Dan Snow's History Hit - How Did the Industrial Revolution Change the World?

Episode Date: October 16, 2025

Was the Industrial Revolution the most important event in human history? Dan is joined by economist and journalist Duncan Weldon to explore why exactly the industrial revolution started on the soggy archipelago of Britain and the impact of its entrepreneurs, politics, and empire had on the country and the rest of the world across the 18th and 19th centuries.They trace a story of ambition and invention—but also upheaval, inequality and consequences and explain what happened and why it still matters.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Matthew Wilson and Dougal Patmore.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Check it out at yotoplay.com. P-O-P-L-A-Y.com. Hi, everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's history. Today, we are diving into arguably the most important thing that's ever happened to the human race. So, you know, this is a big one. A revolution, and it was not one marked by, or not immediately, by gunfire and guillotine,

but by steam and iron. A transformation so profound, it redefined how all of us humans live and work and think and the air that we breathe. 200 years ago, the fastest we humans could reliably travel was around about the speed of a galloping horse. Unless you were sailing a Polynesian outrigger canoe down a huge wave with the following wind, but that was quite unusual. And now we are flying drones on Mars and changing the trajectories of asteroids. That's not bad for a couple of centuries. We're talking, of course, in this episode about the Industrial Revolution. And I'm trying to ask that essential question.

Why on earth did it take place in Britain, of all places? What mix of geography and politics and law and innovation and ambition turned this small island into an engine room of global change? How did the inventions and the upheavals here, the coal mines, the cotton mills, the factory systems, the production lines, how did those ripple out to touch every corner of the globe? From the birth of the factory to shaping, gigantic global empires. In this episode, we inspired the Industrial Revolution

McGahn, how it developed and accelerated across the 18th and 19th centuries, and how Britain exported its technologies and ideas to the wider world. This is a story of invention, ambition, but also of upheaval and inequality and the global consequences that still shape our lives today. I'm very happy to say that joining us is Duncan Weldon, he's a journalist, his writer, who's author of 200 years of muddling through. He's going to explain how this great turning point in history unfolded and how it still powers the world we live in today. Enjoy.

Duncan, great to see you, man. Thanks coming on. Thank you for having me. You've always said something that stuck in my mind, that basically human history can be divided into two bits, and that's pre- and post-industrial revolution. Is that how big it is in your mind? That's absolutely how big it is in my mind, and it makes human history much simpler,

if you want to get two parts before and after the Industrial Revolution. But I think it's fair. You know, the world before the Industrial Revolution looked very different to the world. afterwards, the world we live in, the world where we're used to. The world before the industrial revolution was a world in sort of economic and social terms of fundamental continuity, where people's lives looked most of the time quite similar to their parents' lives, quite similar to their grandparents' lives. Just put some numbers on it really quickly using, you know,

the best estimates we have of income per head in England. In the year 1300, we think income per person in Britain was about £780 a year in modern money. 1650, some three and a half centuries later, £977 a year. Basically no growth, no change. Someone living in 1650, in many ways, if they're on a farm, their life's not that different to someone in 1300. Pretty recognisable. They're pretty recognisable. You know, they'll eat quite a similar diet. They will wear, you know, the same sorts of cloves that they'll make. Their lives are quite similar.

But after the Industrial Revolution, things begin to change. The world changes. People expect their children to be better off than they are. People's incomes grow. Population expands, you know, human mortality. You know, the death rate falls, fertility rates rise. We see something that starts to look like a modern world. And people are immeasurably richer, you know, their material, their possessions, and their horizons as well, I guess.

Yeah, yeah, their horizons are, you know, they're living longer, they're eating better, they're eating more, their children are more likely to survive to, you know, become adults, they're going to live longer, they're living increasingly in cities and towns rather than in the countryside, they're less likely to be working in agriculture. Everything is different after the Industrial Revolution. Okay, so explain to me why, because before the Industrial Revolution, there was this idea that resource is limited, and why, how, because the Industrial Revolution, do you just invent all that while? This is one of the great questions you're probably used to answering this. You just sort of go, oh, by the way, we've just invented trillions and trillions of dollars and pounds of stuff, which isn't related to land and bits of, you know, buildings. Yeah, well, let's go back to the world before the Industrial Revolution and sort of the best description of it in economic terms. It comes in 1798, written by the Reverend Thomas Robert

