On Friday 18 October, Professor Michael Mann joined us for a lecture on ‘Re-examining the History of the Industrial Revolution’ as part of the Cutting Edge Issues in Development Lecture Series for 2024. The discussant was Professor James Putzel, and the chair was Dr Laura Mann. Read what MSc student Yihe Wen took away from the lecture below.
You can watch the lecture back on YouTube or listen to the podcast.
Debates around models for development have been ongoing for decades. Facing increased geopolitical uncertainties and continuous structural blockages, challenges for development remain present for developing countries today. However, a look back at the history of development could potentially shed light on the prominent question: “how to develop?”. This week, our guest speaker Prof. Michael Mann took us on an intellectual journey re-examining the history of the industrial revolution, illustrating the critical conjunctures out of which the revolution was born in Britain.
The Critical Conjuncture
Prof. Mann applied the theoretical framework developed in his famous publications on The Sources of Social Power, analysing the unique constellation of economic, political, military, and ideological power in Britain at the dawn of the industrial revolution. Economically, the agrarian revolution, new inventions such as the iron plough, and intensified development of capitalism in the West led to rising wages and increased agricultural production, lessening the Malthusian constraint by 1750. Politically, the dominant classes in Britain were unified by 1688 and the state’s infrastructural power significantly improved. In terms of military power, colonial and trade wars meant substantial profits for the British empire. Major colonial imports such as cotton and silver, which boosted the industrial revolution, were facilitated using slave labour. Trade wars with other European colonial powers also played a significant role, with Britain’s decisive victory over the Dutch in the last of four Anglo-Dutch wars handing it significant maritime power. Also, key was the scientific revolution in Britain, including the invention of the steam engine, Newtonian calculus, and other breakthroughs achieved by a bourgeoning class of scientists, tinkerers, artisans, and inventors. Mann estimates that about half of the most prolific of these inventors were non-Anglicans, whose exclusion from Oxbridge redirected their creative powers to scientific exploration and engineering. This societal interest in science represents one of the ideological powers critical for the revolution. This conjuncture was further reinforced by geographic factors: Britain, being naturally rich in coal, was able to fuel its industrial capability and rapidly transition towards large-scale mechanisation. It also had natural advantage over the Dutch, since, being an island, it only needed to defend itself from sea and experienced less territorial devastation than the continent.
Development Thinking
Mann’s model of sources of power provides an analytical framework to investigate the endless multi-causality of development, in contrast to the deterministic thinking of causalities. We tend to think there is a particular factor driving development or radical change, and often end up with a rather simplistic model of societal development. However, it is the critical conjuncture of multiple factors, whose constellation in the given timeframe is accidental, and whose impacts are cross-sectional or mutually reinforcing, that ultimately produces development outcomes. Through a series of counterfactuals, Mann showed that each of the four sources contributed to the Industrial Revolution — which would have been impossible without, say, imperialism or the scientific revolution — but that each individual factor is insufficient to explain the phenomenon as a whole; rather, it was the non-deterministic confluence of all factors in the late 17th and 18th century that gave rise to the Industrial Revolution. Today, the global power constellation has fundamentally shifted. Though Britain’s experience of industrial revolution cannot be repeated in other contexts, the anatomy of the four sources of power in societies remains relevant for analysing contemporary development.
The Puzzle
After the lecture, one question still puzzled me. An audience member asked Prof. Mann whether one of the sources of power could be assigned more significance than the others. The professor resisted any such prioritisation, viewing the Industrial Revolution as an emergent phenomenon of all four sources. I reflected on this point, I wondered if Marx’ framework of historical materialism, which attaches greater importance to the economic material foundation upon which institutions and ideology are built, would not view the military source of power as the more significant in boosting British industrial capability. According to Marx, Britain’s extractive and exploitative colonialism in countries like India was key to primitive capital accumulation and provided critical markets for the export of British goods, resulting in the immediate de-industrialisation of its colonies while providing material foundation for its own industrialisation. Though is critical to analyse the multi-causality of development and move away from the deterministic framework, yet it is still worth further debating whether some factor might have greater weight than others – a journey to be continued in assessing different development contexts.
The views expressed in this post are those of the author and in no way reflect those of the International Development LSE blog or the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Featured image credit: LSE Department of International Development
