Was the British industrial revolution a conjuncture in global economic history?

Abstract

Past and recent representations of the first industrial revolution As long ago as 1967, Marshal Hodgson recognized that the rise of Western economies could only be properly analysed and understood in a global context.1 Alas, the recommendation by this eminent scholar of Islam and the Islamicate world to re-conceptualize Britain’s Industrial Revolution within the wider spaces, longer chronologies and cultural frameworks of the long and interconnected history of Afro-Eurasia was not taken forward until Eric Jones published the first edition of the European Miracle in 1981.2 Since then, slowly but surely, books, articles and debates relocating and reconfiguring the industrialization of Britain and the West as another cycle in global economic history have proliferated and the subject has matured into a field that has revitalized scholarly interest in very long run structural developments on a global scale. So it is now timely to follow Hodgson’s advice and, by way of a critical survey of recent historiography, endeavour to ascertain in this essay whether Britain’s Industrial Revolution can continue to be represented as a ‘conjuncture’ in global economic history when prospects for accelerated and sustained growth changed fundamentally. Industrialization is a highly significant historical process. It displays common features on local, regional, national, continental and global scales. These are now understood to include social, cultural, political and geopolitical as well as economic forces. Nevertheless, industrialization can be parsimoniously encapsulated and graphically illustrated in statistical form as a conjuncture of accelerated economic transformation from an agrarian or organic to an industrial economy. Thus, following Kuznets, what the most recent wave of interpretations have observed and quantified is ‘structural change’ proceeding more or less rapidly until majorities of national workforces cease to be closely linked to, and dependent upon, primary production. More and more labour becomes employed either directly or indirectly through linked activities – such as trade, transportation, finance, information, consultancy, protection and welfare – in the servicing of manufactured goods. Comparable trends have also been measured, albeit with far greater difficulty, in