women to produce the same number of adults. This lead to smaller family sizes and a greater concentration of wealth.
Legumes were not the most important staple in eighteenth-century England.

- Manorialism : give individual / nuclear family its own private property
China also had individual private property.

- Consanguinity Law : prevent creation of clans and tribes
China also had no "tribes" and no clans beyond the extended descent groups that we see in Early Modern Europe's "banking families" as well.

Add literacy to the equation.
Eighteenth-century Burma had the highest literacy rates on earth due to universal compulsory education in Buddhist monasteries, outstripping even England. Chinese literacy rates were also comparable to Europe as a whole.

With these five elements combined you can industrialize.
Eighteenth-century China seems to have had all five. Excess cash? It was frequent for the Qing emperors to not collect taxes from the majority of provinces simply because the government was so rich and cost-efficient. China's developed areas, from Beijing to Hangzhou, are also flat and integrated by the Grand Canal and the three river systems. China had all the raw goods it needed, from Hainan sugar to Siberian furs, and its people -- the world's largest consumer market -- had a literacy rate comparable to Europe.

OTOH, China had a more static and rigid Confucian culture that resulted in stagnation and decline over time.
Give me specific examples of this, because it's a false and discredited trope.

the hemisphere centred on Europe included almost all the habitable land area. In that sense Europe is indeed "the centre of the world"
The hemisphere centered on the Middle East contains a greater proportion of the world's population than the one centered on France.
 
And we just got our first China apologist. This should be interesting.

We can go back to saying it was peas, which explains why Europe didn't industrialize until 600 years after their introduction, and the Columbian Exchange, which explains why Ming China also industrialized.


But they did. As the final book on Harvard's series about Imperial China, The Great Qing: China's Last Empire by William T. Rowe, points out, eighteenth-century China was the single most commercially developed nation on earth. Historian Gilbert Rozman has also done important work on preindustrial urbanization patterns and market development, and that research, too, suggests that China was the first nation on earth to reach the most highly developed state of market integration possible without industrialization (this was achieved in China by around 1500, decades to a century earlier than the economic centers of Europe).

So, this is probably true, but, I note that Pomeranz et al. didn't look at literacy in their work.

The impact of science on the early (eighteenth-century) Industrial Revolution is greatly overstated.

I suspect it's overstated, but no impact at all? Look at James Watt. He carried out systemic experiments, applied for patents (which didn't exist in China), and got a job at the University of Glasgow, where he was responsible for repairing telescopes and sextants. I don't see how you get someone in Qing China with the same background.

Eighteenth-century Burma had the highest literacy rates on earth due to universal compulsory education in Buddhist monasteries, outstripping even England. Chinese literacy rates were also comparable to Europe as a whole.

Shouldn't the comparison seem to be the places where the industriali revolution kicked off, i.e. the Yangzi Delta to England?
 
I suspect it's overstated, but no impact at all?
I wouldn't say no impact at all, but I don't think industrialization could have happened in any place with "science," nor do I think rudimentary industrialization requires science. I admit that the lack of Chinese institutional support for inventions and technological innovation probably hindered Qing technology, but by how much I'm not sure. On patents specifically, England and Venice had unusually early patent laws and many parts of Europe did well on the science front without them.

Shouldn't the comparison seem to be the places where the industriali revolution kicked off, i.e. the Yangzi Delta to England?
Recent research by Li Bozhong on eighteenth-century records for 219 Jiangnan villages suggests a literacy rate of around 40% (presumably for men), which is admittedly lower than England (~60% for men) but comparable to France immediately before the Revolution. In major cities like Suzhou or Nanjing, literacy rates were probably on par with eighteenth-century Amsterdam (~85% for men). I honestly don't see this supposed difference in education between the Yangzi Delta and the Low Countries.
 
@ I. S.: All those conditions are necessary (except for the legumes, probably) - which doesn't mean that they're sufficient.

Also, see my post last page.
 
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