Industrial Revolution in England and France: Some Thoughts on the Question, "Why was England First?"

Abstract

A MAJOR concern of economic historians since World War II has been to interpret the process of industrialization in now developed countries. One prominent line of approach has been to compare the experience of the European economies in the eighteenth century, and much of the inquiry has been conceptualized along the following lines. Industrial Revolution poses two problems: (i) did this first breakthrough to a modern industrial system take place in Western Europe? and (2) Why, within this European experience, did change occur when and where it did ? 2 This comparative approach has been seen as a particularly valuable way of yielding insights into the process of economic growth in general and the causes of the English Industrial Revolution in particular. Thus Crouzet argues that economic historian interested in the key problem of growth is bound to find the comparative approach particularly fruitful. A systematic comparison of the eighteenth-century English economy with that of another country-and France as the leading continental power at that time seems the obvious choice-should bring out more clearly what factors were peculiar to England and might have determined what is a unique phenomenon, the English Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century.3 Since Crouzet wrote, much of the literature has accepted the usefulness of the question, Why was England first ? and the specific question, Why did England experience the onset of the Industrial Revolution before France ? has been promoted to a position of great prominence.4 There is by now an extensive literature offering a wide variety of responses to these questions. The answers seem to fall into three types. First, there are studies which single out a single crucial reason. To cite just a couple of examples we find views as diverse as those of Kemp (if one overriding reason can be given for the slower transformation of the continent ... it must be the continued prevalence of the traditional agrarian structures)5 and Hagen (the differences in personality rather than differential circumstances are the central explanation of Britain's