The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

by David S. Landes

  The word “revolution” has many faces. It conjures up visions of quick, even brutal or violent change. It can also mean fundamental or profound transformation. For some, it has progressive connotations (in the political sense): revolutions are good, and the very notion of a reactionary revolution, one that turns the clock back, is seen as a contradiction in terms. Others see revolutions as intrinsically destructive of things of value, hence bad.

  All of these and other meanings hang on a word that once meant simply a turning, in the literal sense. Let me be clear, then, about the way I use the term here. I am using it in its oldest metaphorical sense, to denote an “instance of great change or alteration in affairs or some particular thing”—a sense that goes back to the 1400s and antedates by a century and a half the use of “revolution” to denote abrupt political change.1 It is in this sense that knowing students of the Industrial Revolution have always used it, just as others speak of a medieval “commercial revolution” or a seventeenth-century “scientific revolution” or a twentieth-century “sexual revolution.”

  The emphasis, then, is on deep rather than fast. It will surprise no one that the extraordinary technological advances of the great Industrial Revolution (with capital I and capital R) were not achieved overnight. Few inventions spring mature into the world. On the contrary: it takes a lot of small and large improvements to turn an idea into a technique.

  Take steampower. The first device to use steam to create a vacuum and work a pump was patented in England by Thomas Savery in 1698; the first steam engine proper (with piston) by Thomas Newcomen in 1705. Newcomen’s atmospheric engine (so called becuase it relied simply on atmospheric pressure) in turn was grossly wasteful of energy because the cylinder cooled and had to be reheated with every stroke. The machine therefore worked best pumping water out of coal mines, where fuel was almost a free good.

  A long time—sixty years—passed before James Watt invented an engine with separate condenser (1768) whose fuel efficiency was good enough to make steam profitable away from the mines, in the new industrial cities; and it took another fifteen years to adapt the machine to rotary motion, so that it could drive the wheels of industry. In between, engineers and mechanics had to solve an infinitude of small and large problems of manufacture and maintenance. The task, for example, of making cylinders of smooth and circular cross section, so that the piston would run tight and air not leak to the vacuum side, required care, patience, and ingenuity.* In matters of fuel economy, every shortcoming cost, and good enough was not good enough.

  That was not all. Another line remained to be explored: high-pressure engines (more than atmospheric), which could be built more compact and used to drive ships and land vehicles. This took another quarter century. Such uses put a premium on fuel economy: space was limited, and one wanted room for cargo rather than for coal. The answer was found in compounding—the use of high-pressure steam to drive two or more pistons successively; the steam, having done its work in a high-pressure cylinder, expanded further in a larger, lower-pressure cylinder. The principle was the same as that developed in the Middle Ages for squeezing energy out of falling water by driving a series of wheels. Compounding went back to J. C. Hornblower (1781) and Arthur Woolf (1804); but it did not come into its own until the 1850s, when it was introduced into marine engines and contributed mightily to oceanic trade.

  Nor was that the end of it. The size and power of steam engines were limited by the piston’s inertia. Driving back and forth, it required enormous energy to reverse direction. The solution was found (Charles A. Parsons, 1884) in converting from reciprocating to rotary motion, by replacing the piston with a steam turbine. These were introduced into central power plants at the very end of the nineteenth century; into ships shortly after. In all, steam engine development took two hundred years.*

  Meanwhile, waterpower, itself much improved (breast wheel [John Smeaton, 1750s] and turbine [Benôit Fourneyron, 1827]), remained a major component of manufacturing industry, as it had been since the Middle Ages.2

  Similarly the first successful coke smelt of iron, by Abraham Darby at Coalbrookdale, went back to 1709. (I have stood inside the abandoned blast furnace at Coalbrookdale, there among the pitted bricks where the fire burned and the ore melted, and thought myself inside the womb of the Industrial Revolution. It is now part of an industrial museum, and curious visitors can look at it from outside.) But this achievement, though carefully studied and prepared, was in effect a lucky strike: Darby’s coal was fortuitously suitable.3 Others had less success, and they, as well as Darby, had to confine use of coke-smelted pig iron to castings. It took some forty years to resolve the difficulties, and coke smelting took off only at midcentury.

