Transcript Bob Allen: Why Britain industrialised when others did not

00:05 The big question about the Industrial Revolution is: Why did it happen in England? Why did it happen in the 18th century? The Industrial Revolution meant the replacement of the cottage mode of production with a factory mode of production. By the end of the 18th century there was a big growth in cotton production and initially by women spinning in their cottages.  

00:23 So, in the cottage with the spinning wheel, there was a woman who was the spinner, there was the apparatus – the spinning wheel. On the right side of the spinning wheel there was a big wheel, that she spun with her right hand. If she did this for 12 hours a day, she could produce one pound or half a kilo of cotton yarn. In the middle of the 18th century there were quite a few people who were trying to invent machines to mechanise that production process.  

00:52 James Hargreaves was the first to succeed. His invention was the spinning jenny. It was a kind of scaled up version of the spinning wheel that spinners had used previously in their cottages. With the spinning jenny, the woman turned the big wheel, but it was connected with strings to ten, twenty, thirty spindles, so she could do much more work. So, the question is: why did Hargreave go through five years of effort and hundreds of pounds of expenses from the 1760s to make this machine work?   

01:24 The situation in the 18th century was new. If we compared the earnings of women in spinning back to the end of the 16th century with those of men doing building work what we’d find is that in the late 16th to early 17th century a woman earned about a third of what a man earned. By the time you get to the middle of the 18th century, the woman is earning two thirds of what the man is earning, so there has been a big rise in her earnings, and that means that labour that is saved by the spinning jenny is more valuable and it can offset the extra cost of the machinery.  

02:04 So the rise in women’s wages had a big impact on the rate of return to using equipment. I tried to estimate what the rate of return would have been throughout the period from the end of the 16th century to the middle of the 18th century.

02:15 It goes from something like 2/3% per year in the early 17th century – which wasn’t enough to attract anybody to invest in something like that – to 30/40% in the middle of the 18th century, which was a very profitable investment project. The reason for that was because women’s wages, which monetised the gains from mechanisation, kept rising and rising.  

02:44 The high wages were the result of Britain’s success in international trade. That was rooted in the Empire.

02:51 The Empire had expanded a lot in the 17th and 18th century. There were very valuable sugar colonies that had been started in the 1660s. You had the thirteenth colonies that became the United States on the East Coast of North America, Canada was added to that in 1763, and then in 1757 the East India Company conquered Bengal and added that part of India to the Empire. So, all of these were captive markets for Britain, and all of them were very prosperous in generating high income.   

03:30 So, they were big in growing markets for British manufacture exports and cloth was an important manufactured export. Production of that cloth required more and more employees. Labour markets got tighter and tighter and wages went up, and that made the use of mechanised spinning equipment profitable.

03:50 This happened in Britain but it didn’t happen in other countries, were the rate of return to using spinning jennies was still very low in the 18th century. So, the Industrial Revolution was the knock-on effect of British imperialism. The spinning jenny was invented because it was profitable to use and that profitability covered the costs of Hargreave’s R&D project.