The Industrial Revolution Begins

Britain in 1750 was not the obvious candidate to upend ten thousand years of agrarian civilization. France had a larger population, more fertile soil, and greater cultural prestige. China under the Qing dynasty had sophisticated manufacturing, a massive internal market, and centuries of technological leadership. The Dutch had pioneered global finance. Spain and Portugal had built empires spanning continents. Yet it was a damp, coal-veined island off the northwest coast of Europe that triggered the single largest transformation in how human beings produce things since the Neolithic Revolution.

Why Britain? The question has generated two centuries of academic argument, and no single answer suffices. But certain conditions converged there in ways they did not converge elsewhere. Britain had abundant coal deposits lying close to the surface, accessible without deep-shaft mining techniques that had not yet been developed. It had navigable rivers and a coastline so indented that no point in England sits more than seventy miles from the sea, making transport cheap. It had a relatively stable political system following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, with property rights that gave investors some confidence their profits would not be arbitrarily seized. It had a colonial empire that supplied raw materials, especially cotton, and provided captive markets for finished goods. And it had a culture of practical tinkering, a dense network of artisans, clockmakers, blacksmiths, and millwrights who understood gears and pressure and the behavior of metals under stress.

None of these factors alone was sufficient. Together, they created the conditions in which a series of mechanical innovations could cascade into something no one planned and no one fully understood until it was well underway.