Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
traditional independence of the English labouring people. This may help to explain
why the previously high British pre-industrial real wages became stagnant, or even
temporarily decreased, during the
rst phase of the Industrial Revolution. Bob
Allen has labelled
1830/40) this long-lasting gap between
wages and productivity growth, which corresponds to the pessimistic outlook about
the standards of living during the
'
Engels
'
Pause
'
(1780
-
rst phase of British industrialization.
48
The
pessimistic view has also been reassessed using new biological and social evi-
dence,
49
and the average life
expectancy, or the increase in infant mortality rates, child labour and income
inequality.
50
It is interesting to notice that macroeconomic accounts of economic growth
during the British Industrial Revolution have tended to reduce its revolutionary
character, by dismissing that growth rates experienced any sudden acceleration
compared with previous pre-industrial ones.
51
However, and at the same time, the
beginning of the new Schumpeterian-type of industrial economic growth meant a
revolutionary turnaround in socio-metabolic terms, as it has been reassessed by the
study of the
like the fall in the heights of military conscripts
'
rst energy transition from a biomass solar-based energy system
towards another, based on burning the underground stock of fossil fuels. Moreover,
the historical series on primary energy consumed and the energy intensity per unit
of GDP produced in England and Wales (Fig.
2.7
), reconstructed from 1560
onwards by Paul Warde, have again shown the outlying character of the English
economy which had started substituting coal for biomass energy carriers well before
the Industrial Revolution began.
Thus, as Anthony Wrigley pointed out (1988), the continuity of a gradual increase
in economic growth rates combined with the chance of having large accessible coal
deposits in England and Wales and gave rise to the big energy change of the British
Industrial Revolution. Historical comparative analysis has also shown that GDP
convergence kept pace with the energy transition to fossil fuels, and this evidence
opens up the question whether this relationship was a consequence of economic
growth over energy consumption, or rather that the convergence in economic terms
would have to wait until each nation or region could
nd their own path towards the
new mineral-based energy system.
52
While the abovementioned interpretive lines seem to offer an explanation about
as to why the
rst Industrial Revolution was British, they do not offer a full and
satisfactory outline as to why it did not also take place in other places throughout
Europe and Asia, where convergence with the industrial growth of the United
Kingdom encountered numerous obstacles. Bob Allen
'
s interpretive outline stresses
48
Allen (
2009
).
49
Hobsbawm (
1964
) and Thompson (
1968
).
50
Williamson (
1997
), Horrell and Humphries (
1995
), Crafts. (
1997
), Feinstein (
1998
) and
Komlos (
1998
).
51
Crafts and Harley (
1992
).
52
Krausmann et al. (
2008
).
