How Did the Industrial Revolution Change the World?

Was the Industrial Revolution the most important event in human history? Dan is joined by economist and journalist Duncan Weldon to explore why exactly the industrial revolution started on the soggy archipelago of Britain and the impact of its entrepreneurs, politics, and empire had on the country and the rest of the world across the 18th and 19th centuries. They trace a story of ambition and invention—but also upheaval, inequality and consequences and explain what happened and why it still matters. Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Matthew Wilson and Dougal Patmore. We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on. You can also email the podcast directly at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

  Hey friends, if you love this podcast and want to decide what history we cover, then you need to become a Dan Snow's History Hit subscriber. Pitch your topic and if I like it, we'll make it into a subscriber exclusive episode. So far, we've covered the English Reformation, the Hudson Bay Company, the Trail of Tears, all of which have been decided by dedicated subscribers. So take the reins of your favourite podcast by heading over to historyhit.com/subscribe or sign up in your podcast player.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of the best one yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalised AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 1:13Dan Snow?

  Hi everybody and welcome to Dan Snow's History. Today, we are diving into arguably the most important thing that's ever happened to the human race. So, this is a big one. A revolution, and it was not one marked by, well not immediately, by gunfire and guillotines, but by steam and iron. A transformation so profound, it redefined how all of us humans live and work and think and the air that we breathe. 200 years ago, the fastest we humans could reliably travel was around about the speed of a galloping horse. Unless you are sailing a Polynesian outrigger canoe down a huge wave with the following wind, but that was quite unusual.

• 1:55Dan Snow?

  And now we are flying drones on Mars and changing the trajectories of asteroids. That's not bad for a couple of centuries. We're talking, of course, in this episode about the Industrial Revolution. And I'm trying to ask that essential question. Why on earth did it take place in Britain of all places? What mix of geography and politics and law and innovation and ambition turned this small island into an engine room of global change? How did the inventions and the upheavals here of the coal mines, the cotton mills, the factory systems, the production lines? How did those ripple out to touch every corner of the globe? From the birth of the factory to shaping gigantic global empires. In this episode, we explore the Industrial Revolution began, developed and accelerated

• 2:39Dan Snow?

  across the 18th and 19th centuries, and how Britain exported its technologies and ideas to the wider world. This is a story of invention, ambition, but also of upheaval and inequality and the global consequences that still shape our lives today. I'm very happy to say that joining us is Duncan Weldon. He's a journalist, he's a writer, he's author of 200 Years of Muddling Through. He's going to explain how this great turning point in history unfolded and how it still powers the world we live in today. Enjoy.

• 3:08Dan Snow?

  Duncan, great to see you, man. Thanks for coming on.

• 3:10Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 3:11Dan Snow?

  You've always said something that's stuck in my mind, that basically, human history can be divided into two bits, and that's pre and post Industrial Revolution. Is that how big it is in your mind?

• 3:20Speaker 02

  That's absolutely how big it is in my mind, and it makes human history much simpler.

• 3:23Dan Snow?

  It really does.

• 3:24Speaker 02

  If you want to get to the parts before and after the Industrial Revolution. But I think it's fair, you know, the world before the Industrial Revolution looked very different to the world afterwards, the world, you know, we live in, the world we're used to. The world before the Industrial Revolution was a world, in sort of economic and social terms, of fundamental continuity, where people's lives looked most of the time quite similar to their parents' lives, quite similar to their grandparents' lives. Just put some numbers on it really quickly, using, you know, the best estimates we have of income per head in England. In the year thirteen hundred, we think income per person in Britain was about seven

• 4:05Speaker 02

  hundred and eighty pounds a year in modern money. Sixteen fifty, some three and a half centuries later, nine hundred and seventy seven pounds a year. Basically, no growth, no change. You know, someone living in sixteen fifty, in many ways, if they're on a farm, their life's not that different to someone in thirteen hundred.

• 4:24Dan Snow?

  Pretty recognisable.

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, pretty recognisable. You know, they'll eat quite a similar diet, they will wear, you know, the same sorts of clothes that they'll make, their lives are quite similar. But after the Industrial Revolution, things begin to change. The world changes. People expect their children to be better off than they are. People's incomes grow, population expands, you know, human mortality, you know, the death rate falls, fertility rates rise. We see something that starts to look like a modern world.

• 4:54Dan Snow?

  And people are immeasurably richer, you know, in so, well, their material, their possessions, their, and their horizons as well, I guess.

• 5:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, their horizons are, you know, they're, they're, they're living longer, they're eating better, they're eating more, their children are more likely to survive to, you know, become adults. They're going to live longer. They're living increasingly in cities and towns rather than in the countryside. They're less likely to be working in agriculture. Everything's different after the Industrial Revolution.

• 5:21Dan Snow?

  Okay, so explain to me why, because before the Industrial Revolution, there was this idea that resource is limited and why, how, because of the Industrial Revolution, do you just invent all that? Well, this is one of the great questions I can, you're probably used to answering this. You just sort of go, oh, by the way, we've just invented trillions and trillions of dollars and pounds of stuff, which isn't related to land and bits of, you know, buildings.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, let's go back to the world before the Industrial Revolution. And sort of the best description of it in economic terms comes in seventeen ninety eight, written by the Reverend Thomas Robert Malthus. Economists tend to refer to this as a Malthusian world. And Malthus is You know, as we'll come on to, in some ways, not a very pleasant character. Um, there's some suggestion that he was the the inspiration for the character of Scrooge in um Charles Dickens' Christmas Tales, you know, but keep Scrooge in your mind when we're thinking about Malthmus. But he's his description of the world was pretty accurate. Now, for the only time in this discussion, I am afraid I'm going to use a tiny bit of maths.