Malthmus. Economists tend to refer to this as a Malthusian world. And Malthmus is, you know, as we'll come on to, in some ways, not a very pleasant character. There's some suggestion that he was the inspiration for the character of Scrooge in Charles Dickens' Christmas Tales, you know, but keep Scrooge in your mind when we're thinking about Malthus. But his description of the world was pretty accurate. only time in this discussion, I am afraid I'm going to use a tiny bit of maths. But you've got an economic story on, it's going to happen eventually. So Malthmus' great sort of insight, his description of the world was that human wants and

the expansion of humankind tend to move in an exponential way. So that's one, two, four, eight, sixteen, you know, people can have multiple children, one, two, four, eight, sixteen, that sort of way. But human resources tended to grow in a strictly linear fashion. One, two, three, four, five. Now, you don't need to be very good at maths to realise these two things are out of sequence. You plant a field, you can't double the amount of plants to do each year. Two people can have two children very easily.

But if they've got one field, they can't double the output from that field very quickly. So human wants, human needs tend to run in this pre-industrial revolutionary world. ahead of the capacity to produce stuff, to produce food. And what that tends to mean is that when the population rises, the resources available to the people fall, income ahead starts to fall, people start to get poorer. So you've got this inverse relationship where a rising population tends to mean people are poorer, but a smaller population tends to mean people are a bit better off because they've got, they've got more stuff. Now, Dr. Malthmus, and you'll see why people sometimes compared him to Scrooge, said, you know, what keeps these two numbers in check?

You know, what keeps resources in line to the population? He thought there were two things that happened. There were what he called positive checks. They're not very positive. This is things like famine, play. You hit the wall, and people just die. People just die. Yeah. So what he advocated instead were preventative checks. Now, preventive checks meant either sexual abstinence or people getting married later so they would have fewer children. What society should be doing is keeping population growth in check. Now, that's what takes him into this sort of miserly view that he fought, for example, charitable donations to the poor were a very bad thing. Wow. Because if you give the poor people money, well, they'll just have more children and then there'll be more people

and everyone will be poorer, the best thing to do is to keep population in check. So this is the world he described. And the thing is, his description of the relationship between populations and incomes does seem to broadly, in the big picture, hold for most of human history, until only a few hundred years ago. Periods of high population tended to mean living standards fell. And this is not to say, you know, things were the same all of the time. They weren't.

you would have good crops or bad crops or your weather patterns, things or, you know, things would change, but it would change not very much and generally around sort of a, you know, a fairly static world of continuity. But what's interesting is he was writing that at exactly the time, curiously, that this great revolution was beginning. First of all, very simply put, what is the industrial revolution? I mean, is it a harnessing the natural process on earth, whether it's wind, coal, tide, to generate vast amounts of energy and the things we can do with that energy. How do you define?

I mean, that's not a bad description. I'd start off by saying, you know, this is a battle that I've lost before I was born, that calling it the Industrial Revolution isn't too helpful. I think industrial evolution makes more sense, because it's not like there's one moment that, you know, like a switch is flicked and suddenly you're in this Industrial Revolution world. And I think debating exactly when it happened is quite hard. But I think at some point between 1700, 1750 and the early 19th century, maybe 1820,

at some point around that late 18th century, early 19th century, something changes in Britain. And fundamentally, it's about the ability to get more outputs from any given level of inputs. In economic terms, that's productivity rising. And yet, it's partially about, you know, harnessing, you know, things like steam pads. It's about using, being less reliant on human labour and using more machines, even very early machines, you know, by the end, you know, we've moved to a factory system, we've moved to more intense forms of farming where we can get, you know, more food out of any given bit of agricultural land. We can produce far more cotton from the same level of inputs. We can travel

faster. It's this, it's in some ways the invention of modern economic growth. This idea that, you know, everyone will just, things haven't really been like this for the last 10 or 15 years, but in general, everyone will get one and a half, two percentage points a year better off every year, and that's just normal. And, you know, getting one and a half, two percent better off a year might not sound like much, but that's 20, 25 percent in a decade. That's, you know, 50% in two decades, that's actually your incomes doubling every 50 or so years. These are really, really, you know, slow incremental growth. That starts with the Industrial Revolution. And the interesting thing is, it starts in Brin. And I think it's really important that it starts in Brin.

