So the big historical question for this topic is really what was the Industrial Revolution? How can we explain this global phenomenon that, in big historical terms, happens extraordinarily quickly, really, such that the entire world is changed from essentially a subsistence mentality to at least being touched by a surplus kind of growth mentality? [MUSIC] So the most common story is that the Industrial Revolution started in Britain and occurred between about 1750 and 1850, a sort of nice hundred year kind of bracket. The common story goes that it was essentially a move from top-lying energy sources, so wind, horses, water, these kind of forms of power that you could harness from top-lying sources. It's a move from those sources to underground energy sources, coal, oil, gas, what we today call fossil fuels. So there is a more recent story, and a more recent take on the Industrial Revolution agrees that, essentially, this transformation is about a change in energy sources. It agrees with the story that it's sort of really from top-lying sources of energy to these, a discovery of what underground sources of energy can do. And then, of course, it did bring mechanization to the world and greater increases in wealth per capita. This more recent story also spreads out the timeframe quite crucially, and it will generally look at industrialization from a perspective about three or four hundred years, spreading out the sense that it's not just a 100-year move. And then the third kinda crucial element that this more recent revision gives is that they take a more global stance of this transformation. So when you have a global perspective on the transformation, you also take into account the ways that information, goods, labor, and crucially, capital crisscrossed the world such that kinda innovations could occur and then quite quickly move around into the world. So in between these two stories, the one still kinda reasonably orthodox story and the more recent revised story, there is a lot of disagreement between historians and a lot of ideology at play. This is not just a battle over Eurocentrism, right. It's also a battle about what you think makes history move and also what you think wealth does in history. It's a battle between materialists, those who think that only economic factors, real, cold, hard data, technologies, workplace situations change economies, and culturalists, people who think that culture or mindsets or kinda social environments are just as important about moving, changing the nature of economies. So, you can start to see how this disagreement kinda plays out when you turn to the way that historians, for example, have explained the causes for industrial revolution. Now there are usually, I think, about five major factors that often come up in historians' works about thinking through the causes for industrialization. Historians disagree quite strongly about where on the list of priorities these factors come, but five of them usually always come up. The first one is always population boom, right. You do seem to need to have a sudden increase in population in order to motivate a society to think differently about how they might feed their society. So, and certainly places like Britain, actually all of Europe at the time, has a big population boom from the early 18th century. There's this crucial question of labor as well. Labor is sometimes forgotten nowadays but of course that there's important labor force going on in imperial sites such as India and particularly in its slave form in the new world that is arguably providing the kind of essential labor force that you need to build up the kind of capital that will then invest into industrialization. The second factor that always comes up is what we might call broadly, agricultural innovation, right. So the direct response to a population boom is the way that people start thinking in a more efficient or rethinking the way that they are producing food to feed their society. [COUGH] And certainly Britain is a case where you can find that Britain goes from about the early 18th century with having about three out of four people working on the land in order to feed its society to the end of the century that ratio has gone to two, maybe even just one person on the land in order to feed four people in its society. The third, probably more controversial, factor is commerce. It generally seemed to be that you do need an existing background of commerce, right. This is not only crucial for creating the goods and the capital that you need to then maybe invest in economic transformation, but it probably is the most effective mechanism for changing one's mentality to be more outward-looking, to be more entrepreneurial, and to be more what we might just call plainly greedy or lustful for greater and greater luxuries. Along with commerce, historians often note that you do need a state that is supportive at least of this kind of commercial activity. You have to have a state that at least doesn't step in and halt commercial innovations and ideally a state that is actually is actively encouraging it because they can start to see new flows, new ideas coming in that are gonna be beneficial for their society. Fourthly, and a bit more kind of vaguely, but historians have tried to, well, at least not ignore this question of religion or what I would prefer to call spirit. The term spirit might encompass, therefore, the type of religion a society practices or the type of just intellectual environment that a society operates within. So, spirit in the 18th century in Europe at least might involve certain types of Christianity, such as particularly Protestantism. A couple of generations ago, there were a lot of historians who were interested in the connection between Protestantism and industrial growth. Protestantism does seem to be a denomination that is interested in worldly success. It has at root, of course, an origin of not accepting the way that things are, an origin of protest, so, therefore, an origin of pushing the boundaries. Probably more importantly, though, there is this thing called the European Enlightenment that Britain certainly was involved in. And the British version of the enlightenment did seem to be rather, kinda practically utilitarian bent. Perhaps that is the kind of environment you need to instigate innovation. The fifth factor, of course, sometimes is usually really the only factor that historians are really interested in, is the presence of coal. The great star of all fossil fuels, when we think historically about the industrial revolution, you need coal to be the sources behind innovations such as the steam engine. Okay, and often coal, just that nice little lump of black rock can sometimes be taken as the only symbol you need for this historical phenomenon. Now because Britain did tick the box in all those five factors, it did lead historians really well up into the 1980s to think of course that is why Britain industrializes first. It has a major population boom. It does see, quite evidently, agricultural innovation that is freeing up people to become something else in a different brave new world. It has a long and solid history of commercial trading, imperial commercial trading. It has a version, arguably, of a kind of practical bent to its type of enlightenment. It's dominated by Protestant religion. And most of all, what historians least like to forget, is that underground, there was plenty of coal in Britain. So one powerful implication of this story is that the Industrial Revolution seemed to kind of spread out from its core location in Britain, on the west and east side of this small continent, spread out to the rest of the world like honey pouring out of a jar. And this honey brings with it greater efficiency, greater inventiveness, security, luxury, what some historians have even gone so far as to suggest is greater freedoms, greater happiness. Revisionists who are more interested in thinking in larger scales, thinking in terms of perhaps big history, tend to take that problem of how do you juggle these factors if everyone else is looking like they're in the race as well. They tend to take these factors and try and turn them around and ask not why steam engines or factories first occurred in one particular place but rather try to explain general global change, over three, four hundred years, to see how almost the whole world is touched by an industrial mentality, an industrial sense of growth by about 1900. The picture that you get in the end is not honey pouring out of a jar, but instead perhaps more a metaphor of the global web, a web that has no particular stable center, a web that is forming crosslinks at different times continuously, and sometimes those crosslinks are fraying. We have to be able to explain in our discussion of the Industrial Revolution why sometimes a link will break, why sometimes an industrial center starts to fail. At the end of the day, I suppose you might split historians down to those who really want to figure out that question of why Britain first and those who think, actually, it's not about firsts. It's about pace. It's about how does innovation, how does economic mentality change so fast if we think in terms of universal scales around the globe and have such an extraordinarily big effect? It may, yes, lead to greater freedom, greater happiness for some, but it also led for many to greater types of oppression. It led to the potential for global doom. Right, there were multiple effects, and often there were two sides of new coins. What changed in the end really was not just the amount of liberty, the amount of happiness that people started to enjoy but the very meaning of liberty, the very meaning of happiness. [MUSIC]
