Energy and the English Industrial Revolution
Wrigley begins Energy and the English Industrial Revolution with the metaphor of Pandora’s jar; “nothing in their past experience had prepared people at the time [of the Industrial Revolution] for what was to follow” (Wrigley, 1). And yet, the central problem for the concept of Industrial Revolution, as Wrigley identifies it, is that the pace of change was nonetheless gradual. The “revolution” did not appear revolutionary until at least the 1800s: Marx, Jevons, and Toynbee, Wrigley argues, were among the first to recognize the character of the new economy (Wrigley, 247). It was not clear, during the ascribed period of revolution itself, that anything fundamental had changed, or that growth would continue unabated. But Wrigley, though he identifies a number of causal factors, is less concerned with the question of why and how economic acceleration began, but on the question, of continuing contemporary significance, of why it did not come to an end. Why did not the same arrester mechanism that had always stopped previous growth stop this expansion?
The classical theories of Malthus and Ricardo tell that the return of capital and labor must fall as population rises, because economic productivity is dependent on the limits of land. An overabundance of people acts as a strain on the essentially fixed resources of geography, driving down the wages of labor, and forcing the cultivation of less-than-ideal land in order to provide sufficient sustenance. In this regime, which Wrigley identifies as the “organic economy,” subsistence dominates, and long-term growth rates are limited around 0.5% per year (Wrigley, 10–11). This amount of economic growth is easily absorbed by population growth. There will be no surplus in the economy; there is no demand for luxury goods to drive a differentiated market. As long as economic productivity is dependent on the supply of land, therefore, sustained and accelerating growth is impossible. Equilibrium will prevail.
That which provided an escape from this constrained subsistence existence, the “laborious poverty” of most of history, was the exploitation of a new source of energy: Coal (Wrigley, 38, 239). To Wrigley, energy is key. While wood as fuel requires substantial land area that could otherwise be used for agriculture, coal is a punctiform rather than areal quantity, and provides huge amounts of energy for a fixed, and relatively small, investment in land (Wrigley, 103). This decouples energy production from the Malthusian / Ricardian arrester mechanism of land demand. This shift in energy sources is a necessary, but not necessarily sufficient, precondition for a revolution that also involves numerous other factors: Cultivation of oats to power more efficient horses; the growth of transit networks; changes in occupational structure, income, and migration patterns; shifts in nuptiality and fertility. All of these are part of Wrigley’s explanations, and together they tell a compelling history. But his fundamental claim is relatively simple: “The discovery of a way of meeting the energy needs of an economy from a single source which was not subject to the limitations associated with dependence on the annual round of plant photosynthesis, was the decisive step in ensuring that growth would not be halted by the changes induced by its earlier success” (Wrigley, 100).
Wrigley puts forward what is essentially a demand-led theory. The economic acceleration he describes, however energetic its ultimate causes, is proximately caused by a rising demand for varied goods made possible by an escape from an agrarian economy. It is consumer demand, fed by the higher wages of secondary employment in factories, that provides the opportunity for an expanding market. And it is in part differences in consumer demand that seem to separate the Netherlands from England, in Wrigley’s telling (Wrigley, 224). Problematically, however, this puts the onus on the unfashionable side of the supply-demand equation. And Wrigley’s sole concession to supply-side economics is the recognition that coal provided the possibility of more cheaply producing a wide variety of goods, from dyed fabric to iron (Wrigley, 99–100). His point, however, is simple enough that it seems to stand regardless: Clearly, in order to buy the products of an Industrial Revolution, the English populace needed to have the money to do so. Whether this supply of excess wages was itself sufficient to spur the supply of goods is a reasonable question that falls outside the scope of Wrigley’s argument; Wrigley has not proposed a mechanism to directly connect the new sources of energy to a proliferating market of industrial goods.
Wrigley also appears to court direct contradictions in the discussion of the Netherlands as a counterexample. The Netherlands was modernized before England, but took longer to industrialize. The Netherlands did have a fuel source somewhat comparable to English coal: Peat. Wrigley argues that a lack of peat supply was not the problem; there was plenty more peat to be had (Wrigley, 223). But nevertheless, the Netherlands did not keep up with England’s industrialization. Wrigley offers as a possible explanation the claim that the presence of a new capital store of energy was the requirement for industrialization: “Only by gaining access to a vast store rather than a limited flow of energy” could the problem of energy, and therefore accelerated growth, be solved (Wrigley, 235). But this reads against the previous claim that the Netherlands had reserves of energy, and the ability to import coal from England. Wrigley had initially called upon De Vries and van der Woude to argue that it was demand instead that was lacking, and which could therefore not overcome high production costs (Wrigley, 223–24). However, he never explains why production costs or demand differed in these two places in ways in which energy was unable to overcome. These statements may not precisely contradict each other, but they do leave the reader in a bit of a muddle as to why England was able to industrialize sooner than the Netherlands. Either the energy sources were different (a store rather than a flow), or the discussion of peat is a distraction; but either way gaps remain in the argument.
It is also noteworthy that Wrigley does not talk at all about external markets or overseas trade. The only market for goods that is discussed is the domestic market of English laborers. But this inward-looking decision is not defended, and goes entirely without comment. It seems important to consider the impacts that foreign markets and sources of goods, both import and export, had on the industrialization of England, and the energetic uncoupling of the English economy—De Vries likewise critiques the books self-contained argument, which deals neither with trade relations nor even the greater British Isles, let alone Britain’s empire (De Vries, 1386). But it may be that Wrigley’s energy argument is capable of standing alone, even if England is considered to be a closed system.
What Wrigley has achieved in Energy and the English Industrial Revolution is to provide a thorough description of the circumstances that lifted the inverse relationship between population and wage in England between 1600 and 1800. The description depends fundamentally on the nature of a new energy source, but is not so plainly determinist as to suggest that energy could act alone. Instead, energy is at the center of a network of societal changes that made possible the growth of a market-consuming laboring class provided for, in essence, by the energy borrowed from the deep geological past. This borrowing has sustained us ever since. Though a competent history in its own right, Wrigley’s book looks to the future: If it was a vast store of energy that made sustained growth possible, and converted our economy from one with a fungible basis to a consumptible one, how do we continue to secure such stores of energy to maintain growth into the future, without making the world an unlivable place? Our markets have grown on the borrowed time of consumptible energy, and we are coming to a juncture in which we will have to renegotiate our sources of energy, and shift back toward the fungible. As energy production threatens to return to an areal nature (via solar and wind power), albeit at greater efficiency than photosynthesis, Wrigley’s book calls us to ask: Will Ricardo yet have his revenge? That Wrigley’s book provides historical grounding for this discussion alone makes it valuable reading for the historian or layperson alike.
References
De Vries, Jan. “Energy, and the English Industrial Revolution.” Economic History Review 64, no. 4 (2011): 1386–7.
Wrigley, Edward Anthony. Energy and the English Industrial Revolution. Cambridge. UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010.