Well, let's get into it. I mean, why on earth does it start in this little rainy archipelago? Is it natural resources? Is it climate? Is it culture? What's going on here? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot going on. As you can imagine, you know, economic historians and economists and historians have been debating this way ever since. So I think we can start off by saying, you know, sort of climate and geography probably does matter a bit. You know, Britain has a few natural advantages. Being in Ireland really helps because moving stuff by sea is just cheaper and easier than moving stuff by land. And, you know, Britain is, you're never that far from the sea anywhere on the island. Lots of navigable rivers. Lots of navigable rivers. And, you know, so, you know, classic example, moving cold. from Newcastle to London is quite easy if you can put in a ship, take it down the coast and up the Thames. So that helps. Britain also, for such a small place, has quite a lot of variety of climactic conditions and land types, much allowed for a bit more sort of specialisation in different areas of the economy. So, you know, Lancashire is quite rainy. That's done blackpools, tourism industry, no good in the last 50 or 60 years. But it turns out that's

quite helpful when you're processing cotton. And lots of small, fast-moving streams which allow you to use water wheels and harness water posts there, and a lot of coal deposits, which are easy to access in Britain, relatively easy. They're close to the surface. So all of these sort of geographic things matter. But I don't think you can say it's just the geography, because the geography's been like that for hundreds and hundreds and thousands of years. That's true. The Romans were mining, well, in fact, our prehistoric ancestors were mining tin. and coal was being mined as well. So it's always been there, right?

So what goes on, though, that period? So I think you've got a few of things happening. So you've got, I think Britain's, let's step back away from just from Britain for a moment. Let's talk about what some people call the little divergence. The little, you know, there's a big thing in economic history, the great divergence, as people call it. That's when Britain and then Europe sort of decouple from Asia, from other regions. You know, Europe, Britain become very, very, very rich. in the late 18th, early 19th century, the time we're talking about.

But something has happened before the Great Divergence, which, you know, may be a bit less important, so sometimes gets called the Little Divergence. And that's basically saying, if you go back to 1,500, the richest places in Europe are Italy, Spain, Southern France, the areas around the Mediterranean. And they've been the richest place in Europe for, you know, well over a thousand years. Right back to Roman times, the area around the Mediterranean has been Europe. center of economic gravity, where there's the most trade, where people are the wealthiest, the climate is very supportive of various types of agriculture, the Mediterranean is easy

to trade across. But at some point, between about 1500 and when the Industrial Revolution starts, we see what people call the little divergence. We see Europe's center of economic gravity move away from the Mediterranean and to the North Sea to what was then still England and the Dutch Republic on the other side. So I think you've got to say, why did this happen? Why did the economy just start to develop in a stronger way around the North Sea? For that, I think we start with a couple of things. We firstly got the Black Death. You know, economists like this term, economic shock. You don't really get much more shocking than the Black Death, you know. Half the population of Europe. Yeah, yeah. Somewhere

between a third and a half population dead, you know, obviously a huge shaking up. But in a Malthusian world, I mean, if you half the population, but the animals are still there, the infrastructure is still there, you've still got the same fields, well, you've half the population, you've still got the same resources, you'd expect people to be better off. And that does seem to be what happened. You know, it's really sad news that your neighbour died of the plague, but now you can have their cow, sort of the world we're in. So, you know, you do get this jump in incomes. But that jump in incomes, seems to sort of peter away after a few generations in southern Europe, but be a bit more persistent in northern Europe. And some people think, and I think it's definitely true, part of this is about institutions, about the character of the state in those areas. So if you think about early modern England and the Dutch Republic,

I would not describe them as smaller liberal, I would not describe them as democracies. They're not like a modern, late 20th century, early 21st century democracy, but neither are they sort of the authoritarian autocracies of France or Habsburg, Spain. They're places where the political order is a bit more open, where monarchs are less absolute in their powers, where parliaments matter more, and where increasingly, particularly in the case of the Dutch Republic, but then also in. England where sort of commercial and mercantile interests are starting to get a bit more say in government. You know, if an English king wants to raise taxes, they need to summon a parliament and that parliament will have a lot of sort of what we would call sort of middle class, commercial

lawyers, bankers, merchants. They're much more say in government and this sort of more, you know, economic historians tend to call it an open access order. It's not a completely closed leave. These open access orders, these institutions tend, in the long run, to be more supportive of economic growth. So I think you've got marriage patterns, you've got the climate, you've got this sort of institutional setup in England. That all points to, you know, something has changed in the Dutch Republic and in England. And by the 1600s, they're both recognizably commercial societies. You know, money is used quite a bit.