• 6:23Dan Snow?

  Okay.

• 6:23Speaker 02

  But you've got you've got an economic historian on, it's going to happen eventually. So Malthmus's great sort of insight, his description of the world was that human wants and the expansion of humankind tend to move in an exponential way. So that's one, two, four, eight, sixteen, you know, people can have multiple children, one, two, four, eight, sixteen, that sort of way. But human resources tended to grow in a strictly linear fashion. One, two, three, four, five. Now, you don't need to be very good at maths.

• 6:58Dan Snow?

  Yeah.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  To realise these two things are out of sequence.

• 7:00Dan Snow?

  So you like you plant a field, you you can't double the amount of plants.

• 7:04Speaker 02

  Exactly, yes. Whereas two, two people can have two children very easily. But if they've got one field, they can't double the output from that field very quickly. So human wants, human needs tend to run in this pre-industrial revolutionary world ahead of the capacity to produce stuff, to produce food. And what that tends to mean is that when the population rises, the resources available to the people fall, income per head starts to fall, people start to get poorer. So you've got this inverse relationship where a rising population tends to mean people are poorer, but a a smaller population tends to mean people are a bit better off because they've got they've got more stuff. Now,

• 7:45Speaker 02

  Dr. Malthmus, and you'll see why why people sometimes compare him to Scrooge, said, you know, what what keeps these two numbers in check? You know, the the what keeps resources in line with the population? He thought there were two things that happened. There were What he called positive checks, they're not very positive. This is things like famine, plague.

• 8:07Dan Snow?

  Run out, you hit the, you hit the wall and people just die.

• 8:10Speaker 02

  People just die, yeah. So what he advocated instead were preventative checks. Now preventive checks meant either sexual abstinence or people getting married later. So they would have fewer children. You know, what society should be doing is keeping, keeping population growth in check. Now, that's what takes him into this sort of miserly view that he thought, for example, you know, charitable donations to the poor were a very bad thing.

• 8:34Dan Snow?

  Wow.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Because if you give the poor people money, well, they'll just have more children and then there'll be more people and everyone will be poorer. The best thing to do is to keep population in check. So this is the world he described. And the thing is, his, his description of the relationship between populations and incomes does seem to broadly, in the big picture, hold for most of human history, until only a few hundred years ago, periods of high population tended to mean living standards fell. And this is not to say, you know, things were the same all of the time. They weren't. You would have good crops or bad crops or your weather patterns, things or, you know, things would change, but it would change not very much and generally around sort of a, you know, a fairly static

• 9:19Speaker 02

  world of, of continuity.

• 9:21Dan Snow?

  But what's interesting is he was writing that at exactly the time, curiously, that this great revolution was beginning. First of all, very simply put, what is the industrial revolution? I mean, is it harnessing the natural process on earth, whether it's wind, coal, tide, to generate vast amounts of energy and the things we can do without energy? What, what do you define?

• 9:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, that, I mean, that's not a bad description. I'd start off by saying, you know, this is a battle that I've lost before I was born, that calling it the industrial revolution. Isn't too helpful. I think industrial evolution makes more sense because it's not like there's one moment that, you know, like a switch is flicked and suddenly you're in this industrial revolution world. And I think debating exactly when it happened is quite hard, but I think at some point between seventeen hundred, seventeen fifty and the early nineteenth century, maybe eighteen twenty, some point around that late eighteenth century, early nineteenth century, something changes in Britain. And fundamentally, it's about the ability to get more outputs from any given level of inputs. In economic terms,

• 10:28Speaker 02

  that's productivity rising. And yeah, it's partially about harnessing things like steam power. It's about using, being less reliant on human labour and using more machines, even very early machines. By the end, we've moved to a factory system, we've moved to more intense forms of farming where we can get more food out of any given bit of agricultural land. We can produce far more cotton from the same level of inputs. We can travel faster. It's in some ways the invention of modern economic growth. This idea that everyone

• 11:10Speaker 02

  will just, things haven't really been like this for the last ten or fifteen years, but in general, everyone will get one and a half, two percentage points a year better off every year, and that's just normal. And, you know, getting one and a half, two percent better off a year might not sound like much, but that's twenty, twenty-five percent in a decade. That's fifty percent in two decades. That's actually, your income's doubling every fifty or so years. These are really, really, you know, slow incremental growth. That starts with the industrial revolution. And the interesting thing is, it starts in Britain. And I think it's really important that it starts in Britain.

• 11:50Dan Snow?

  Yeah, well, let's get into it. I mean, why on earth does it start in this little rainy archipelago? Is it natural resources? Is it climate? Is it culture? What's going on here?

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot going on. As you can imagine, you know, economic historians and economists and historians have been debating this ever since. So I think we can start off by saying, you know, sort of climate and geography probably does matter a bit. Britain has a few natural advantages. Being an island really helps because moving stuff by sea is just cheaper. And easier than moving stuff by land. And you know, Britain is, you're never that far from the sea anywhere.

• 12:27Dan Snow?