  This technology, moreover, had serious limitations. Cast iron suited the manufacture of pots and pans, firebacks, pipes, and similar unstressed objects, but a machine technology cannot be based on castings. Moving parts require the resilience and elasticity of wrought iron (or steel) and must be shaped (forged or machined) more exactly than casting can do.† A half century and much experiment went by before ironmasters could make coke-smelted pig suited to further refining and before refiners had techniques to deal with coke-smelted pig (Henry Cort, patents of 1783 and 1784). Cheap steel (Henry Bessemer, 1856) took another three quarters of a century. Cheap steel transformed industry and transportation. Where once this costly metal had been reserved for small uses—arms, razors, springs, files—it could now be used to make rails and build ships. Steel rails lasted longer, carried more; steel ships had thinner skins and carried more.

  Moreover, if origins we seek, we can push both these technical sequences back to the sixteenth century, to the precocious reliance of English industry on coal as fuel and raw material, in glassmaking, brewing, dyeing, brick-and tilemaking, smithing and metallurgy. One scholar has termed this shift to fossil fuel, far earlier than in other European countries, a “first industrial revolution.”4

  Next, powered machinery. The machine itself is simply an articulated device to move a tool (or tools) in such wise as to do the work of the hand. Its purpose may be to enhance the force and speed of the operator as with a printing press, a drill press, or a spinning wheel. Or it may channel its tool so as to perform uniform, repetitious motions, as in a clock. Or it may align a battery of tools so as to multiply the work performed by a single motion. So long as machines are hand-operated, it is fairly easy to respond to the inevitable hitches and glitches: the worker has only to stop the action by ceasing to wind the crank or yank the lever. Power drive changes everything.*

  The Middle Ages, we saw, were already familiar with a wide variety of machines—for grinding corn or malt, shaping metals, spinning yarn, fulling cloth, scrubbing fabrics, blowing furnaces. Many of these were power-driven, typically by water wheels. In the centuries that followed (1500-), these devices proliferated, for the principles of mechanics were widely applicable. In textiles, some of the important innovations were the knitting frame, the “Dutch” or “engine” loom, the ribbon loom; also powered machines for throwing silk. But the most potent advances, as is often the case, were the most banal:

  —the introduction of the foot treadle to drive the spinning wheel, thereby freeing the operative’s hands to manipulate the thread and deal with winding; or, for the loom, to work the headles while throwing the shuttle;

  —the invention of the flyer (the Saxon wheel), which added twist by winding the yarn at the same time as it turned the spindle, but at a different speed;

  —the achievement of unidirectional, continuous spinning and reeling.

  These changes together quadrupled or better the spinner’s productivity.5

  The next step was to mechanize spinning by somehow replicating the gestures of the hand spinner. This required simplifying by dividing: breaking up the task into a succession of repeatable processes. That seems logical enough, but it was not easy. Not until inventors applied their devices to a tough vegetable fiber, cotton, was success achieved. That took decad
es of trial and error, from the 1730s to the 1760s. When power spinning came to cotton, it turned industry upside down.

  In metallurgy, big gains came from substituting rotary for reciprocating motion: making sheet metal by rolling instead of pounding; making wire by drawing through a sequence of ever narrower holes; making holes by drilling instead of punching; planing and shaping by lathe rather than by chisel and hammer. Most important was the growing recourse to precision gauging and fixed settings. Here the clock-and watchmakers and instrument makers gave the lead. They were working smaller pieces and could more easily shape them to the high standards required for accuracy with special-purpose tools such as wheel dividers and tooth-cutters. These devices in turn, along with similar tools devised by machinists, could then be adapted to work in larger format, and it is no accident that cotton manufacturers, when looking for skilled craftsmen to build and maintain machines, advertised for clockmakers; or that the wheel trains of these machines were known as “clockwork.” The repetitious work of these machines suggested in turn the first experiments in mass production based on interchangeable parts (clocks, guns, gun carriages, pulley blocks, locks, hardware, furniture).