There are people we would recognize as capitalists on quite a small scale. You're not into the Industrial Revolution yet, but you're in a different world to even just a few centuries before. And then it steps up again. Listen to Dan Snow's history. More Industrial Revolution coming up. I'm always looking for ways to keep my kids entertained without screens, and the Yoto Mini has been a total lifesaver. My kids are obsessed. Yoto is a screen-free audio player where kids just pop in a card and listen. Hours of stories, music, podcasts, and more. And no screens or ads. With hundreds of options for ages zero to 12, it's the perfect gift they'll go back to again and again. Check it out at yotoplay.com. Y-O-T-O-P-L-A-Y dot com. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoners' Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic

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And that's why behind the scenes, we rely heavily on Google workspace with Gemini, Google's AI productivity tools to do our best work. It's how my producers, the brilliant minds you don't always hear, help plan and execute everything we do from our interview episodes to my big explainers. You might be surprised to know that we're actually a pretty small team here on Down Snow's History. It's me, my two producers, Mariana and James, our editor, the long-suffering Google and our production manager, Beth, So we rely on technology to get things done.

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dot g-l-e-slash-10 stories. That's g-o-o-g-g-le-slash-1-0 stories. And presumably there's bits that might sound boring, but the essential kind of preconditions. So those sort of middle-class people are, they're interested in things like the legal system and protecting patents and protecting shareholders' investments and things,

and the governments can't come and go, I'll have that invention, or I'll take that off you. There's the beginnings of that. that's sort of the nitty-gritty. So if you have an invention, you can be confident that you're actually going to keep control of it and actually enjoy the benefit of it as well.

Sell it, distribute it. Absolutely. And then you've got this sort of strange, strange conditions in England on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. I'm going to keep saying England, because most of this is just before the Act of Union and then becomes Britain during this process.

But in sort of England and in early Great Britain, you've got this strange combination of factors. Wages are reasonably high as far as we can tell compared to other economies, partially because of the impact of international trade on England and Britain over the centuries. But for whatever reason, wages are a little bit higher. And the cost of borrowing is a little bit lower because we've started developing these stable institutions. And also coal energy is relatively cheap because it's a little bit lower. It's very easy to get out of the ground in lots of parts of Britain. And just as importantly, coal is bulky and heavy.

Easy to move around the island using these waterways and the sea. And if you're in a world where wages, you know, using people to do things, is a bit more expensive, but actually the ability to borrow capital is quite cheap. Energy is quite cheap. You are just incentivised to try and find ways. is, is there a way I could be using a machine to do this rather than five or six people? And you've got this strange alignment of economic incentives in England and then Britain. And people, you know, responded to that. We get, you know, really picking up pace, right, the 1700s into the early 1800s,

these waves of inventions, which, you know, we start to see the beginnings of modern economic growth. And you start to see more specialisation. You start to see productivity slowly rising and you start to see alongside that this huge change in the character of the country and it really is a huge change. People, the majority of people living in towns and cities for the first time in Britain ever.

And we've never gone back. And on one basic level, I suppose, listen to you, replacing people with machines. Absolutely. Which is one of the key things we probably think about with the Industrial Revolution. We live in a world of machines now and we're all talking about it endlessly.

the issue of humans and robotics and drones and everything. But this was a conversation that started right back then. So if you're in farming or in shipbuilding, if you can involve machines or extracting coal from deep pits and draining out the floodwater that gathers there, you can use engines, you can use machines to do that job. Yeah, absolutely. And what we see is these sorts of ideas

being applied to bit of the economy after bit of the economy. So you see huge changes in sort of metallurgy and the ability to make higher grade. metals and using, you know, really powerful blast furnaces. You see this whole wave of inventions in the one people tend to talk about is the textile industry. But, you know, before the industrial revolution, you know, the textile industry pretty much relied on what was called a putting out system. So you'd have generally women working from home, doing sort of odd jobs to, you know, add to the family income, someone coming around, dropping off the work, coming and collecting it.

And within a few generations, we've moved to Boon Town of Manchester, just filled with factories, workers, working on machines, able to produce far more textiles than had been imagined by previous generations and then then being exported as a vastly, vastly different world. And so, yeah, I love going to the quarry bank mill just next to Manchester Airport. And you see, originally that was, I think, water powered, wasn't it? Yes. And these amazing machines, so you're industrialising the process of creating textiles. And then quite quickly, you're into a world that we recognise as well today. Coming back to that thing about English and some Britishness, these entrepreneurs, these inventors, they're getting to keep what they've made.

