The Industrial Revolution and globalization: A discussion of Patrick O’Brien’s contribution

Abstract

The sheer volume of Patrick O’Brien’s writings on the Industrial Revolution, the geographical stretch of the comparative mode of analysis employed, and the unusual effective combination of detailed political history and economic history (which his current essay exemplifies1) all these make for an intimidating proposition to discuss.2 The defining features of O’Brien’s writings on the Industrial Revolution include the role of the state, particularly, in its strong fiscal form, the political capacity of the state to collect taxes to pay for public goods.3 The Royal Navy, imperialism and mercantilism are embodied in this feature. The other is the feature of globalization centering on the history of the hierarchical structuring of the global economy, in which the Industrial Revolution was a critical factor in the ‘long nineteenth century’. Rather than discuss O’Brien’s voluminous writings on the Industrial Revolution, what this essay proposes to do in the limited space allotted is to expand upon some of the major issues raised in O’Brien’s writings that are not fully developed and whose implications for the significance of the Industrial Revolution for the nineteenth-century global economy are not sufficiently explored. These issues are O’Brien’s emphasis on the role of the Royal Navy, imperialism and mercantilism (that does not explicitly elaborate the central place of the Atlantic economy which can be demonstrated using comparative history of the economies of England’s major counties); the history of the Navy after the Civil War (showing the role of British merchants in the Atlantic world which O’Brien’s narrative does not include); mischaracterization of the Industrial Revolution relative to more recent industrializations in the so-called periphery, especially Asia, by ‘liberal’ economic historians (high wages as prime mover, labour-intensive versus capital-intensive industrialization processes, possibly