The Industrial Revolution

For four centuries English wages went up and down without going anywhere, and Malthus wrote down the mechanism that kept them there.

When British national income is rebuilt from better data the revolution grows slower than its reputation, and the slowness turns out to be the clue.

Before anyone could work in a mill, English farming had to feed people who were not farming, and English demography had to supply them.

Four explanations compete for the break, and the way to tell them apart is to ask what kind of machine each predicts would be invented.

Spinning was the most labour-intensive job in the largest manufacturing trade, and four machines cut the hours it took by a factor of several hundred.

Smelting with coke and puddling with coal released British industry from the acreage that charcoal iron demanded, and coal itself is an energy source with no acreage at all.

From Newcomen to the Cornish engines the fuel needed for a given amount of work fell by a factor of fourteen, and the measurements that prove it were being taken at the time.

The cost of moving a ton fell by an order of magnitude twice over, and the honest measurement of what the railway was worth is smaller than its reputation.

Gathering workers under one roof was not obviously more efficient than leaving them at home, so the reason it won has to be argued rather than assumed.

Wages, heights and death rates disagree with each other for two generations, and the disagreement is the finding rather than a defect in the data.

Britain became the first majority-urban society and paid for it in cholera and dead infants, and the accounting of that cost invented the public health state.

Machine breaking, mass petitions and forty years of statute changed what an industrial society was allowed to do to the people inside it.

The technology spread to a handful of countries, wrecked the manufacturing of others, ran on slave-grown cotton, and began a carbon release still being paid for.