Why Industry Began Where It Did

A list of preconditions, not a single cause

• A variety of factors contributed to the growth of industrial production and eventually resulted in the Industrial Revolution.
• The CED's seven: proximity to waterways; the geographical distribution of coal, iron and timber; urbanisation; improved agricultural productivity; legal protection of private property; access to foreign resources; and the accumulation of capital.
• A variety is the point — no single one of these explains industrialisation on its own.

Geography and energy

• Waterways move heavy goods cheaply; coal, iron and timber are what an early industry consumes and builds with.
• Where these sit close together, the cost of moving them nearly disappears.
• So the CED's first two factors are really one argument: industry starts where its inputs are already next to each other.

Industrialisation needed several conditions at once- which is why the question is always 'why here, and why then'

A Boulton and Watt steam engine- power that does not depend on a river, a wind or an animal

Farming had to improve first

• Improved agricultural productivity and urbanisation are linked: fewer farmers feeding more people is what frees labour for cities.
• A factory needs workers who are not needed in a field, and that only happens after yields rise.
• This is the same Champa-rice logic from unit 1, arriving at a different destination.

Law and capital

• Legal protection of private property makes long investments safe enough to make.
• Accumulation of capital supplies the money, and access to foreign resources supplies raw materials the home country lacks.
• The last of these connects unit 5 to unit 4: the Atlantic system is where much of that capital and those resources came from.

The factory concentrated everything

• The development of the factory system concentrated production in a single location and led to an increasing degree of specialisation of labour.
• Two changes in one sentence: where work happens, and how finely divided it is.
• Specialisation raises output per worker and lowers the skill each task requires — which 5.9 will read as a social consequence.

Write from coal as the energy

• British factories needed more energy than local wood and muscle could supply.
• Coal deposits lay near iron and navigable water.