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Kenneth Morgan, Robert C. Allen. The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. (New Approaches to Economic and Social History.) New York: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Pp. xi, 331. Cloth $85.00, paper $27.99, The American Historical Review, Volume 115, Issue 3, June 2010, Page 816, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.115.3.816
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This is a book that all students of the industrial revolution should read. Robert C. Allen offers a wide-ranging, stimulating analysis of the factors that made Britain the first industrial nation by placing technological development within the context of laborers' wages and the availability of energy resources. He does this through drawing on newly compiled statistical series for Britain, through comparisons with the progress of industrialization in other countries, and through simulation models that show why alternative explanations of industrialization fall down conceptually.
Throughout the book there are plentiful signs of engagement with the vast historiography on the industrial revolution. David S. Landes offered a still important account of the technological development of industry in The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (1969). E. A. Wrigley explained the importance for British industrialization of the transition from an organic economy to a mineral fuel economy in Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England (1988). Christine MacLeod highlighted the ingenuity of British industrialists in Inventing the Industrial Revolution: The English Patent System, 1660–1800 (1988). Allen goes beyond these analyses of technology, mineral resources, and mechanical invention to provide an original argument that ties them together and links them to other economic factors that were triggers for industrial and economic growth in Britain in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
