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Explaining the Industrial Revolution

At the heart of the Industrial Revolution lay a great acceleration in the rate of technological innovation leading to an enormously increased output of goods and services.

Early signs of the technological creativity that spawned the industrial revolution appeared in the eighteenth-century Britain, where a variety of innovations transformed cotton textile production.

In the twentieth century, the industrial revolution became global when a number of Asian and Latin American countries developed substantial industrial sectors.

Why Europe?

The industrial revolution has long been a source of great controversy among scholars.

First, other areas of the world had experienced times of great technological and scientific flourishing.

Nor did Europe enjoy any overall economic advantage as late as 1750.

A final reason for doubting any unique European capacity for industrial development lies in the relatively rapid spread of industrial techniques to many parts of the world over the past 250 years.

Thus contemporary historians are inclined to see the industrial revolution erupting rather quickly and quite unexpectedly between 1750 and 1850.

Furthermore, the relative newness of these European states and their monarchs’ desperate need for revenue in the absence of an effective tax-collecting bureaucracy pushed European royals into an unusual alliance with their merchant classes.

Europe’s societies, of course, were not alone in developing market-based economies by the eighteenth century.

For example, Asia, home to the world’s richest and most sophisticated societies, was the initial destination of European voyages of exploration.

In the Americas, Europeans found a windfall of silver that allowed them to operate in Asian markets.

Thus the intersection of new, highly commercialized, competitive European societies with the novel global network of their own making provides a context for understanding Europe’s industrial revolution.