The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective

The question of why eighteenth-century Britain, rather than other parts of Europe or Asia, saw the industrial revolution drives Robert C. Allen's account. He sees it as a successful response to the world economy of the 1600s and 1700s: British wages were high while capital and energy were cheap relative to other countries. That made the key inventions, from steam power and cotton mills to coal replacing wood in metalworking, uniquely profitable to develop there. The high-wage economy also let more people afford schooling and apprenticeships. Only when British engineers made the new technologies more cost-effective in the nineteenth century did industrialization spread around the world. Cambridge University Press published it in 2009.

Paul Graham included it in a post on X.