Rune Haahr Petersen

“The Industrial Revolution in Global History”

Where should we look for the roots of present-day global economic inequality ? In this article, I argue that the Industrial Revolution should occupy a central position in such an investigation. In the first part of the article I challenge a number of views associated with some members of the so-called California School, most notably Ken Pomeranz and Jack Goldstone, that what really set Britain apart from the rest of the world were the presence of easily accessible coal deposits and cheap and plentiful imports of raw materials from America, and that these two factors explain why Britain (and later, Europe) industrialized while the rest of the world did not. The other part of the article suggests that we look somewhere else: At the European system of knowledge, in the form it took from the Scientific Revolution onwards, and the boost to technological development that this system provided. The article concludes with a critique of what is seen as an overly Anglo-centric perspective on the Industrial Revolution, represented by the California School.