Why Did the Industrial Revolution Happen in Britain? ~ Robert Allen

About this episode

This episode explores why the Industrial Revolution occurred in Britain, focusing on economic dynamics and worker wellbeing.

Why was industrial modernity born in Europe and not, say, China? This is one of the most consequential questions about the origins of the modern world. Yet asking “why Europe” can mislead. The Industrial Revolution was not a European event. It was a British event. So why was the steam engine invented in Britain, and not France or Italy? Oxford professor Robert Allen has worked for decades trying to understand this question. Allen believes that to understand the path to modernity, we must forget grand generalisations about the West. Instead, he asks us to zoom in on two very specific dynamics that shaped the British economy in the 1700s: cheap fuel and expensive workers. Together, they jolted Britain into a path where ever more work was streamlined with the help of machines and fossil fuels — a path that we are still walking on, with AI and robotics simply the latest sightings on this long march of modernity. In this episode, we discuss the surprising revelations that led Allen to his theory. We discuss the reasons that British wages were high, and we discuss recent scholarship suggesting that this wasn’t the case–or at least, was not the cause for the Industrial Revolution. We…

People in this episode

Host: Ilari Mäkelä

Guest: Robert Allen

Topics covered

• Industrial Revolution
• British economy
• worker wellbeing
• history of wages
• modernity
• steam engine

Keywords

• Industrial Revolution
• Britain
• Robert Allen
• worker wellbeing
• 1700s
• steam engine
• modernity

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Oxford

Books & works: Black Death

Places: Britain, Europe, China, France, Italy

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