Introduction

The British Industrial Revolution created an industrial economy. While casual discourse conflates industrialisation and economic growth, Britain was remarkable primarily for the pronounced structural change that occurred rather than for rapid economic growth. Uniquely the British labour force became highly industrialised even prior to the move to free trade in the 1840s. On the eve of the abolition of the Corn Laws the share of agriculture in employment had already declined to levels that were not reached in France and Germany until the 1950s.

Table 4.1 reports levels of agricultural employment in other European countries at dates when, later on, they reached the British real income level of 1840. In every other case the share of agriculture was much larger. This reinforces the claim that precocious industrialisation was a key aspect of British economic development. It also means that, in Patrick O'Brien's words, Britain was ‘something of a special and less of a paradigm case’ (1986: 297). The aim of this paper is to explore how Britain became such an outlier.

An argument that has endured through the decades is that British industrialisation reflects the unusual ability of its agricultural sector to raise productivity. Looking at the period 1500–1800, Wrigley pointed out that