Why was industrial modernity born in Europe and not, say, China? This is one of the most consequential questions about the origins of the modern world. Yet asking “why Europe” can mislead. The Industrial Revolution was not a European event. It was a British event.

So why was the steam engine invented in Britain, and not France or Italy?

Oxford professor Robert Allen has worked for decades trying to understand this question.

Allen believes that to understand the path to modernity, we must forget grand generalisations about the West. Instead, he asks us to zoom in on two very specific dynamics that shaped the British economy in the 1700s: cheap fuel and expensive workers. Together, they jolted Britain into a path where ever more work was streamlined with the help of machines and fossil fuels — a path that we are still walking on, with AI and robotics simply the latest sightings on this long march of modernity.

In this episode, we discuss the surprising revelations that led Allen to his theory. We discuss the reasons that British wages were high, and we discuss recent scholarship suggesting that this wasn’t the case–or at least, was not the cause for the Industrial Revolution. We also discuss the more humane side of wages, tracing the history of worker wellbeing from the Black Death to today.

As always in this series, we finish with our guests’ reflections on the future.

LINKS AND REFERENCES

Do you prefer reading to listening? You can find⁠ a summarised essay ⁠of this conversation, with a bibliography, at our series page:⁠ ⁠https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/news/podcasts/⁠⁠

EPISODE INFO

Guest: Robert C. Allen (Nuffield College, University of Oxford and NYU Abu Dhabi) ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Host: Ilari Mäkelä (⁠⁠⁠On Humans⁠⁠⁠)

Contact: ⁠greatdivergencepod@gmail.com

GREAT DIVERGENCE: THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

This episode is part of a series, produced by Warwick University’s⁠ ⁠CAGE Research Centre⁠⁠ in collaboration with⁠ ⁠On Humans.⁠⁠ The series searches for explanations to why Western Europe and North America overtook China and India as the richest regions of the modern world. Guided by six expert guests, including a winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, we approach this topic with balance and breadth, exploring everything from colonialism and fossil fuels to science and technology.

1 | Why the West? Colonies, fossil fuels, and lessons from China (Kenneth Pomeranz)

2 | Did science and the Enlightenment give Europe the edge? (Joel Mokyr)

3 | Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain? (Robert Allen)

4 | What happened in the East? China, Japan, and the other path to prosperity (Debin Ma)

5 | The big picture: Measuring the origins of the modern world (Bishnupriya Gupta and Stephen Broadberry)

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Why Did the Industrial Revolution Happen in Britain? ~ Robert Allen