Why Britain? Preconditions for Industrial Takeoff

The Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain around 1760-1780 and unfolded across the entire nineteenth century in successive waves. Several converging factors explain why it started there rather than anywhere else. Britain possessed abundant reserves of coal and iron, the essential raw materials of mechanized industry, while its political system, with secure private property and less arbitrary taxation than on the continent, encouraged productive investment. Britain's colonial and commercial expansion supplied both external markets and raw materials, cotton above all, and financial institutions such as the Bank of England, founded in 1694, had matured early enough to supply credit and capital for investment. The relative political stability that followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688 stood in sharp contrast to the instability of other continental powers.