  Lots of navigable rivers.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Lots of navigable rivers. And you know, so you know, classic example, moving coal from Newcastle to London is quite easy if you can put in a ship, take it down the coast and up the Thames. So that helps. Britain also, for such a small place, has quite a lot of variety of climatic conditions and land types, which allowed for a bit more sort of specialization in different areas of the economy. And you know, so you know, Lancashire is quite rainy. That's done Blackpool's tourism industry no good in the last 50 or 60 years. But it turns out it's quite helpful when you're processing cotton. And lots of small, fast-moving streams, which allow you to use water wheels and harness water pipes there,

• 13:11Speaker 02

  and a lot of coal deposits, which are easy to access in Britain, relatively easy, they're close to the surface. So all of these sort of geographic things matter. But I don't think you can say it's just the geography, because the geography's been like that for hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years.

• 13:27Dan Snow?

  That's true. There's always, the Romans were mining tin. Well, in fact, their prehistoric ancestors were mining tin and coal was being mined as well. So it's always been there. Right. So what goes on though at that period?

• 13:37Speaker 02

  So I think you've got a few of things happening. So you've got, I think Britain's, well, let's, let's step back away from just from Britain for a moment. Let's, let's talk about, let's talk about what some people call the little divergence. The little, you know, this big thing in economic history, the great divergence, as people call it. That's when Britain and then Europe sort of decouple from Asia, from other regions, you know, Europe, Britain become very, very, very rich in the late 18th, 19th century, the time we're talking about. But something has happened before the great divergence, which, you know, maybe a bit less important. So sometimes gets called the little divergence. And that's basically saying, if you, if you go back to 1500.

• 14:16Speaker 02

  The richest places in Europe are Italy, Spain, Southern France, the areas around the Mediterranean. And they've been the richest place in Europe for, you know, well over a thousand years. Right back to Roman times, the area around the Mediterranean has been Europe's centre of economic gravity. Where there's the most trade, where people are the wealthiest, you know. The climate is very supportive of various types of agriculture, the Mediterranean is easy to trade across. But at some point, between about fifteen hundred and when the Industrial Revolution starts, we see what people call the little divergence. We see Europe's centre of economic gravity move away from the Mediterranean and to the North Sea, to what was then still England and the Dutch Republic on the other side.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  So I think you've got to say, why did this happen? Why did the economy just start to develop in a stronger way around the North Sea? For that, I think we start with a couple of things. We firstly got the Black Death. You know, economists like this term economic shock. You don't really get much more shocking than the Black Death, you know.

• 15:19Dan Snow?

  On half the population of Europe?

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, somewhere between a third and half the population dead. You know, obviously a huge shaking up. But in a Malthusian world, I mean, if you half the population, but the animals are still there, the infrastructure's still there, you've still got the same fields. Well, you've half the population, you've still got the same resources. You'd expect people to be better off, and that does seem to be what happened. You know, it's really sad news that your neighbour died of the plague, but now you can have their cow. Sort of the world we're in. So, you know, you do get this jump in incomes. But that jump in incomes seems to sort of peter away after a few generations in Southern Europe,

• 16:05Speaker 02

  but be a bit more persistent in Northern Europe. And some people think, and I think it's definitely true, part of this is about institutions, about the character of the state in those areas. If you think about. Early modern England and the Dutch Republic. They are, you know, I would not describe them as smaller liberal. I would not describe them as democracies. You know, they're not like a modern late 20th century, early 21st century democracy. But neither are they sort of the authoritarian autocracies of France or Habsburg, Spain. They're places where the political order is a bit more open, where monarchs are less

• 16:48Speaker 02

  absolute in their powers, where parliaments matter more and where increasingly, particularly in the case of the Dutch Republic, but then also in England, where sort of commercial and sort of mercantile interests are starting to get a bit more say in government. You know, if an English king wants to raise taxes, they need to summon a parliament and that parliament will have a lot of sort of what we would call sort of middle class commercial lawyers, bankers, merchants. They're much more say in government. And this sort of more, you know, economic historians tend to call it an open access order. It's not a completely closed, these open access orders, these institutions tend in

• 17:33Speaker 02

  the long run to be more supportive of economic growth. So I think you've got, you know, marriage patterns, you've got the climate, you've got this sort of institutional setup in England. That all points to, you know, something has changed in the Dutch Republic and in England. And by the 1600s, they're both recognizably commercial societies. You know, money is used quite a bit. There are people we would recognise as capitalists on quite a small scale. You're not into the Industrial Revolution yet, but you're in a, you're in a different world to you were even just a few centuries before. And then it steps up again.

• 18:13Dan Snow?

  Listen to Dan Snow's History. More Industrial Revolution coming up.

• 18:21Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by Decagon. If you've ever been trapped in phone tree hell, pushing zero 50 times while a voice robot pretends not to hear you, you know true psychological warfare. It's brutal, folks. Thankfully, that kind of horror is now confined to the history books. Customer service has evolved. Decagon helps companies create personalized, concierge-style customer experiences with AI agents across chat, email, voice, and SMS. They're available 24/7, feel natural to talk to, and can resolve customer requests on their own so businesses can keep up with requests without losing their personal touch. Plus, because workflows can be updated using natural language, teams can make changes themselves.

• 19:04Dan Snow?

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• 19:32Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery, a detail. But suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what will baffle historians about us: mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 20:15Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goole dot G L E slash Workspace with Gemini. That's goole dot G L E slash Workspace with Gemini.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  After civil war, regicide, and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same.

• 20:59Speaker 03

  I'm Professor Suzanne Ellipsum, and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty, from Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 21:24Dan Snow?