It's quite attractive for other people. You think, well, I want a bit of that. Absolutely, absolutely. You say it's spread for Britain. So you put some numbers on it. In 1801, start of the 19th century, around a third of people in Britain lived in towns and cities. By 1851, it's more than 50%. And I think that's when we can say the industrial revolution in Britain has played out.

We've become an urban society. You know, economic growth continues after that and the urban percentage continues to rise. But this country has been fundamentally changed by what's happening. I think once you've no longer got the majority of your population directly living off the land, then I think we can start to say this is an industrial country and Britain is the first industrial country. And it's worth saying because today factories are likely to be anywhere. but when we talk about cities, that's where workers would go and work in these huge workshops, these huge factories. They were concentrated together. Yeah. And it's a pattern that,

you know, we've seen play out in China over the last few decades. People leave sort of farming backgrounds, you know, as they come of age, they move to a city. You know, nowadays, it might be, you know, a rural worker moving to Shenzhen. Then it was a rural worker moving to Manchester or Birmingham. These cities, which were growing enormously quickly. There were plentiful jobs of available in these new factories, this sort of insatiable demand for workers in these factories at times. They would move there and they would work in these factories often. So you can imagine the housing conditions were fairly grim. These were sort of knocked together quite quickly, you know, houses for these urban workers who'd, you know, be working very long hours at times.

But still, you know, earning much more than they would have done if they'd stayed at home, you know, on a farm. What about the role of individuals? economics, and you've painted that very clearly, what about this phenomenon that we see in Britain of often people who are self-taught, people who are not from a background of science, engineering and education, just inventing stuff. You know, you've got Stevenson with steam entry, you've got newcomen, you've got Newcombe, you've got Arkwright, you've just got these extraordinary people who are then networking and cross-fertilising and competing, and then they're

suddenly you're underway. That's a revolution. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, the interesting thing is, what we don't know is, were the ancestors of these people similar three, 400 years earlier? Were they back in the shed? Yeah, yeah, we just don't know. We just don't know. But these sort of this confluence of conditions in the 1700s that let them flourish. And you're right. They're absolutely right. They all feed off each other. Now, what's interesting about them is the vast majority of this sort of great pantheon of English and British inventors of this time, very few

them are sort of formally educated, sort of sciences. And actually, most of them, you know, you wouldn't say they were a scientist if you looked at them. They were mechanics. They were mechanics who worked on mechanical processes and worked in a sort of very iterative way, and was sort of tinkering all the time. You know, try finding out what work until something did work and when something worked, able to really, you know, put it into, put it into production. So, you know, the pace of change. You know, what I, one way I like to think, about it sometimes is if, you know, if you could transport someone, just random person off the street from 1650 to 1750. Okay, people are wearing slightly different clothes and

hairstyles have changed a bit and beards have gone out of fashion. But the day-to-day life, they could probably, they could probably recognise it. If you took someone from 1750, drop them in 1850. Suddenly these huge cities, your railways running between towns, the canal system, all of there. This is a, just an unrecognizable world. But what's weird is there were people tinkering in Russia at the time, in Germany, in Botswana. Why, just again, it's that funny question. What was going on on this little island of ours? Yeah.

Why are these tinkers, they're seeing the rewards somehow? They're seeing the benefit. There's a culture that's encouraging that tinkering. If you're looking like, where would the industrial revolution have happened? If it hadn't happened in Britain and England, I think you look across the North Sea to the Dutch Republic. The Dutch Republic is a, if anything, even more urbanised society. It's very, very commercial, big role for merchants and sort of commercial types in policymaking, a more developed legal system. All of these attributes.

Now, it doesn't have the easy access to coal, which probably makes a difference. But also, it's a small state on the European continent really next to France. And I think this is one of those moments when actually there is another benefit to being an island. Britain is this relatively stable state during this time, which is not directly threatened by invasion. All of these things have come together. The country got lucky. And it made a huge difference because Britain is the first country to industrialize. There is this moment when Britain is the only industrial country in the world,

when it is just much richer than anywhere else on the planet. And that lasts, you know, it's like a half century or so of Britain just being staggeringly, more productive, staggeringly economically stronger than anyone else. And then you've got this funny debate that goes on because England and Britain was building this empire because of its position in the world as well, facing the Atlantic, following the Spanish and Portuguese around the world, but then overtaking them. And did that help cause the Industrial Revolution or did the Industrial Revolution help cause the Empire? Yeah, I really think you're into chicken and egg at this point. I mean, you know, the fascinating thing is, you know, if you think the shape of the world changes in the 1490s, early 1500s, for Europeans it changes. You've got Columbus discovering the Americas. You've got Vasco da Gama rounding the Cape, finding another route to Asia.

