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Why did Britain industrialise first? It’s more complicated than you think

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The Industrial Revolution didn’t happen because the British were uniquely inventive. There's much more to the story. Subscribe here: https://bit.ly/subhistoryextrayoutube

From spinning jennies to steam engines, British factories changed the world in the 18th and 19th centuries. But those machines didn’t operate in isolation. In this video, Professor Emma Griffin, Professor of History and Head of School at Queen Mary, University of London, reveals how – without coal, cotton, and colonial networks – the revolution might never have happened.

In the second episode of her HistoryExtra series on the Industrial Revolution, Professor Griffin explores why Britain was the first country to industrialise – and why the answer lies not just in technology, but in empire, economics, and exploitation. Was it the abundant coal under British soil? The breakthroughs in machinery? Or something more hidden – like the profits of slavery and access to cheap raw materials?

From the growth of the textile industry to the importance of African enslavement in Caribbean plantations, this video dismantles the old myths of British exceptionalism, and shows how the wealth and resources extracted through colonialism helped fuel industrial growth at home.

#HistoryExtra #history #industrialrevolution

03:51 Was Britain’s revolution unique?
07:29 Empire and slavery
13:45 Rapid changes in technology

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20 Comments

@bobprince1472 7 months ago

I think the biggest driver of the Industrial Revolution was the development of the Navy which provided models for all sorts of practices which affected commercial and technological development. During the reign of Henry VIII the English started using iron cannons (as opposed to brass/bronze) and that created a need for great quantities of iron. As English naval successes increased during the 17th century the whole process of naval procurement, development of ship design created systems which could be imitated by the commercial sector. Colonising new territories enabled by naval power created markets for British products. Prior to the industrial revolution products used local materials for local consumption. What changed was British companies started manufacturing goods for the whole world and not just for Britain. A great example of this was the manufacture of pins and needles in Redditch in which using relatively simple mass production produced far more of those items than could possibly absorbed by the home market (the Redditch needle museum is surprisingly interesting). Naval power created a virtuous cycle/circle, the greater the needs of the navy, the greater its capacity, and its conquests creating greater demand which required industrial might to satisfy needing technological development and so on...

@BantuNation77 7 months ago (edited)

My guess would be the creation of the Bank of England in 1694. This is the critical factor that laid the financial foundation for the transformation of the English economy into a manufacturing behemoth.

In the absence of the establishment of the Bank of England and its creation of a system of credit that was made available to the wider public, and not just the land owning elites, the government and private lenders simply would not have been able to finance the infrastructural development or the capital-intensive innovations that made the Industrial Revolution possible.

@Sophiedorian0535 7 months ago (edited)

Belgian here. Belgium was the first to adopt the British Industrial Revolution on the European continent, at the start of the 19th century. The first Stephenson-design steam train on the continent connected Brussels to Mechelen. We had raw materials to process, and coal from several coal mines to fend off the wet and cold Belgian weather. Hydro power never worked out over here, but it did in Switzerland. We had Dickensian misery in our cities, in Dickens’ day, and the earliest pre-Marxist socialist movement, that originated in the local Catholic Church, of all places. The materials were here, the markets were here, the constitutional monarchy and the liberal legislation were here, and the Roman roads had made the country into Europe’s crossroads centuries before that.

@nandokart2830 7 months ago

You had the enclosures that pushed people from the countryside to the cities (labor), the Dutch bankers that came with the Orange house (capital), cotton from America (raw material) and the newly conquered India (market). And other intangibles that coalesced in an industrial revolution. The pieces came together first there and then the French revolution gave a head start to England as the Continent was busy.

@zfvr 7 months ago

Development of the financial system is always overlooked factor in industrial revolution. BoE was founded 1695, industrial revolution started about 50 years later. That is not coincidence.

@lanetomkow6885 7 months ago

Magna Carta, Protestant King, Civil War, Parliament, Bank of England, Science.....

Honestly, a lot was missed that pointed to the fact that, yes, the English are special.

@jameskirk2905 7 months ago

The development of the screw cutting lathe by Henry Maudsley made possible every machine tool after that. It had to be made.

