8. Why was Britain first? The industrial revolution in global context. In no way is the superiority of the British manufactures more strikingly shown than in the extent of the triumph it has gained over the cotton fabrics of India … The British manufacturer brings the cotton of India from a distance of 12,000 miles, commits it to his spinning jennies and power-looms, carries back their products to the East, making them again to travel 12,000 miles; and in spite of the loss of time, and of the enormous expense incurred by this voyage of 24,000 miles, the cotton manufactured by his machinery becomes less costly than the cotton of India spun and woven by the hand near the field that produced it (William Waterston, A Cyclopædia of Commerce, Mercantile Law, Finance, Commercial Geography (London, 1846), p.224) It is a commonplace of any history textbook that the world’s first industrial revolution took place in Britain. Yet this simple assertion leads quickly to the more complex question: why? What was unique about Britain? What qualities – political, economic, cultural, geographical, or ecological – did Britain possess that predisposed it towards early industrialisation? Or to put the question another way: what was missing in other countries so that their industrialisation was either delayed until the second half of the nineteenth century, or indeed had failed to occur by the century’s end at all? Considering pathways to industrialisation outside Britain is of course interesting in its own right, but it is also invaluable to any discussion of British industrialisation. Understanding the course of economic development in other parts of the world helps us to isolate which features of the British economy were critical to industrialisation, and which merely occurred at around the same time. The following chapter provides a global context for the economic transition that occurred in Britain in the nineteenth century. In the first place we shall look at the pattern of economic growth in Europe and consider when and why some of Britain’s neighbours underwent the transformation to industrial society. Then we shall look beyond Europe and ask why a number of highly developed Asian nations failed to make a similar leap to full-blown industrialisation before the end of the nineteenth century. 157