Now, what is really interesting is the countries much benefit from this are not Spain, Portugal, where these people came from, where they sailed from, where they sailed from, where they're. sell back to, it's the English and the Dutch who really benefit from this sort of new maritime trading economy. And yes, so all of this sort of early English and then British colonialism, all of this early exposure to trade probably does impact the wage structure in Britain, which encourages people towards using more machines. But once you've got this outsized economy in Britain, I think that's what really helps allow Britain to take on a truly sort of global role to fight a second 100 years war against France, which is we should always remember a much, much, much bigger country in population to conquer an empire around the world.

I think the two feed off each other. Talk about the Industrial Revolution more coming up after this. Hey friends, it's Nikaela from the podcast Side Hustle Pro. I'm always looking for ways to keep my kids entertained without screens, and the Yoto Mini has been a total lifesaver. My kids are obsessed. Yoto is a screen-free audio player where kids just pop in a card and listen. Hours of stories, music, podcasts, and more. And no screens or ads. With hundreds of options for ages zero to 12, it's the perfect gift they'll go back to again and again. Check it out at yotoplay.com. Y-O-T-O-P-L-A-Y dot com. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoners' Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into Feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and Shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed,

not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. What about, first of all, people back home knew they were in the middle of something crazy, didn't they? I mean, they were seeing it every day. was commented on it, was written about, you felt like, as we do now with the digital revolution, you feel like you're a part of it. Was it popular? Did they like it? I mean, you mentioned all these people moving cities in terrible housing, and yet economically they're doing that for a reason. And the normal men and women and kids benefiting from this

industrial... I mean, look, it's a really, really, really messy process. It's worth talking about the Luddites, Captain Ned Ludd. And, you know, these are in sort of Nottinghamshire, early 19th century workers whose job is going to be destroyed by this, new technology. You know, rather than having dozens of people working and weaving, that job can be done by a couple of machines. So the Luddites, these are people smashing up looms, you know, at night, breaking these new machines saying these machines are going to take away our jobs, we don't want them. They're clearly not very happy with this progress. A rather sort of cold and calculating economist, maybe a sort of reverent mouthmust type, would say it's going to

be fine. Like, your jobs are going to go in the short run, but in the long run, everyone is going to be better off. That turns out to be true, but the long run can last a really long time. And, you know, what we see in Britain, sort of the early 19th century is this big rise in GDP, big rising population as well. And this is a really important thing that we're in a world now where the population can rise at the same time as incomes. But for an awful lot of people, it looks like they weren't feeling that much better off for a very long time. You know, this is the time that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote, communist manifest, you know, Engels at the time was living in Manchester and sort of, you know,

observing conditions in this economic boontown saying, right, what's happened here is these people that have come to work in these factories, you know, they're subject to cholera outbreaks, to poor sanitation, to really long hours, to horrific industrial injuries at times, and they don't seem to be earning very much, you know, the time at which Marx and Engels are, okay, we think this is going to lead to another type of revolution, but rather like doctor Malthmus, almost at the exact time they diagnosed this, things seem to change. And suddenly wages started to rise as well, and second half of the 19th century looks rather different. Okay, interesting. So the working people start to benefit. We've already talked about,

but again, this middle class is professional class. They're the engineers, the clerks. They're going to work in these, in sort of managerial positions in these new giant factories. They're doing very nicely. They are doing very nicely. And you know, some people are earning absolutely huge fortunes as a result. It's during this time that wealth stops for the first time really being based mainly on landholding. Landholding still matters, but you're seeing other ways to become very, very wealthy, industrial enterprises, all of that. And you start to see a shift in political power as well. In a time when most wealth is fundamentally built on landholding, then obviously the nobility, you hold most of the land, tend to dominate governments. And as the industrial

revolution plays out, you start to see cabinets being less dominated by members of the House of Lords. You see the commons becoming much more important. And, you know, wealth changes. And once economic power has started to shift, political power starts to shift as well. Yeah. So if you have a factory, it's churning out cash. Yeah. And it might be more valuable than a big estate where all you're doing is rearing sheep and agriculture.

