What happened that allowed the British (English) to make a lot of money in textile production?
Why did the Industrial Revolution take place in eighteenth century Britain and not elsewhere in Europe or Asia? Answers to this question have ranged from religion and culture to politics and constitutions. In a just published book, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, I argue that the explanation of the Industrial Revolution was fundamentally economical. The Industrial Revolution was United kingdom of great britain and northern ireland's creative response to the challenges and opportunities created by the global economic system that emerged after 1500. This was a two stride procedure. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a European-broad market emerged. England took a commanding position in this new order as her wool cloth industry out competed the established producers in Italian republic and the Low Countries. England extended her lead in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by creating an intercontinental trading network including the Americas and India. Intercontinental trade expansion depended on the acquisition of colonies, mercantilist trade promotion, and naval power.
The consequence of Britain's success in the global economy was the expansion of rural manufacturing industries and rapid urbanisation. East Anglia was the centre of the woollen cloth industry, and its products were exported through London where a quarter of the jobs depended on the port. As a result, the population of London exploded from 50,000 in 1500 to 200,000 in 1600 and half a million in 1700. In the eighteenth century, the expansion of merchandise with the American colonies and India doubled London'southward population again and led to even more rapid growth in provincial and Scottish cities. This expansion depended on vigorous imperialism, which expanded British possessions abroad, the Regal Navy, which defeated competing naval and mercantile powers, and the Navigation Acts, which excluded foreigners from the colonial trades. The British Empire was designed to stimulate the British economy–and it did.
The growth of British commerce had three of import consequences. First, the growth of London created a shortage of wood fuel that was merely relieved by the exploitation of coal. Figure one shows the real cost per meg BTUs of energy in London from wood and coal in this period. In the fifteenth century, the 2 fuels sold at the aforementioned price per 1000000 BTU's which meant that the marketplace for coal was limited given its polluting character. As London grew after 1500, the price of wood fuels rose and by the end of the sixteenth century, charcoal and firewood were twice the price of coal per unit of measurement of free energy. With that premium, consumers began to substitute coal for wood. Instead of a wood burning hearth in the middle of a large primal room, houses were built with narrow fireplaces and chimneys to burn coal. The coal burning house was invented. It then paid to mine coal in Northumberland and ship it down the declension to London. The coal trade began. On the coal fields (in Newcastle, for example), Uk had the cheapest energy in the globe. Free energy was more expensive on the European continent and particularly expensive in China (Figure 2).
Figure 1.
Effigy 2.
Second, the growth of cities and manufacturing increased the demand for labour with the result that British wages and living standards were the highest in the world. Effigy 3 shows the wages of labours in leading cities in Europe and Asia from 1375 to 1875. The wages have been deflated by a consumer cost index so that they show the purchasing power beyond space as well equally over fourth dimension. A value of one means that a labourer employed full time, full year could earn just enough to go on his family at a subsistence standard of living of 1940 calories per adult male equivalent per day. The budget used to define the consumer price index is set up so that nigh of the spending is on food and almost of that is on the cheapest carbohydrate available (oatmeal in northwestern Europe, polenta in Florence, sorghum in Beijing, millet chapatis in Delhi). Only tiny quantities of meat, oil, material, fuel, and housing are included in the budget. Subsequently the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century, the standard of living of workers everywhere was loftier; they typically earned three or four times subsistence. In the ensuing centuries, population growth in Europe and Asia led to falling real wages, so that most workers ended up in the eighteenth century earning just enough to purchase the subsistence standard of living. The but countries to avoid that fate were Britain and the Low Countries. Their populations, in fact, grew more than rapidly than those elsewhere, but this effect was showtime by the booms in their economies due to international trade. Workers in London and Amsterdam did not, yet, buy 4 times as much oatmeal as they needed for subsistence. Instead they upgraded their diets to beef, beer, and bread, while their counterparts in much of Europe and Asia subsisted on quasi-vegetarian diets of boiled grains with a few peas or lentils. Workers in northwestern Europe also had surplus income to buy exotic imports similar tea and sugar as well as domestic articles similar books, pictures, watches, and better clothes.
Effigy 3.
3rd, the growth of cities and the high wage economy stimulated agronomics. The potent demand for food and particularly meat, butter, and cheese led to the conversion of arable to pasture, convertible husbandry, and the production of forage crops (beans, clover, turnips), most of which raised soil nitrogen levels and pushed upward the yields of wheat and barley. The urban need for labour led to the amalgamation of small holdings into large farms, which employed fewer people per acre, a development besides entailed past the conversion of ploughed land to grass. Agriculture was revolutionised because cities expanded, rather than the opposite as historians have frequently maintained.