  All these gains, plus the invention of machines to build machines, came together in the last third of the eighteenth century—a period of contagious novelty. Some of this merging stream of innovation may have been a lucky harvest. But no. Innovation was catching because the principles that underlay a given technique could take many forms, find many uses. If one could bore cannon, one could bore the cylinders of steam engines. If one could print fabrics by means of cylinders (as against the much slower block printing), one could also print wallpaper that way; or print word text far faster than by the up-and-down strokes of a press and turn out penny tabloids and cheap novels by the tens and hundreds of thousands. Similarly, a modified cotton-spinning machine could spin wool and flax. Indeed, contemporaries argued that the mechanization of cotton manufacture forced these other branches to modernize:

  …had not the genius of Hargreaves and Arkwright changed entirely the modes of carding and spinning cotton, the woollen manufacture would probably have remained at this day what it was in the earliest ages…. That it would have been better for general society if it had so remained, we readily admit; but after the improved modes of working cotton were discovered, this was impossible.6

  And on and on, into a brave and not-so-brave world of higher incomes and cheaper commodities, unheard-of devices and materials, insatiable appetites. New, new, new. Money, money, money. As Dr. (Samuel) Johnson, more prescient than his contemporaries, put it, “all the business of the world is to be done in a new way.”7 The world had slipped its moorings.

  Can one put dates to this revolution? Not easily, because of the decades of experiment that precede a given innovation and the long run of improvement that follows. Where is beginning and where end? The core of the larger process—mechanization of industry and the adoption of the factory—lies, however, in the story of the textile manufacture.* Rapid change there began with the spinning jenny of James Hargreaves (c. 1766), followed by Thomas Arkwright’s water frame (1769) and Samuel Crompton’s mule (1779), so called because it was a cross between the jenny and the water frame. With the mule, one could spin fine counts as well as coarse, better and cheaper than any hand spinner.

  Then in 1787 Edmund Cartwright built the first successful power loom, which gradually transformed weaving, first of coarse yarn, which stood up better to the to-and-fro of the shuttle, then of fine; and in 1830 Richard Roberts, an experienced machine builder, devised—in response to employer demand—a “self-acting” mule to free spinning from dependence on the strength and special skill of an indocile labor aristocracy. (The self-actor worked, but the aristocracy remained.)

  This sequence of inventions took some sixty years and dominated completely the older technology—unlike the steam engine, which long shared the field with waterpower.* The new technique yielded a sharp fall in costs and prices, and a rapid increase in cotton output and consumption.8 On this basis, the British Industrial Revolution ran about a century, from say 1770 to 1870, “the entire interval between the old order and the establishment of a fairly stable relationship of the different aspects of industry under the new order.”9

  Other specialists have adopted slightly different periodizations.10 Whatever; we are talking about a process that took a century, give or take a generation. That may seem slow for something called a revolution, but economic time runs slower than political. The great economic revolutions of the past had taken far longer.

  Even when one takes account of the quantitative data put forward by the practitioners of the self-proclaimed New Economic History, one still has a break in the trend of growth around 1760-70; unprecedented rates of increase; above all, the beginnings of a profound transformation of the mode of production. Technology matters. The aggregate figures show this, and elementary logic makes it clear. If one takes even the lowest estimates of increase for the latter part of the eighteenth century and extrapolates backward, one quickly arrives at levels of income insufficient to support life. So something had changed.

