Why Britain, not the rest of Europe

Matt Clancy: The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in the UK and not somewhere else in Europe? Allen argues it’s down to economics. It’s only worth doing all the work to develop a steam engine if you expect people will want to buy it, and that will only happen (initially) in places where the cost of labor is expensive and the cost of coal is cheap. The UK qualifies, but most of the rest of Europe didn’t. Allen’s book was the first serious work I read about innovation and it changed my whole career. Not because of Allen’s specific argument, which I’ve subsequently been convinced wasn’t a big part of the story. Instead, it was the notion that technological progress - which I already believed was the big lever of rising material prosperity in human history - had causes which could be both understood and influenced. Eighteen years later, I’m still working on that.