  Welcome back to History Hit. Now, you might wonder how we bring you these stories every week. It's not just me in a dusty archive. It's a whole team, and frankly, keeping us on the same page, especially when we're juggling multiple projects, is crucial. And that's why behind the scenes, we rely heavily on Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI productivity tools, to do our best work. It's how my producers, the brilliant minds you don't always hear, help plan and execute everything we do, from our interview episodes to my big explainers. You might be surprised to know that we're actually a pretty small team here on Dan Snow's History. It's me, my two producers, Mariana and James, our editor, the long-suffering Dougal, and our production manager, Beth. So we rely on technology to get things done. I want to take you behind the scenes

• 22:09Dan Snow?

  to show or tell you how we make all the episodes you love each week. Hey guys, how's it going?

• 22:15Speaker 04

  Hey Dan!

• 22:16Dan Snow?

  Hey Dan, how's it going? Okay, welcome to this planning session, folks. Right, you can hear there Beth and James. And of course, next to me, I've got the brilliant Mariano with me, right here in the studio.

• 22:26Speaker 04

  Hello!

• 22:27Dan Snow?

  We're using Google Meet, which makes collaborating from different locations seamless. And it's brilliant because Gemini can take notes and capture action items for us. Meaning I can just ramble away. Right, just for context for you listeners, we're about to jump into one of our planning meetings for an upcoming podcast. It's one you've been waiting for all year. An explainer on the GOAT, my hero, Horatio Nelson. Okay, so right, team, I'm thinking we do a dramatic intro. Opening of the Battle of Trafalgar, we're at the 21st of October, 1805. The British Navy, obviously led by Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson. Twenty-seven ships, the line, against a bigger French and Spanish fleet. Is everyone following?

• 23:05Speaker 04

  Yes, because I made sure Gemini in Meet is taking notes for us.

• 23:09Dan Snow?

  And the team and I will have everything concisely noted down, even with an AI-generated summary and next steps. So Beth, let Google know, what we're going to do is add in some big wave noises. The wash of seawater against wood, the sails and the breeze, the creak of the rigging. And we're going to need to get, of course, the sound, some fire, we need some firepower. I'm talking cannon, range of calibers, obviously, and caranets, let's not forget those. Men shouting, probably quite useful. We're going to open, I think, at the height of the drama of the Battle of Trafalgar. That extraordinary moment, that chemo when Nelson, he's pacing the cortex of victory in uniform, he hasn't removed his decorations despite the risk of making himself a target. And I'm going to talk about the way that a French sharpshooter, high in a renouvelable's

• 23:52Dan Snow?

  rigging, he takes aim and he shoots and he strikes Nelson through the left shoulder and Nelson collapses and cries out, "They've done for me at last, Hardy!" Temerare's about to burst out of the mist and smash the renou... Have I lost everyone again?

• 24:05Speaker 04

  Luckily, Gemini in Meet can also catch us up on the last two minutes of what you just said. So just to check, you said you want sound effects with Beth. You've confirmed that we can have waves, wood, sails, breeze, cannon fire. And then you also talked about his injury during the battle.

• 24:20Dan Snow?

  Well, that's amazing, brilliant. Okay, so we've got an amazing end to a heroic, charismatic man, because then he clings to life just long enough to hear news of a decisive British victory.

• 24:31Speaker 04

  Nice. And then we'll have our dramatic opening music. We'll go back to his early life and then we'll go chronologically through, return to Trafalgar, Below Deck, then we'll get to his dying moments and then his return to England.

• 24:43Dan Snow?

  That's enough planning. Okay, Mariana, can you pull up the notes from Gemini? That is wild. It's taken all that rambling nonsense to put it into coherent sentences. You can see the planning, we have the sound effects that describes the moment of Nelson getting shot. Even James and Beth get their comments included. That is genius. Not only were the team able to keep up with my occasionally rambling mid-call with Gemini's note-taking feature in Meet, but in a few moments, we'll have a full notes document and a meeting transcript. It's just one of the ways that Google Workspace with Gemini can help manage our workflow and stay engaged in the chats we love without distractions. There's also a handy feature that I'm really excited to dive into a bit more.

• 25:26Dan Snow?

  Notebook LM. It's designed to help you quickly make sense of large amounts of information from your sources. So I'm hoping it'll be a game changer for our research.

• 25:35Speaker 04

  So we can upload PDFs, audio files, docs and more. And AI can give us the insights from all this information in an instant, even creating audio overviews or visual guides to help us comprehend all that info.

• 25:47Dan Snow?

  Perfect for history. It truly is AI for every business and it's certainly helping us to bring history to life for you. To see how Google Workspace with Gemini can power your next project or business, head over to goo.gle/10stories. That's goo.gle/10stories.

• 26:13Dan Snow?

  And presumably there's bits that might sound boring, but are the essential kind of preconditions. So those sort of middle-class people, they're interested in things like the legal system and protecting patents and protecting shareholders' investments and things. And the governments can't come and go, I'll have that invention or I'll take that off you. There's the beginnings of that sort of, the nitty-gritty.

• 26:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:33Dan Snow?

  So if you have an invention, you can be confident you're actually going to keep control of it and actually enjoy the benefit of it as well. Sell it, distribute it.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And then you've got this sort of strange, strange conditions in.