Success in international merchandise created Britain's high wage, cheap energy economy, and it was the spring board for the Industrial Revolution. High wages and cheap energy created a demand for applied science that substituted upper-case letter and free energy for labour. These incentives operated in many industries. Pottery, for instance, was manufactured in both England and China. The pattern of the kilns differed greatly, however. English language kilns were inexpensive to build only very fuel inefficient; much of the free energy from the called-for fuel was lost through the vent pigsty on the acme (Figure 4). The typical Chinese kiln, on the other paw, was more expensive to construct and, indeed, required more labour to operate. Figure 5 shows how oestrus was fatigued into the chamber on the left and so forced out a hole at floor level into a 2nd sleeping room. The procedure continued through many chambers until the air, by then denuded of nigh of its heat, finally exited up a chimney. In England, it was not worth spending a lot of coin to build a thermally efficient kiln since free energy was so cheap. In China, however, where energy was expensive, it was toll constructive to build thermally efficient kilns. The technologies that were used reflected the relative prices of capital letter, labour, and energy. Since it was costly to invent technology, invention likewise responded to the same incentives.
Effigy 4. English kiln
Figure 5. Chinese kiln
The famous inventions of the Industrial Revolution were responses to the loftier wages and cheap energy of the British economic system. These inventions as well substituted capital and energy for labour. The steam engine increased the use of capital and coal to raise output per worker. The cotton wool mill used machines to heighten labour productivity in spinning and weaving. New technologies of fe making substituted cheap coal for expensive charcoal and mechanised production to increment output per worker.
These technologies eventually revolutionised the earth, simply at the outset they were barely assisting in Britain, and their commercial success depended on increasing the use of inputs that were relatively cheap in Britain. In other countries, where wages were lower and energy more than expensive, it did not pay to use technology that reduced employment and increased the consumption of fuel.
The French government was very active in trying to promote advanced British technology in the eighteenth century, but its efforts failed since the British techniques were not cost effective at French prices. James Hargreaves perfected the spinning jenny, the outset car that successfully spun cotton wool, in the late 1760s. In 1771, John Holker, an English language Jacobite who held the post of Inspector General of Foreign Manufactures, spirited a jenny into France. Demonstration models were made, simply the jenny was only installed in big, state supported workshops. By the late 1780s, over twenty,000 jennies were used in England and only 900 in France. Besides, the French government sponsored the construction of an English style atomic number 26 works (including iv coke blast furnaces) in Burgundy in the 1780s. The raw materials were adequate, the enterprise was well capitalised, and they hired outstanding and experienced English engineers to oversee the projection. Yet it was a commercial bomb because coal was too expensive in French republic.
Since the technologies of the Industrial Revolution were only profitable to adopt in Uk, that was as well the just country where information technology paid to invent them. The ideas embodied in the quantum technologies were simple; the difficult problem was the engineering challenge of making them work. Responding to that challenged required research and development, which emerged as an important business practise in the eighteenth century. Information technology was accompanied past the appearance of venture capitalists to finance the R&D and a reliance on patents to recoup the benefits of successful development. The Industrial Revolution was invented in Great britain in the eighteenth century because that was where it paid to invent it.
The success of R&D programs in eighteenth century Britain depended on some other characteristic of the loftier wage economic system. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the growth of a manufacturing, commercial economy increased the demand for literacy, numeracy and trade skills. These were acquired through privately purchased education and apprenticeships. The high wage economy non just created a need for these skills, but besides gave parents the income to purchase them. As a result, the British population was highly skilled (past international standards), and those skills were necessary for the high tech revolution to unfold.
The Industrial Revolution was bars to U.k. for many years, because the technological breakthroughs were tailored to British weather condition and could not be profitably deployed elsewhere. However, British engineers strove to amend efficiency and reduced the use of inputs that were inexpensive in Uk equally well every bit those that were expensive. The consumption of coal in steam engines, for example, was cutting from 45 pounds per horse power-hour in the early eighteenth to only 2 pounds in the mid-nineteenth. The genius of British engineering undermined the state'southward technological pb by creating 'appropriate technology' for the world at large. Past the middle of the nineteenth century, advanced technology could exist profitably used in countries like France with expensive energy and Bharat with inexpensive labour. In one case that happened, the Industrial Revolution went world wide.
Source: https://voxeu.org/article/why-was-industrial-revolution-british
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