Pathogenesis: A History of the World in Eight Plagues

by Jonathan Kennedy

For many Britons, the fact that the Industrial Revolution occurred first in their country is a source of national pride; they see industrialization as the natural consequence of their innate superiority, specifically their pre-eminence in science and engineering. Yet this jingoistic explanation doesn’t make sense, because the technical knowledge that made innovations in the British textile sector possible existed throughout Europe, and had done so for several generations.[2] Why, then, was the United Kingdom the first country in the world to go through the process of industrialization? It certainly helped that Britain had large and easily accessible coal deposits that were already being used for domestic fuel, as Britons had cut down most of their woods and forests over the previous centuries to make way for agricultural land and to use in shipbuilding. It was also critical that wages in Britain were markedly higher than in the rest of Europe—as a result of the post–Black Death transition from feudalism to agricultural capitalism. Consequently, investment in steam-driven machinery to reduce reliance on the workforce made much more economic sense in Britain than in parts of the continent where coal was scarce and expensive, and labor plentiful and cheap. The legacy of previous infectious disease outbreaks catalyzed the Industrial Revolution in a number of other ways too.