Bennett writes,
Very briefly, and simplistically, the Industrial Revolution happened when it did because the English (and their available capital) were occupied gathering the plentiful low-hanging fruit available with pre-industrial (or what Mumford would call “eotechnic”) technology. Iain [Murray]’s ancestors had all the coal they could profitably dig and transport by human, animal, and wind power for a century or so before they needed steam pumps to be able to exploit deeper mines, and steam locomotives to pull coal from mines further from the Tyne, than they had before. Crude steam engines had been around for a while; suddenly it became profitable to build and use them. The Industrial Revolution happened when financing it became the best available use of capital. The middle class had had plenty of honor and dignity for centuries before that — due to the legacy of Anglo-Saxon culture that held that there was no such thing as “noble blood” — even if your father held a title, you were legally a commoner unless and until your father died and you inherited the title, unlike on the Continent.
From a Facebook thread discussing this post.
Yes, but:
From “Dignity”:
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A Swiss traveler … wrote:
“in England commerce is not looked down upon as being derogatory, as it is in France and Germany. Here men of good family and even of rank may become merchants without losing caste.”‘ He meant it literally: in France and Spain a nobleman caught engaging in commerce could be stripped of his rank, “derogated,” whereas in England, Bethel noted, the “heralds [are] not requiring so much as any restoration in such cases.”
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And a page or two later:
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The historian Tim Blanning puts it so: “In the past it had been an axiom of English political theory that a virtuous polity depended on a tradition of civic humanism, sustained by a landed elite whose independence ensured their virtue”-thus Roman and neo-Roman theorizing down to Thomas Jefferson, and in the mid-twentieth century also certain British Tories and American Republicans. By the early eighteenth century in England, though, a century after its emergence in the Netherlands, “there emerged a greater willingness to view commercial society, not as a sink of corruption but as a wholly legitimate sphere of private sociability.”
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Private sociability. Libertarians cannot win – but only because something has happened to ideas. Some forms of liberty (of contract, of commerce, of innovation) as spheres of private sociability are now much less legitimate than they used to be. Ideas, words matter. Professors of economics, politicians, UN diplomats and World Bank officers, journalists, bloggers, environmentalists – all those who care, the new nobility – are much more respected than a humble and a bit crazy merchant starting a hopeless private enterprise with money borrowed from in-laws.
The permeability of the British aristocracy also mattered a lot. Bennett points out that it was a small aristocracy and would shrink without additions, whereas in (say) France it was large and naturally growing – and all this is true. But it’s just as important that it was an open aristocracy – almost anyone who had sufficient money and influence would be elevated.
Vaclav also makes good points, although it is worth pointing out that in 18th century Britain you couldn’t be properly respectable if you didn’t own land. But if you didn’t own land, you could always buy land with the profits of your commerce, and if you were already landed then you wouldn’t lose rank by going into commerce. This was worlds apart from the situation in France, Spain or Germany, let alone Eastern Europe.
I repeat:
McCloskey demolishes that position (energy from coal) in her second book (which is given over to a lot of “demolishing”).
“The Industrial Revolution happened when financing it became the best available use of capital.
“The middle class had had plenty of honor and dignity for centuries before that — due to the legacy of Anglo-Saxon culture that held that there was no such thing as “noble blood” — even if your father held a title, you were legally a commoner unless and until your father died and you inherited the title, unlike on the Continent.”
Contemporaneous circumstances do not confirm causality.
McCloskey makes the point of the 16 times multiple of expansion, which did not occur when those confluences occurred elsewhere or previously.
Implicit are the ways in which people came to regard one another (plus the factors that caused those regards to arise); which ways of regard may be fading from causal factors only now being examined.
Charles Mann, the author of 1493: The New World After Columbus, claims that it was actually rubber trees in Brazil that made the Industrial Revolution possible, because you can’t make much of an engine without rubber gaskets, hoses, etc, and Europe didn’t have much in the way of rubber trees prior to the age of exploration.
I dunno. I find these discussions fascinating, but a lot of it sounds like just-so storytelling to my ears. A form of scholarly entertainment.
I have always thought that three very important factors were:
1. The very low numbers of British nobility. If I recall correctly the outcome of the Norman invasion, combined with a couple of purely contingent events (such as the sinking of The White Ship, that wiped out a significant fraction of Norman-English nobility) meant that in the 17th and 18th centuries there were only a couple of hundred nobles in England. Compared with a couple of hundred thousand in France. English law simply could not avoid giving (wealthy) commoners the respect and legal rights. They just didn’t have enough nobles to run the country without commoners in positions of power.
2. The sudden increase of wealth due to overseas expansion led to a lot of wealthy people (noble and common). And these were people whose fortune was derived from technological development and trade. Even the land holders could see their own wealth being increased by the technological development of the drainage systems that converted huge slabs of England from swamp and wetlands to fields. The “powers that be” were friendly to technology, at least by the standards of the day. (The Dutch were also in this position.)
3. The vast increase in wealth and power referred to in point 2 was running ahead of the ever-present tendency of government power to control such things. The stultification of rules, regulations and bureaucracy fell behind, and allowed things to “get out of hand”, which resulted in a revolution, but not the sort that was feared. This can be compared to the rise of the internet, though our own governments seem to be quicker off the mark in regaining control after only a couple of decades.
” The Industrial Revolution happened when financing it became the best available use of capital. The middle class had had plenty of honor and dignity for centuries before that ”
But would the development of that financing have happened, and would the capital for it have been found, if the middle class had not “had plenty of honor and dignity for centuries before that “, thereby lending dignity to the whole pursuit?