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The quest to divine the first industrial revolution's origins may be likened to the pursuit of the philosopher's stone: a legendary elixir capable of transforming base metals into gold. Each of these major studies explores pro-economic explanations of Britain's metamorphosis from European backwater into the world's premier workshop. They differ, however, in the treatment of impersonal forces and adopt divergent approaches to the central problem of determinism. For Sir Tony Wrigley, demography and energy set the decisive parameters: population initiated structural change and coal ensured that growth did not peter out. For Bob Allen, the intractable problem of industrialization is resolved by a deus ex machina: innovations induced by factor prices play a pivotal role. In contrast, Jane Humphries demonstrates that a central feature of the transition - the widespread employment of children - was socially shaped and not preordained by a unique combination of resources, population, and technology.
Energy and the English industrial revolution begins by setting out the limits of growth confronting economies reliant on the annual harvest cycle. Wrigley estimates that over half of all power employed in the mid-sixteenth century was provided by food-consuming draft animals and labourers. Since wood fuel provided a further third of needs, land was directly responsible for almost nine-tenths of energy consumption. In contrast, coal burning contributed barely 10 per cent of requirements and wind and water very little indeed. Malthus and Ricardo recognized that dependency on agriculture and forestry generated a problem of diminishing returns to capital and labour owing to land's essentially fixed supply. The impossibility of sustaining significant increases in energy output ensured that population growth and living standards moved inversely, constrained by an 'arrester mechanism' (p. 4).1 Wrigley concludes that the only escape route lay underground in the form of 'ghost acres' (p. 38): the accrual of millions of years of photosynthesis trapped in carbon deposits.
By 1800, fossil fuel provided nearly 80 per cent of power consumed in Britain, accounting for almost 90 per cent of an eightfold rise in energy use over the preceding two and a half centuries. The switch from organic to non-renewable is hailed by Wrigley as the first major transformation of the human race's 'production horizon' (p. 206)...