What were the factors that led to the Industrial Revolution beginning in Great Britain? How did China’s decisions facilitate this revolution in Great Britain?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Unlike the agricultural revolution, which began independently in at least seven different places, the Industrial Revolution began in only one place—Great Britain. Historians and sociologists, after much discussion and argumentation, now mostly agree that a convergence of factors, both global and local, came together to produce that result.

To take off, the Industrial Revolution required at least some of these ingredients: large quantities of extra capital (money), lots of cheap labor, new markets for goods, new inventions, a new source of power, new raw materials, and an improved transportation system. In addition, changing social and ideological contexts played a significant role.

Great Britain and other western European nations such as France and the Netherlands benefited from two major decisions made by China. China’s decision to withdraw from trade in the Indian Ocean offered the British East India Company, formed in 1600, and it’s Dutch and French counterparts the opportunity to enter the markets of Southeast Asia.

In addition, Britain and other European nations gained from China’s decision in the 1400s to use silver as the basis of its monetary system. After the Treaty of Utrecht (1713), Britain gained the right to sell slaves acquired in Africa to Spanish colonies in America, in exchange for some of the vast supplies of silver being mined in Potosi, Peru (now Bolivia), and at Zacatecas, Mexico. With this silver, which the Chinese needed to provide coinage in a booming economy, the British could buy Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain in large quantities.

Behind the silver, of course, lay the primary global card in Britain’s fateful hand—the fact that, by winning the Seven Years’ War in 1763 that involved the major European countries, Britain had displaced Spain, France, and the Netherlands, to become the hub of the new Atlantic world-system of trade. This brought Britain massive raw materials and provided consistent new markets. Besides silver, the Americas provided cheap food for industrial workers (fish, potatoes, and sugar), slave-produced cotton for the textile mills, and a market for everything the colonies would need—cradles, coffins, and clothing, including that for the slaves. British entrepreneurs accumulated capital from these ventures.

In addition, the land in Britain’s North American colonies provided products that Britain could not produce on its own. By 1830 Britain’s former colonies in North America (now the United States) wereproducing so much cotton, sugar, and timber that Britain would have to have been twice as large to produce them. Historians Kenneth Pomeranz and Robert Marks call these American acres Britain’s “ghost acres.”

Another significant factor in pushing Great Britain into industrialization was the changing global climate. From about 1250 to 1900, often known as the Little Ice Age (LIA),temperatures cooled in many areas of the world. This seems to have been caused by widespread volcanic eruptions and lower levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. To keep warm people everywhere burned more wood. The British on their small island ran out of forests, which motivated them to figure out how to mine coal efficiently.

Other possible explanations for why Britain became the first site of industrialization must be summarized even more briefly. For one thing, in the sixteenth century, Spain had failed to impose its empire on Europe, despite using vast sums of silver on war. Without a unified Europe, the system of competing states and markets continued, with Britain taking dominance by winning the Seven Years’War. Without a unified European government, neither the state nor religious institutions could dominate people’s thinking. Religious toleration and attitudes of experimentation and challenge to authority (the Enlightenment) could prevail, encouraging innovations of many different kinds. Financial institutions also developed structures for mobilizing capital.

Economic historians stress the importance of coal and colonies as the primary explanation for Britain’s dominance. Cultural historians stress the importance of particular skills, a parliamentary system that encouraged commerce, and freethinking. Important as each explanation may seem,all the forces for change interacted in complex ways, and all played out in a multicentered global arena, not just in Great Britain.