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Signed in but can't access contentOxford Academic is home to a wide variety of products. The institutional subscription may not cover the content that you are trying to access. If you believe you should have access to that content, please contact your librarian. Institutional account managementFor librarians and administrators, your personal account also provides access to institutional account management. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more. The Montgolfier balloon, one of many French Industrial Revolution-era innovations Tyler Cowen asks whether the world would have seen an Industrial Revolution if Britain had failed to have one. I’m going to take “Industrial Revolution” to really mean a sustained acceleration of innovation, which is, after all, the underlying source of sustained economic growth. So let’s assume that Britain had no innovators whatsoever — every single one of the 1,452 individuals whose biographies I lovingly reconstructed over the past few years simply never became innovators. Thomas Newcomen remained an unremarkable iron merchant. Josiah Wedgwood merely copied the tried and tested methods of making ceramics. Sarah Guppy took no interest in her husband’s business affairs. Britain in the eighteenth century might have remained an unremarkable, relatively impoverished nation. But innovation would almost certainly have accelerated elsewhere, probably within the space of a few decades. Britain might have had more innovators, but it did not have a monopoly on them. In fact, we don’t actually know for sure if Britain did have more innovators. It’s possible that an equal number of Dutch and French and German and other countries’ innovators were simply engaged in improving industries that would prove to be less productive. French and Italian innovators mechanised silk-throwing long before the British mechanised cotton-spinning, but cotton for a number of reasons had all the makings of a mass-consumption item (its demand elasticity was much higher). The truth, is we don’t know for sure — nobody, to my knowledge, has yet attempted to put together samples of innovators comparable to those assembled for Britain (don’t worry, I’m working on it..) Soon after I completed my PhD thesis I actually began to compile an equivalent French list (this has recently been on hold, and a Dutch list will also soon be in the works). We know that there were plenty of French innovators — Jacquard, Girard, Montgolfier, Lavoisier, Daguerre all immediately spring to mind — but I didn’t realise quite how many there were until I started to list them. Even my cursory look suggests that Britain may not have been quite as dominant an innovator as we assume. As Joel Mokyr has suggested, Britain’s advantage may have been in adopting and adapting the innovations of others, not necessarily in originating them. (For what it’s worth, I still suspect Britain had more innovators, just not that many more; but again, we don’t yet have the evidence to confirm this suspicion). So if not Britain, probably France. Or the Low Countries, or Switzerland, or the United States. These countries were, after all, the first to experience their own accelerations of innovation either contemporaneously with Britain, or only a few decades after. The raw materials were there. France for example had access to the Atlantic economy, and Belgium had plenty of coal (which France could have imported, or perhaps even conquered). Indeed, as demonstrated by Leonardo Ridolfi’s astonishingly thorough doctoral thesis, the French were a lot richer before 1789 that we had thought. What’s more, France certainly had the scientific knowledge-creation necessary to some of the major technological developments. Denis Papin first became interested with using vacuums to produce motive power during his time in Paris, working with Christiaan Huygens (pronounced like this) and Gottfried Leibniz. These experiments, along with his later work in Germany, eventually led to the first atmospheric steam engines. Squicciarini and Voigtländer’s mapSuch Enlightened thinkers and makers were not just concentrated in Paris, but were spread across the country, as indicated by the work of Squicciarini and Voigtländer. See their map, left, which shows the density of subscriptions (per 1,000 of population) to the famous Encyclopédie (they also showed, controlling for prior development and for mass education, that places with more subscribers tended to develop faster). But this isn’t to say that France (as well as the other countries I’ve mentioned) would have experienced an acceleration of innovation that was quite as fast as that in Britain. There were a number of factors that may have slowed France’s acceleration (but crucially not stopped it):
So without the British acceleration of innovation, the Industrial Revolution would likely have happened elsewhere within a few decades. France and the Low Countries and Switzerland and the United States were by the eighteenth century well on their way towards sustained modern economic growth. The growth would probably have been slower, it may have been delayed. The path that technology took may have been a little more winding. But the improving mentality was already spreading rapidly throughout Europe, as was the commitment to spreading it further. The steam locomotive had already bolted. *Thanks for reading. If you enjoyed it, please do check out my other posts about the history of innovation. And please share! What are the differences of French Revolution and Industrial Revolution?The French Revolution changed political powers by the dead of the kings , while the Industrial Revolution changed economic powers giving more opportunitys to people for having a stable economy if you own a factory .
How did the 2 industrial revolutions differ?While the First Industrial Revolution centered on textile manufacturing and the innovation of the steam engine, the Second Industrial Revolution focused instead on steel production, the automobile and advances in electricity. Discoveries in the field of electricity improved communication technologies.
Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain and not France?Historians have identified several reasons for why the Industrial Revolution began first in Britain, including: the effects of the Agricultural Revolution, large supplies of coal, geography of the country, a positive political climate, and a vast colonial empire.
What 3 major advantages did Great Britain have in the Industrial Revolution?Many different factors contributed to the rise of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. The new inventions, access to raw materials, trade routes and partners, social changes, and a stable government all paved the way for Britain to become an industry-driven country.
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