The Industrial Revolution and the Atlantic Economy

In recent years, the idea that Britain experienced an industrial revolution has been widely questioned. The new economic history, with its emphasis on quantative techniques and macro-economic indices, has tended to regard Britain's transformation as a gradual and modest affair which does not deserve the term revolution'. The Industrial Revolution and the Atlantic Economy takes issue with this revisionism. Brinley Thomas argues that the industrial revolution was an epoch making change in the energy base through the substitution of fossil fuels for organic materials, thereby ushering in the modern age of coal, iron and petroleum. Brinley Thomas, pioneer of the organic approach to economic growth, places the industrial revolution within the context of the Atlantic economy. He argues that an energy crisis in the seventeenth century put Britain on a technological path that enabled her to solve a more severe crisis in the second half of the eighteenth century. The intensity of this second crisis was due to a population explosion and heavy pressure on supplies of timber and charcoal iron caused by Britain's commitment as head of the Atlantic economy. Increasing dependence on foreign sources of organic energy was not a solution: there had to be an industrial revolution. The fulfilment for Britain s revolution came in the second half of the nineteenth century when Britain was able to overcome the constraints of her limited agricultural area by exchanging the products of the industrial revolution for food and raw materials and sustain dramatic population growth. The Industrial Revolution and the Atlantic Economy offers a provocative substitute to the commonplace notions of a gradual and incremental industrial revolution in Britain.