• 26:46Speaker 02

  England on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, I'm going to keep saying England because most of this is just before the Act of Union and then it becomes Britain during this process. But in sort of England and in early Great Britain, you've got this strange combination of factors. Wages are reasonably high, as far as we can tell, compared to other economies, partially because of the impact of international trade on England and Britain over the centuries. But for whatever reason, wages are a little bit higher. And the cost of borrowing is a little bit lower because we've started developing these stable institutions. And also coal energy is relatively cheap because it's very easy to get out

• 27:30Speaker 02

  of the ground in lots of parts of Britain. And just as importantly, coal is bulky and heavy, easy to move around the island using these waterways and that sea. And if you're in a world where wages, using people to do things is a bit more expensive, but actually the ability to borrow, capital is quite cheap, energy is quite cheap, you are just incentivized to try and find ways. Is there a way I could be using a machine to do this rather than five or six people? And you've got this strange alignment of economic incentives in England and then Britain. And people responded to that. We get really picking a pace throughout

• 28:09Speaker 02

  the 1700s into the early 1800s, these waves of inventions, which we start to see the beginnings of modern economic growth. And you start to see more specialization, you start to see productivity slowly rising. And you start to see alongside that, this huge change in the character of the country. And it really is a huge change. The majority of people living in towns and cities for the first time in Britain ever, and we've never gone back.

• 28:40Dan Snow?

  And on one basic level, I suppose, listen to you, replacing people with machines.

• 28:46Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 28:47Dan Snow?

  Which is one of the key things we probably think about with industrial revolution. We live in a world of machines now and we're all talking about it endlessly. The issue of humans and robotics and drones and everything. But this was a conversation that started right back then. So if you're in farming or in shipbuilding, if you can involve machines or extracting coal from deep pits and draining out the floodwater that gathers there, you can use engines, you can use machines to do that job.

• 29:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And what we see is these sorts of ideas being applied to bit of the economy after bit of the economy. So you see huge changes in sort of metallurgy and the ability to make higher grade metals and using really powerful blast furnaces. You see this whole wave of inventions in, the one people tend to talk about is the textile industry, which before the industrial revolution, the textile industry pretty much relied on what was called a putting out system. So you'd have generally women working from home, doing sort of odd jobs to add to the family income, someone coming around, dropping off the work, coming and collecting it. And within a few generations, we've moved to boomtown of Manchester, just filled with

• 29:54Speaker 02

  factories, workers working on machines, able to produce far more textiles than had been imagined by previous generations and then them being exported. It's a vastly, vastly different world.

• 30:08Dan Snow?

  And so, yeah, I love going to the Quarrybank Mill just next to Manchester Airport. And you see, originally that was, I think, water powered, wasn't it?

• 30:13Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:13Dan Snow?

  Steam engine. These amazing machines. So you're industrializing the process of creating textiles. And then quite quickly, you're into a world that we recognize as well today of, coming back to that thing about Englishness and Britishness, these entrepreneurs, these inventors, they're going to keep what they've made. It's quite attractive to other people. You think, well, I want a bit of that.

• 30:31Speaker 02

  Absolutely, absolutely. So you say it's spread for Britain. So just to put some numbers on it, in 1801, so start of the 19th century, around a third of people in Britain lived in towns and cities. By 1851, it's more than 50%. And I think that's when we can say the industrial revolution in Britain has played out. We've become an urban society. Economic growth continues after that and the urban percentage continues to rise. But this country has been fundamentally changed by what's happened. I think once you've no longer got the majority of your population directly living off the land. Then I think we can start to say this is an industrial country and Britain is the first industrial country.

• 31:14Dan Snow?

  And it's worth saying, because today factories are likely to be anywhere, but when we talk about cities, that's where workers would go and work in these huge workshops, these huge factories, they were concentrated together.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, and it's a pattern that we've seen play out in China over the last few decades. People leave farming backgrounds, as they come of age, they move to a city. Nowadays, it might be a rural worker moving to Shenzhen, then it was a rural worker moving to Manchester or Birmingham, these cities which were growing enormously quickly, plentiful jobs available in these new factories, this insatiable demand for workers in these factories at times. They would move there and they would work in these factories often. So you can imagine the housing conditions were fairly grim. These were sort of knocked together quite quickly, houses for these urban workers who

• 32:05Speaker 02

  would be working very long hours at times, but still earning much more than they would have done if they'd stayed at home on a farm.

• 32:14Dan Snow?

  What about the role of individuals as the economics? And you've painted that very clearly. What about this phenomenon that we see in Britain of often people who are self-taught, people who are not from a background of science, engineering and education, just inventing stuff? You've got Stevenson with STEAM entry, you've got Newcomen, you've got Arkwright, you've just got these extraordinary people who are then networking and cross-fertilising and competing and then suddenly you're underway, that's a revolution.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. And the interesting thing is, what we don't know is, were the ancestors of these people similar three, four hundred years earlier?

• 32:54Dan Snow?

  Were they back in the shed?

• 32:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, we just don't know, we just don't know. But this confluence of conditions in the 1700s that let them flourish, and you're right, they're absolutely right, they all feed off each other. Now, what's interesting about them is, the vast majority of this great pantheon of English and British inventors of this time, very few of them are formally educated, sort of scientists. And actually, most of them, you wouldn't say they were scientists if you looked at them now, they were mechanics. They were mechanics who worked on mechanical processes and worked in a very iterative way, almost tinkering all of the time, trying to find out what worked until something did work. And when something worked...

