A political typology of Industrial Revolution explanations

Note 1: This post should be seen as a long tweet. No care was taken in writing it, and it took all of 10 minutes. Note 2: Below, I refer to the Industrial Revolution, the Great Divergence, the Rise of Capitalism, and (the older phrase) ‘The Rise of the West’ as the ‘The Big Event’.

Jeremy Adelman conveniently divided scholars of the Big Event into two camps: ‘internalists’ and ‘externalists’.

Internalists, as the name suggests, favour domestic explanations of the Big Event — institutions, technology/innovation, culture, agriculture, etc.

Externalists prefer to stress the global and international causes: imperialism, wars amongst imperialist states, overseas commerce, slavery, etc.

Two people who come closest to ideal internalism are Mokyr and Brenner. The prime mover for Mokyr of course is the ‘Industrial Enlightenment’. For Brenner, class struggle in the English countryside set the stage for all subsequent events.

But there’s no pure internalism or externalism. For example, Allen is famous for his theory of technology, which is traditionally associated with internalists (the ingenious ‘wave of gadgets’). But his theory strongly implicates overseas commerce as a major cause of high wages. Acemoglu is today the institutionalist guy par excellence. He (& new institutionalists before him) argues the rise of a state representing the interests of merchants was very important. But he borrows heavily from Marxists: the rise of pro-mercantile institutions was bound up with the rise of Atlantic commerce.

Although institutionalists tend to stress the contingent outcomes of political struggles (usually between merchants and monarchs), there are also many who talk about ‘informal institutions’ such as family structures, customary laws, private order institutions, etc. Which lead many externalists to dismiss ‘institutions’ as a more polite term for ‘culture’, now that you cannot be openly Weberian about it à la Landes in The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. I personally would call it Fukuyamist-neoliberal-democratism.

Sometimes internalists and externalists say more or less the same thing when it comes to institutions but use different words and think they’re disagreeing with each other. When an externalist hears the phrase ‘secure property rights’, the impulsive response is usually well what about indigenous dispossession??? That was primitive accumulation! Sometimes insecure property rights promotes growth! The internalist bristles but often doesn’t realise essentially the same thing is asserted when it’s claimed that the French Revolution (or parliamentary enclosures, or the Glorious Revolution) made property rights more flexible and efficient. You could finally seize land and build turnpikes or irrigation where obstinate peasants and lords had once stymied modernisers!

The internalist-externalist dichotomy is supplemented by two other, related dichotomies:

— statism
— geographism

Statism

This can be divided into right-statists and left-statists.

Right-statists talk about secure property rights, the rule of law, the rise of a strong fiscal state which built infrastructure, expanded markets, and supported merchants, etc. It’s basically the Washington Consensus applied to IR historiography. The most parodic version of this can be found in North & Thomas ‘The Rise of the Western World’. Of course you’ve always had liberal institutionalists but I think the predominant Whig view before the 1970s was Smithian (division of labour & the expansion of markets).

Left-statists conceive of a strong state in terms of both class power and the anachronistic ‘developmental state’ concept. The state took the side of capital over labour and abetted domestic capital accumulation. The same state had sponsored colonial projects and abetted overseas primitive accumulation. These days every country which eventually became rich also had a ‘developmental state’. England’s MITI was of course its customs house, judiciously imposing tariffs on behalf of the star industries of the IR.

Internalism v externalism does not map neatly onto right-statism v left-statism, but correlations between the two are strong. People who believe the triangular commerce of the 18th century between England, America, and the West Indies is crucial to explaining the Big Event are also more likely to be left-statists. Right-statists generally tend to think the periphery was peripheral (to use O’Brien’s phrase, before his Damascene conversion). They generally don’t think colonial loot from India mattered that much.

Geographism

Coal is the most famous ecological-geographical explanation, and it’s also a very traditional one. (Wrigley is the most famous exponent but it goes back long before him thanks to its association with steam.) Coal should be deemed internalist, but many patriotic internalists (wink wink Anton) have always hated coal as an explanation, because it suggests dumb luck. In turn, many externalists have seized upon coal precisely because England then becomes the beneficiary of dumb luck (like ghost acres). Thus coal tends to be associated (today, especially after Pomeranz) with externalists.

Another geographical explanation is Northwest Europe’s agriculture, which was unusually fertile, very early, by global standards. Wrigley combines agriculture and coal as the primary explanation.

Naturally, all of these arguments tend to be presentist and correlate well with how one views political economy in the modern world.

Postscript on Induced Innovation:

Allen’s thesis about high wages & inventions is very popular with two groups of people: economists who don’t know any history but find the high wages => mechanisation a refreshingly simple economic mechanism; and centre-left and left people who support higher wages for workers and are always scraping the bottom of the barrel for any evidence that high wages are also good for the economy (i.e., not only induced innovation, but also demand-led growth people). High wages kickstarted the IR? Fantastic!

I can think of a few people who don’t like Allen’s theory because they don’t like the minimum wage. But I reckon most of them reject the HWE theory because it seems to make the IR’s ‘wave of gadgets’ into something ‘ordinary’, generated by simple (relative) prices…

However, non-Mokyrian counters to Allen’s HWE thesis are based on more traditional left narratives of England’s labour markets in the 18th & early 19th centuries — filled with impoverished reserve army of labour streaming into factories. In Deane & Cole you can find explicit references to the surplus labour model of Lewis. (I think this is the latent ideological background of Humphries, for example.)

Yet this is ironic because (a) Allen has also pushed the Engel’s Pause narrative for the early IR & (b) in his agricultural work he had basically argued England was a country with a ‘premature agricultural revolution’ where labour release > labour absorption, like a developing country of today. In fact Allen has argued Parliamentary enclosures => higher inequality => smaller domestic market => greater export dependence — which is rather Hobsonian! Allen’s view is that parliamentary enclosures achieved higher productivity (Y/L) by lowering L but not increasing Y very much, and growth in other sectors just wasn’t fast enough. So like O’Brien he thinks a slightly more ‘French’ path in agriculture would have been less traumatic for ordinary people.

(Allen doesn’t mention it but greater export dependence also implies, in his logic, that with less domestic inequality in England => less ‘deindustrialisation’ in the rest of the world. Which is a very large implication!)