And you see a lot of the old nobility, obviously are very keen to get their hands in on this, you know, a lot of sort of speculative investments and railways and all of that sort of stuff.

Whilst pretending to decry it. No doubt, no doubt, yes, absolutely galloping towards it. So politics change. I mean, this is the point, really everything changes. War, politics, where the power and wealth lies

in a society, our geography, how we live together in society. Yeah. And I guess one other thing is travel. I mean, people will be familiar Brunel, Eisenbard King Brunel's, this engineer,

who almost encapsulates and bodies this change. His father was actually a great inventor as well and built one of the first mechanised assembly lines for the Royal Navy. But he puts in place things that we still recognise day right in terms of communication. I mean, that must have just been extraordinarily witness that. Absolutely. I mean, it's things like, one little change

that comes with the Industrial Revolution, which is quite minor. But it always striking to me about how much the world has changed is for the first time, once we have ever. rail travel, time across Britain has to be the same. You know, before then, you might have a village clock. You might, if you're lucky, you might have a village or a town clock. And, you know, anyone in that village or town, you can set your watch if you have a watch off that clock. Once a train is going to arrive at a certain time, then, you know, the time in Oxford has to be

the same as the time in Bristol. So we get this sort of synchronisation of time. To me, that's just like a little change, but it's like for the first time, probably ever, time across England is the same after the Industrial Revolution. And a huge change. A huge change, yeah. The ability to travel via rail, you know, it's utterly fascinating. It was a Times leader column in the early days of railway after, you know, a member of Parliament match to get themselves killed by one of the first trains.

The odds of getting killed by the only train in the world here find, but it happens. But after Hutchinson, the former minister is killed by a train, the Times wrote, now we will see the folly of traveling at 30 miles per hour. Trains will be travelling a lot quicker than that within not very much time. Not very long. But we're just in this very, very different world. And that actual rail travel

really allows cities to expand as well. So if you think of London, I'm always struck when you look at a map of London that, you know, it is basically the city of London, the city of Westminster, a few little villages and so forth around it. Once you've got early commuter rail lines in, you can travel to work in 40, 45 minutes.

it's on a small train, suddenly the size of these places, the geographic size of them starts to grow as well. You really, really see it in London as the train lines go out, so do the suburbs. Is the kind of hot take about the Industrial Revolution? One of them is actually, although it begins in Britain, it benefits Britain enormously initially. Ultimately, it also has the seeds of Britain's eclipse and downfall as a world power, because actually the place that benefit even and more enormously, are the enormous continental-sized land masses, Russia into the USSR, the United States, arguably Germany as well. So India, where the Industrial Revolution can knit together these places that are just super diverse. If you rule over a big chunk

of North America, before trains, before, you know, refrigeration, you can't really exploit that as much. So actually Britain unleashes this on the world, but then eventually we'll come to suffer a little bit. Yeah, so you get this moment, you know, with the last a few decades, decades when it's pretty much only happened in Britain. And Britain is, I mean, this really is the time that Britain is fighting a lot of wars against France. And, you know, France's population is, you know, 50, 60 percent larger, sometimes even more than that. But Britain's income per head is higher. So Britain is just as rich a country as France can afford to fight these wars. But yes, you know, the Industrial Revolution spreads first into Western Europe, France,

and then Germany. And yeah, the second half of the 19th century, you know, the really big shifts so the industrialisation of North America, the United States, and Germany, which, you know, really, really rise to prominence as manufacturing powers. And then, yes, in the 20th century, Soviet Union, and in the final third of the 20th century, we see big developments in East Asia, starting with, you know, Japan and South Korea, and then China. Well, that's so interesting, is it? Because the transformation of China that we've seen in our lifetime, that's the Industrial Revolution. And that's it, you know, when you see those famous...

pictures of, you know, the Shanghai skyline 40 years ago versus day, and it's unrecognizable. I mean, that would have been Manchester at one point, you know, almost nothing there. And then suddenly this booming cotton town, you know, cities like Glasgow and Liverpool, which have always been there, which really boomed during the Industrial Revolution and so exporting ports for all of this cotton. Yeah, a big shift for in Britain. The most populous and the richest part of Britain before the Industrial Revolution would have been outside of London, East Anglia, good agricultural land.

but then agricultural land matters much less in this new world. And it's, you know, Manchester, which no one had ever heard of. It's Birmingham. These are the real sort of economic centres of Britain. We should talk about the environmental impact because that's something we're now dealing with because we didn't just change everything here on Earth and underground and in our oceans,

but literally everything on the planet. We now realize that we adjusted the composition of our atmosphere, the acidity of our oceans. I mean, extraordinary. Yes, I mean, you know, kicked off this period of, you know, mankind having, you know, a big marked material impact on the environment. So, you know, people have been burning coal for years. They hadn't been burning it on this sort of scale.