• 33:34Speaker 02

  Able to really, you know, put it into uh, put into, put it into production. So you know, the, the pace of change. You know, what I, one way I like to think about it sometimes is if, you know, if you could transport someone, just random person off the street from sixteen fifty to seventeen fifty. Okay, people are wearing slightly different clothes and hairstyles have changed a bit and beards have gone out of fashion. But the day to day life, they could probably, they could probably recognize it. If you took someone from seventeen fifty, drop them in eighteen fifty. Suddenly these huge cities, you know, railways running between towns, the canal system, all of that. This is a, just an unrecognizable world.

• 34:15Dan Snow?

  But what's weird is there were people tinkering in Russia at the time, in Germany, in Botswana. Why? Just again, it's that funny question. What was going on on this little island of ours? Why? Why are these tinkerers, they're seeing the rewards somehow? They're seeing the benefit. There's a culture that's encouraging that tinkering.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  If you're looking at where would the Industrial Revolution have happened if it hadn't happened in Britain and England? I think you look across the North Sea to the Dutch Republic. Dutch Republic is a, if anything, even more urbanized society. It's very, very commercial, big role for merchants and sort of commercial types in policymaking. A more developed legal system, all of these attributes. Now, it doesn't have the easy access to coal. Which probably makes a difference, but also it's a small state on the European continent, really next to France. And I think this is one of those moments when actually there is another benefit to being an island.

• 35:11Speaker 02

  Britain is this um, relatively stable state during this time, which is not directly threatened by invasion. All of these things have come together and the country got lucky. And it made a huge difference because Britain is the first country to industrialize. There is this moment when Britain is the only industrial country in the world, when it is just much richer than anywhere else on the planet. And that lasts, you know, it's like a half century or so of Britain just being staggeringly more productive, staggeringly economically stronger than anyone else.

• 35:46Dan Snow?

  And then you've got this funny debate that goes on because England and Britain was building this empire because of its position in the world as well, facing the Atlantic, following the Spanish and Portuguese around the world, but then overtaking them. And did that help cause the Industrial Revolution? Or did the Industrial Revolution help cause the Empire?

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I really think you're into chicken and egg at this point. I mean, the fascinating thing is, you know, if you think the shape of the world changes in the 1490s, early 1500s for Europeans, it changes. You've got Columbus discovering the Americas. You've got Vasco de Gama rounding the Cape, finding another route to Asia. Now, what is really interesting is the countries which benefit from this are not Spain, Portugal, where these people came from, where they sailed from, where they sailed back to. It's the English and the Dutch who really benefit from this sort of new maritime trading economy. And yes, so all of this sort of early English and then British colonialism, all of this

• 36:46Speaker 02

  early exposure to trade probably does impact the wage structure in Britain, which encourages people towards using more machines. But once you've got this outsized economy in Britain, I think that's what really helps allow Britain to take on a truly sort of global role, to fight a second 100 years war against France, which is, we should always remember, a much, much, much bigger country in population to conquer an empire around the world. I think the two feed off each other.

• 37:18Dan Snow?

  Talk about the Industrial Revolution, more coming up after this.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithGemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithGemini.

• 38:04Speaker 03

  After civil war, regicide, and Cromwell's Republic, the monarchy returned. But Britain would never be the same. I'm Professor Suzanne Ellipscombe and this month on Not Just the Tudors, we're transported back to the age of Restoration royalty. From Charles II to Queen Anne and the birth of the Empire. Join me on Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 38:43Dan Snow?

  What about, first of all, people back home knew they were in the middle of something crazy, didn't they? I mean, they were seeing it every day. It was commented on, it was written about. You felt like, as we do now with the digital revolution, you feel like you're a part of it. Was it popular? Did they like it? I mean, you mentioned all these people moving to cities and in terrible housing. And yet economically, they're doing that for a reason. Are the normal men and women and kids benefiting from this industrial?

• 39:05Speaker 02

  I mean, it's a really messy, it's a really, really messy process. It's worth talking about the Luddites, Captain Ned Ludd. And, you know, these are in Nottinghamshire, early 19th century, workers whose job is going to be destroyed by this new technology. You know, rather than having dozens of people working in weaving, that job can be done by a couple of machines. So the Luddites, these are people smashing up looms, you know, at night, breaking these new machines, saying, these machines are going to take away our jobs. We don't want them. They're clearly not very happy with this, this progress. A rather sort of cold and calculating economist, maybe a sort of reverent mouthless type, would say, it's going to be fine. Like, your jobs are going to go in the short run, but in the long run, everyone is going to be better off.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Now, it turns out to be true, but the long run can last a really long time. And, you know, what we see in Britain, sort of the early 19th century is this big rise in GDP, big rise in population as well. And this is a really important thing, that we're in a world now where the population can rise at the same time as incomes. But for an awful lot of people... It looks like they weren't feeling that much better off for a very long time. You know, this is the time that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto. You know, Engels at the time was living in Manchester and sort of, you know, observing conditions in this economic boomtown, saying, right, what's happened here is these people that have come to work in these factories, you know, they're subject to cholera outbreaks,

• 40:32Speaker 02

  to poor sanitation, to really long hours, to horrific industrial injuries at times, and they don't seem to be earning very much. You know, this is sort of the time at which Marx and Engels, okay, we think this is going to lead to another type of revolution, but rather like Dr. Malthus, you know, almost at the exact time they diagnosed this, things seemed to change. And suddenly wages started to rise as well, and second half of the 19th century looks rather different.