  The question remains why overall growth was not faster. It is an anachronistic question that reflects the expectations of more recent times—of an era of quicker, more potent innovation and leapfrog catch-up. Even so, the question is worth posing. The answer is that the Industrial Revolution was uneven and protracted in its effects; that it started and flourished in some branches before others; that it left behind and even destroyed old trades while building new; that it did not, could not, replace older technologies overnight. (Even the almighty computer has not eliminated the typewriter, let alone pen-and-paper.)11 This is why estimates for growth in those years are so sensitive to weights: give more importance to cotton and iron, and growth seems faster; give less, and it slows down. All of this, of course, was obvious to such earlier students of technological change as A. P. Usher and T. H. Clapham. The “new economic historians” who have stressed the theme of continuity have essentially revived their work without citing them, perhaps without knowing them.*

  Many of the anti-Revolutionists have also committed the sin of either—or. Their point about continuity is well taken. History abhors leaps, and large changes and economic revolutions do not come out of the blue. They are invariably well and long prepared.12 But continuity does not exclude change, even drastic change. One true believer in the cogency of economic theory and cliometrics notes that British income per head doubled between 1780 and 1860, and then multiplied by six times between 1860 and 1990 and acknowledges that we have more here than a simple continuation of older trends: “The first eighty years of growth were astonishing enough, but they were merely a prelude.”13 To which I would add that Britain was not the most impressive performer over this long period.

  The consequence of these advances was a growing gap between modern industrial countries and laggards, between rich and poor. In Europe to begin with: in 1750, the difference between western Europe (excluding Britain) and eastern in income per head was perhaps 15 percent; in 1800, little more than 20. By 1860 it was up to 64 percent; by the 1900s, almost 80 percent.14 The same polarization, only much sharper, took place between Europe and those countries that later came to be defined as a Third World—in part because modern factory industries swallowed their old-fashioned rivals, at home and abroad.

  Paradox: the Industrial Revolution brought the world closer together, made it smaller and more homogenous. But the same revolution fragmented the globe by estranging winners and losers. It begat multiple worlds.

  When Is a Revolution Not a Revolution?

  The reliance of early students of the Industrial Revolution on the output and price data for particular industries reflected the statistical limitations of that day: that was what they had and knew to work with. The data did not let them down. They represented direct and simple returns, and where the historian had to make use of proxy measures (imports of raw cotton, for exa
mple, as stand-in for the output of cotton yarn in countries that did not grow cotton), these were good and fairly stable indicators of a narrowly defined, unambiguous reality.15

  Beginning in the late 1950s, however, numerically minded economic historians began to construct measures of aggregate growth during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This was a natural extension of historical work on national income for more recent periods, where data were fuller and more reliable.* But as one went back in time before the systematic collection of numbers by government bureaus, such reconstructions entailed a heroic exercise of imagination and ingenuity: use and fusion of disparate figures estimated or collected at different times, for different purposes, on different bases; use of proxies justified by often arbitrary and not always specified assumptions concerning the nature of the economy; assignment of weights drawn from other contexts and periods; index problems galore; use of customary or nominal rather than market prices; interpolations and extrapolations without end, thereby smoothing and blurring breaks in trend. It will not come as a surprise, then, that these constructions have varied with the builder and have changed over time; that the latest estimate is not necessarily better than the one before (the estimators would not agree); and that the appearance of precision is not an assurance of robustness or a predictor of durability.*

  Neither is the appearance of precision an unambiguous indicator of meaning. Believe the data; the interpretation remains a problem. Theoretical economists have long appreciated this difficulty. Here is one “Nobéliste” who puts the matter with disarming frankness: “Early economists were not inundated with statistics. They were spared the burden of statistical proof. They relied on history and on personal observations. Now we place our trust in hard data provided they are sanctioned by theory.”16 In the light of this principle, the least one might expect of economic historians is that they put their trust in “hard [read: numerical] data” provided they are sanctioned by historical evidence. Instead, their leap to judgment often beggars credulity.