And, yeah, particularly on Britain started off, but then other countries follow. And we are still dealing with the circumstances. Now, it's interesting when you look at the British numbers that, you know, British emissions now are back to sort of mid-19th century levels. but they went a lot higher, you know, before being brought down before we made changes in the kind of things we produce and how we produce them. Well, the industrial revolution, the optimistic view would be that as that revolution keeps delivering us technological solutions, we will be able to start to fix some of the problems

caused by that initial wave of burning fossil fuels. Well, hopefully we get a similar wave of inventors who can feed off each other's ideas. Yes, if there's any out there, let's get it. I guess the other thing is that nobody has been able to predict where all this goes. That's what's fascinating. The amazing thing about this Industrial Revolution, I think we're still in it, really. As you point out, there was all of human history before,

and then there's the last 200 years, which, as we now know from AI and new inventions that we're talking about all the time, and perhaps the speed's even picking up. I mean, who knows? Who knows? I mean, if you want some sort of comforting lessons from the Industrial Revolution,

the comforting one is that throughout human history and since the Industrial Revolution, mankind is yet to invent something which actually materially increases unemployment. So whenever you hear people saying the robots, used to be the robots are going to take our jobs, and now it's AI is going to take our jobs. We have yet to invent something, which ultimately puts people out of work. What tends to happen is a new technology. It's throughout the Industrial Revolution has two impacts. It's got what people call the labor-saving

impact, that you can do the same amount with fewer workers, so you don't need as many. So you can use fewer workers. But the people who are still in work now tend to be, earning a lot more because they're more productive. They spend that money on other things and that creates demand for new jobs. This is the thing. Since the Industrial Revolution, this is a really important point. Since the Industrial Revolution, the normal state for the economy has been changed. People do different jobs to what their parents did and to what their grandparents did and their children will do different jobs to them. And that is normal and healthy and is how an economy grows and sort of worrying that one type of job might not exist in the future, well, if you want

to go back to the pre-industrial revolution world where the same jobs always exist and where your life looks quite similar to your parents, which looks quite similar to your grandparents and your children's lives will look the same as you, you can do, but it wasn't a very pleasant world. Okay, well, so at the end of it all, are you an optimist when it comes to this industrial transformation, this ongoing industrial transformation? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, we've spent a lot of time fretting about the possibility of these sort of revolutionary technologies shaking up our economy in our jobs market. But, you know, what we've had generally across the West for the last 15, 20 years is quite poor economic growth, not much productivity. You know, sort of stagnant incomes and wages most of the time across the West. And it's all seemed quite strange to me that we have 10 or 15 years of, stagnant productivity and stagnant incomes, whilst worrying that productivity might improve. And if

productivity improves, yes, there will be some jobs that don't exist anymore. But economic growth is generally a good thing. Getting back to that world where people are getting one and a half, 2% a year, better off each and every year will make a big change. So, you know, I'm not sure if it will happen, but I would welcome it if it did. Well, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Thanks very much for listening, everyone. Before you go, I'll tell you that ever at the cutting edge, the bleeding edge of what's new and exciting, after 10 years of the podcast, you can finally watch it on YouTube. We are moving fast and breaking things here, folks. Our Friday episodes each week will be available to watch on YouTube, and you can see me. You can see what we're talking about. I'd love it. If you could subscribe to that channel over there, just click the link in the show notes below, and you can watch it on your phone, your tablet, or your or even a TV, or even a giant cinema movie screen, if you have one in your underground layer.

See you next time, folks. Hey, next time, folks. Hey, friends, it's Nikaela from the podcast Side Hustle Pro. I'm always looking for ways to keep my kids entertained without screens. And the Yoto Mini has been a total lifesaver. My kids are obsessed. Yoto is a screen-free audio player where kids just pop in a card and listen, hours of stories, music, podcasts, and more, and no screens or ads. With hundreds of options for ages 0 to 12, it's the perfect gift they'll go back to again and again.

Check it out at Yotoplai.com. Thank you.