• 41:00Dan Snow?

  Okay, interesting. So the working people start to benefit. We've already talked about, but again, this middle class is professional class. They're the engineers, the clerks, they're going to work in these, in sort of managerial positions in these new giant factories. They're doing very nicely.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  They are doing very nicely, and you know, some people are earning absolutely huge fortunes as a result. It's during this time that wealth stops for the first time, really, being based mainly on landholding. Landholding still matters, but you're seeing, you know, other ways to become very, very wealthy, if you're industrial enterprises, all of that. And you start to see a shift in political power as well. In a time when most wealth is fundamentally built on landholding, then obviously the nobility who hold most of the land tend to sort of dominate governments. And as the Industrial Revolution plays out, you start to see cabinets being less dominated by members of the House of Lords.

• 41:57Speaker 02

  You see the Commons becoming much more important and, you know, wealth changes. And once economic power has started to shift, political power starts to shift as well.

• 42:08Dan Snow?

  Yeah, so if you have a factory, it's churning out cash.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:12Dan Snow?

  And it might be more valuable than a big estate where you're, all you're doing is rearing sheep and agriculture.

• 42:18Speaker 02

  And you see a lot of the old nobility, obviously, are very keen to get their hands in on this, you know, a lot of sort of speculative investments and railways and all of that sort of stuff.

• 42:25Dan Snow?

  Whilst pretending to cry it.

• 42:26Speaker 02

  Oh, no doubt, no doubt, yes, yes.

• 42:28Dan Snow?

  Absolutely galloping towards it. So politics change. I mean, this is the point. Really, everything changes. War, politics, who, where the power and wealth lies in a society, our geography, how we live together in societies.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:40Dan Snow?

  And I guess one other thing is travel. I mean, we, people will be familiar with Brunel, Eisenberg, King Brunel is this engineer who almost encapsulates and embodies this change. His father was actually a great inventor as well and built one of the first mechanized assembly lines for the Royal Navy. But he puts in place things that we still recognise today, right? In terms of communication, I mean, that must have just been extraordinary to witness that.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And yeah, I mean, it's things like, one little change that comes with the Industrial Revolution, which is quite minor. But always striking to me about how much the world has changed is, for the first time, once we have rail travel, time across Britain has to be the same. You know, before then, you might have a village clock. You might, if you're lucky, you might have a village or a town clock and, you know, anyone in that village or town, you know, you can set your watch if you have a watch off that clock. Once a train is going to arrive at a certain time, then, you know, the time in Oxford has to be the same as the time in Bristol. So we get this sort of synchronization of time. To me, that's just like a little change, but it's like, for the first time probably ever, time across England is the same after the Industrial Revolution.

• 43:44Dan Snow?

  And a huge change.

• 43:45Speaker 02

  A huge change, yeah. The ability to travel via rail, you know, it's utterly fascinating. There's a Times leader column in the early days of railway after, you know, a member of parliament managed to get themselves killed by one of the first trains. The odds of getting killed by the only train in the world, they're fine, but it happens that, but after Hutchinson, the minister is, former minister is killed by a train. The Times wrote, now we will see the folly of travelling at 30 miles per hour. Trains will be travelling a lot quicker than that within not very much time. Not very much time at all, but you know, we're just in this very, very different world. And that actual rail travel really allows cities to expand as well. So if you think of London, I'm always struck when you look at a map of London that, you know,

• 44:27Speaker 02

  it is basically the city of London, the city of Westminster, a few little villages and so forth around it. Once you've got early commuter rail lines in, you can travel to work in 40, 45 minutes on a small train. Suddenly the size of these places, the geographic size of them starts to grow as well. And you really, really see it in London as the train lines go out, so do the suburbs.

• 44:53Dan Snow?

  Is the kind of hot take about the Industrial Revolution, one of them is that actually although it begins in Britain, it benefits Britain enormously initially, ultimately also has the seeds of Britain's eclipse and downfall as a world power because actually the place that benefit even more enormously are the enormous continental sized land masses, Russia into the USSR, the United States, arguably Germany as well, so India, where the Industrial Revolution can knit together these places that are just super diverse, if you rule over a big chunk of North America before trains, before refrigeration, you can't really exploit that as much. So actually Britain unleashes this on the world, but then eventually will come to suffer a little bit.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  Yes, you get this moment, you know, within the last few decades, when it's pretty much only happened in Britain. And Britain is, I mean, this really is the time that Britain is fighting a lot of wars against France. And, you know, France's population is, you know, 50, 60% larger, sometimes even more than that. But Britain's income per head is higher. So Britain is just as rich a country as France and can afford to fight these wars. But yes, you know, the Industrial Revolution spreads first into Western Europe, France, and then Germany. And yeah, second half of the 19th century, you know, the really big shifts are the industrialization of North America, the United States and Germany, which, you know, really, really, you know, rise to prominence as manufacturing powers. And then, yes, in the 20th century, Soviet Union, and in

• 46:20Speaker 02

  the final third of the 20th century, we see big developments in East Asia, starting with, you know, Japan and South Korea, and then China.

• 46:29Dan Snow?