@martinquartermaine3982 6 months ago

Hello, i discovered in my graduate thesis that one of the most important factors was the hereditary system in Britain. Primogeniture inheritance enabled farm estate size to kept lñat a level which enabled greater food production which was the criterion which enabled the industrial revolution.

@jameslooker4791 7 months ago

I think what made England different was the legal structures that protected entrepreneurs. What really made industrialization was capitalism. I don't think capitalism is truly possible without industrialism.

@robertpearson8798 7 months ago

One thing that you never seemed to touch upon was the rapid construction of canals. Steam engines required large amounts of coal to work, raw materials needed to be brought in for processing and finished goods needed to be sent to markets. Horses and wagons were very limited in the amount they could carry but canal boats could suddenly carry many times the weight and quantity of goods with the same or less real horsepower. Did the canals help kickstart the industrial revolution or did the revolution ignite the construction of canals?

@bchapman1234 7 months ago

A major contribution to the Industrial revolution starting in England was the religious settlement of the Restoration. Dissenters were given religious freedom so they did not emigrate like the Huguenots, but they were excluded from the Universities and the government. The dissenters therefore went into industries and private development

@qienna6677 7 months ago

Didn't some factories also use water wheels?

@EnneaIsInterested 7 months ago

It's the underlying commercialization that is important, particularly the land centralization that came out of the Norman Conquest, opened up England to commercialization in entirely new ways, because you had big agricultural outfits that could sell to merchants, who in turn, sold at the markets, vs. Many individual small plots and "Farmer's markets"

@rkayakr 7 months ago

I read a tech history that suggested that Britain hosted the industrial revolution due to instituting a working patent system. This lead to the transition from secretive guild technology to published technology that others could build on. Sorry don't remember the name of the book, but it did a great job of contrasting development in Britain and France.in this period.

@Sean_JN 3 months ago

Great video 👏

@renzodenhollander1465 7 months ago

One factor that seems to be missing here is demographic and the kind of agrarian economy Britain was before it industrialized. Britain had a grain-based agrarian economy. This provides enough food to sustain a growing population but won't make it skyrocket. Combined with political developments over the centuries this caused the wage for each worker to be relatively high (as compared to India or China, often seen as the most likely societies to have industrialized). High wages and large bargaining power stimulates the development of new technology to produce more stuff with less labor.

In rice-based agrarian economies, like India and China, the agricultural produce allows for a very big population. Rice-production is very labor-intensive, but if there are simply a lot of people who could do this work, there is no stimulus to develop new technologies to lessen the need for labor. There are plenty of laborers to choose from and because there are many, they don't cost much.

Grain-based agrarian economies therefore are a bit likelier to develop cost and time-cutting technologies than rice-based agrarian economies, because labor costs are higher in the former than in the latter.

@jameslooker4791 7 months ago (edited)

Possibly the most serendipitous coincidence of steam power was that it was invented to drain water out of coal mines. Wind mills and water wheels were the other dominant sources of non-animal mechanical work. While far simpler than steam power, wind and water were both dependent on favorable geography. Steam was the first mechanical power source that had any degree of portability. Prior to steam engines, keeping coal mines dry required expensive grain and fodder for the livestock that powered the pumps. Ironically, early steam engines, functionally, also required favorable geography, which just happened to be any location within about a mile of a coal mine. With an efficiency of about 1%, early steam engines needed more coal than any industry could afford except for coal miners. Even just logistically, moving the coal to the first steam engines would have been impossible if the engines hadn't been at a coal mine.

@StephenSkinner-k4w 7 months ago

The Portuguese and Spanish had larger numbers of slaves than Britain had. The Ottoman Empire had far larger numbers of slaves than any European country. So if slavery was significant due to wealth generated by the numbers of slaves kept, then the Ottoman Empire would have industrialized first, followed by Spain then Portugal. That didn't happen- making the number of slaves kept likely irrelevant to the start of Industrialization on the evidence.
Key factors in British industrialization are likely education, literacy and numeracy were unusually high by world standards, and investment law. Investment law evolved alongside the Industrial Revolution, creating mechanisms to support large-scale capital accumulation, such as joint-stock companies, limited liability, and intellectual property rights. Legal frameworks encouraged entrepreneurship enabling the expansion of factories, and the development of railways and steamships.