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This article was presented at the annual Economic History Society conference in Nottingham and to seminars at Oxford University and the California Institute of Technology. I am grateful to the participants for their spirited discussion. I also thank the following people (without implicating them) for helpful comments on earlier drafts: Daron Acemoglu, Tony Atkinson, Alessandro Nuvolari, Joel Mokyr, Paul David, Peter Temin, Jane Humphries, Tommy Murphy, Roman Studer, Stan Engerman, Patrick O'Brien, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal.
The Industrial Revolution was summarized by T. S. Ashton in the words of the famous schoolboy: "About 1760 a wave of gadgets swept over England."1 Some gadgets are well known (the spinning jenny, the water frame, the steam engine), and others less so (devices to lay out and cut the gears of watches, foot-powered trip hammers to stamp the heads on nails). Much has been learned about these inventions, but central questions remain: Why did the gadgets sweep over England rather than the Netherlands or France or, for that matter, China or India? And why were these technologies invented in England rather than elsewhere? Why, in other words, was the Industrial Revolution British?
This article approaches these questions through a case study of the spinning jenny, the machine that kicked off the Industrial Revolution in cotton. It was invented by James Hargreaves in Lancashire in the mid-1760s, about the same time that Richard Arkwright was inventing his water frame. The spinning jenny, however, was the first to be used on a large scale. It quickly displaced spinning wheels in Britain. France was the other major European cotton producer, but adoption across the channel was very slow. These industries were small compared to the major Asian producers. In Britain and France, several million pounds of cotton were spun annually in the middle of the eighteenth century.2 Bengal, which was a major exporter to Europe and Africa and the main competitor of British and French manufacturers, produced about 85 million pounds per year.3 This was accomplished without any mechanization, and, indeed, explaining "the absence of any technological innovation in the textile industry" is an important problem for Indian historians.4 In the nineteenth century, British producers outcompeted all others in the world,...