Thanks mainly to new energy technologies, what took a textile worker twenty minutes in 1750 took just one minute in 1850. He could therefore either supply twenty times as many people in a day’s work, or supply each customer with twenty times as much cloth, or free his customer to spend 19/20ths of his income on some thing other than shirts. That was in essence why the second half of the industrial revolution made Britain rich. It made it possible for fewer people to supply more people with more goods and more services – in Adam Smith’s words, to make ‘a smaller quantity of labour produce a
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