  Well, that's what's so interesting, is it? Because the transformation of China that we've seen in our lifetime, that's the Industrial Revolution.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  And that's it. You know, when you see those famous pictures of, you know, the Shanghai skyline 40 years ago versus today and it's unrecognizable. I mean, that would have been Manchester at one point, you know, almost nothing there. And then suddenly this booming cotton town, you know, cities like Glasgow and Liverpool, which have always been there, that which really boom during the Industrial Revolution, and so exporting ports for all of this cotton. Yeah, a big shift in Britain. The most populous and the richest part of Britain before the Industrial Revolution would have been outside of London, East Anglia, good agricultural land. But then agricultural land matters much less in this new world. And it's, you know, Manchester, which no one had ever heard of, it's Birmingham, these are the real sort of economic centres of Britain.

• 47:17Dan Snow?

  We should talk about the environmental impact because that's something we're now dealing with because we didn't just change everything here on earth and underground and in our oceans, but literally everything on the planet. We now realise that we adjusted the composition of our atmosphere, the acidity of our oceans. So extraordinary.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, you know, kicked off this, yeah, kicked off this period of, you know, mankind having, you know, a big marked material impact on the environment. Burning, so, you know, people have been burning coal for years. They hadn't been burning it on this, um, this sort of scale. And yeah, particularly on Britain started off, but then other countries follow. And we are still dealing with the circumstances. Now, it's interesting when you look at the British numbers that, you know, British emissions now are back to sort of mid 19th century levels, but they went a lot higher, you know, before being brought down, before we made changes in the kind of things we produce and how we produce them.

• 48:14Dan Snow?

  Well, the industrial revolution, the optimistic view would be that as that revolution keeps delivering us technological solutions, we will be able to start to fix some of the problems caused by that initial wave of burning fossil fuels.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, hopefully we get a similar wave of inventors who can feed off each other's ideas.

• 48:30Dan Snow?

  Yes, if there's any out there.

• 48:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 48:32Dan Snow?

  I, I guess the other thing is that nobody has been able to predict where all this goes. That's what's fascinating. The amazing thing about this industrial revolution, I think we're still in it really. There's, as you point out, there was all of human history before, and then there's the last 200 years, which, as we now know from AI and new inventions that we're talking about all the time, and perhaps the speed's even picking up. I mean, who knows?

• 48:51Speaker 02

  Who knows? Who knows? I mean, if you want some sort of comforting lessons from the industrial revolution.

• 48:55Dan Snow?

  Yes, I do.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  The comforting one is that throughout human history and since the industrial revolution, mankind is yet to invent something which actually materially increases unemployment. So whenever you hear people saying, the robots, it used to be the robots are going to take our jobs, and now it's AI is going to take our jobs, we have yet to invent something which ultimately puts people out of work. What tends to happen is a new technology, see, it's throughout the industrial revolution, has two impacts. It's what people call the labour-saving impact, that you can do the same amount with fewer workers, so you don't need as many, so you, you can, you can use fewer workers, but.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  The people who are still in work now tend to be earning a lot more because they're more productive. They spend that money on other things and that creates demand for new jobs. This is the thing, since the Industrial Revolution, this is a really important point. Since the Industrial Revolution, the normal state for the economy has been changed. People do different jobs to what their parents did and to what their grandparents did and their children will do different jobs to them. And that is normal and healthy and is how an economy grows and sort of worrying that one type of job might not exist in the future. Well, if you want to go back to the pre-Industrial Revolution world, where the same jobs always

• 50:15Speaker 02

  exist and where your life looks quite similar to your parents, which looks quite similar to your grandparents and your children's lives will look the same as you, you can do, but it wasn't a very pleasant world.

• 50:26Dan Snow?

  Okay, well, so at the end of it all, are you an optimist when it comes to this industrial transformation, this ongoing industrial transformation?

• 50:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we've spent, we spend a lot of time fretting about the possibility of these sort of revolutionary technologies shaking up our economy and our jobs market. But, you know, what we've had generally across the West for the last 15, 20 years is quite poor economic growth, not much productivity, you know, sort of stagnant incomes and wages most of the time across the West. And it's always seemed quite strange to me that we have 10 or 15 years of stagnant productivity and stagnant incomes whilst worrying that productivity might improve. And if productivity improves, yes, there will be some jobs that don't exist anymore. But economic growth is generally a good thing.

• 51:17Speaker 02

  Getting back to that world where people are getting one and a half, two percent a year better off each and every year will make a big change. So, you know, I'm not sure if it will happen, but I would welcome it if it did.

• 51:30Dan Snow?

  Well, thank you very much for coming on the podcast.

• 51:32Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 51:35Dan Snow?

  Thanks very much for listening, everyone. Before we go, I'll tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch it on YouTube. We are moving fast and breaking things here, folks. Our Friday episodes each week will be available to watch on YouTube and you can see me, you can see what we're talking about. I'd love it if you could subscribe to that channel over there. Just click the link in the show notes below and you can watch it on your phone, your tablet, or even a TV, or even a giant cinema movie screen if you have one in your underground lair. See you next time, folks.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Hey, we're Nick and Jack, hosts of The Best One Yet. Behind every episode, there's research, emails, spreadsheets, and our shared Google Doc, the headline hammer. With Google Workspace with Gemini, Google's AI is built right into the premium versions of tools we already use, like Gmail, Docs, and Sheets. No new tools or extra logins, just personalized AI for the way we work. That means less time on the work around the work and more time finding the stories worth talking about. Get AI tools for work. Upgrade to Google Workspace with Gemini at goo.gle/workspacewithgemini. That's goo.gle/workspacewithgemini.

• 52:54Speaker 05

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• 53:36Dan Snow?

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