CAGE Economic History

Why was industrial modernity born in Europe and not, say, China? This is one of the most consequential questions about the origins of the modern world. Yet asking “why Europe” can mislead. The Industrial Revolution was not a European event. It was a British event. So why was the steam engine invented in Britain, and not France or Italy?Oxford professor Robert Allen has worked for decades trying to understand this question. Allen believes that to understand the path to modernity, we must forget grand generalisations about the West. Instead, he asks us to zoom in on two very specific dynamics that shaped the British economy in the 1700s: cheap fuel and expensive workers. Together, they jolted Britain into a path where ever more work was streamlined with the help of machines and fossil fuels — a path that we are still walking on, with AI and robotics simply the latest sightings on this long march of modernity.In this episode, we discuss the surprising revelations that led Allen to his theory. We discuss the reasons that British wages were high, and we discuss recent scholarship suggesting that this wasn’t the case–or at least, was not the cause for the Industrial Revolution. We also discuss the more humane side of wages, tracing the history of worker wellbeing from the Black Death to today. As always in this series, we finish with our guests’ reflections on the future.LINKS AND REFERENCESDo you prefer reading to listening? You can find⁠ a summarised essay ⁠of this conversation, with a bibliography, at our series page: ⁠https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/news/podcasts/⁠EPISODE INFOGuest: Robert C. Allen (Nuffield College, University of Oxford and NYU Abu Dhabi)   ⁠⁠⁠Host: Ilari Mäkelä (⁠⁠On Humans⁠⁠)Contact: ⁠[email protected] DIVERGENCE: THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLDThis episode is part of a series, produced by Warwick University’s ⁠CAGE Research Centre⁠ in collaboration with ⁠On Humans.⁠ The series searches for explanations to why Western Europe and North America overtook China and India as the richest regions of the modern world. Guided by six expert guests, including a winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, we approach this topic with balance and breadth, exploring everything from colonialism and fossil fuels to science and technology. 1 | Why the West? Colonies, fossil fuels, and lessons from China (Kenneth Pomeranz)2 | Did science and the Enlightenment give Europe the edge? (Joel Mokyr)  3 | Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain? (Robert Allen)  4 | What happened in the East? China, Japan, and the other path to prosperity (Debin Ma)5 | The big picture: Measuring the origins of the modern world (Bishnupriya Gupta and Stephen Broadberry)NAMES MENTIONEDJames E. Thorold Rogers | Kenneth Pomeranz | Joel Mokyr | Jane Humphries | Daniel Defoe | Bradford J. (Brad) DeLong | Branko Milanovic | Daron Acemogly | Oded GalorKEYWORDSEconomics | History | Global Economic History | Industrial Revolution | Age of Inventions | Steam engine| European Miracle | British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective | Wage history | History of labour | Social history | Comparative development | Meiji Japan | Spinning Jenny | Industrial Policy | History of Technology | History of Inventions 

"The Industrial Revolution happened after the Scientific Revolution,” says Joel Mokyr, a winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Economics. “And that is probably not a coincidence.” In this episode, Mokyr explores the many surprising ways in which science contributed to Europe’s economic rise. And it wasn’t just science. Europe’s culture was going through a broader change, with less emphasis on venerating the ancients and more desire to solve practical problems. But how much did science actually contribute to the Industrial Revolution? And how much praise do Enlightenment figures deserve today? We discuss this and much more in this episode. As always in this series, we finish with our guests’ reflections on the challenges of our future.LINKS AND REFERENCESDo you prefer reading to listening? You can find a summarised essay of this conversation, with a bibliography, at our series page: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/news/podcasts/GREAT DIVERGENCE: THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLDThis episode is part of a series, produced by Warwick University’s CAGE Research Centre in collaboration with On Humans. The series searches for explanations to why Western Europe and North America overtook China and India as the richest regions of the modern world. Guided by six expert guests, including a winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, we approach this topic with balance and breadth, exploring everything from colonialism and fossil fuels to science and technology. 1 | Why the West? Colonies, fossil fuels, and lessons from China (Kenneth Pomeranz)2 | Did science and the Enlightenment give Europe the edge? (Joel Mokyr)  3 | Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain? (Robert Allen)  4 | What happened in the East? China, Japan, and the power of the state (Debin Ma)5 | What about the rest of the world? Measuring the origins of the modern economy (Bishnupriya Gupta and Stephen Broadberry)NAMES MENTIONEDJoel Mokyr | Robert Lucas | David Hume | Isaac Newton | Antoine Lavoisier | Joseph Black | James Watt | John Robison | Josiah Wedgwood | Sadi Carnot | Margaret Jacob | Evangelista Torricelli | Galileo Galilei | Blaise Pascal | Otto von Guericke | Aristotle | Denis Diderot | William Harvey | Song Yingxing | Marco Polo | Zheng He | Louis XIV | Avner Greif | Guido Tabellini | Kenneth Pomeranz | Adam Smith | Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot | Montesquieu | Voltaire | Confucius | al-Ghazali | Ptolemy | Euclid | David Ricardo | Karl Marx | Hippocrates | Galen | Xi Jinping | Joseph Needham | Nigel Farage | Joseph Stalin | Trofim Lysenko | Robert AllenKEYWORDSEconomics | History | Global Economic History | Intellectual History | Age of Inventions | Rise of the West | European Miracle | Enlightened Economy | Culture of Growth | Gift of Athena |Industrial Revolution | History of technology | History of inventions  INFOGuest: Joel Mokyr (Northwestern University)Host: Ilari Mäkelä (On Humans)Contact: [email protected]

Why did Western Europe become the richest region of the early modern world? Was the rise of the West powered by colonization, inventions, or something else entirely? And what happened to the medieval might of China and India?The term “great divergence” is increasingly used by historians who are bold enough to study this immense question, but who want to do it carefully, without falling into traditional East-West clichés. This episode marks the beginning of a five-episode series exploring the state of this research, produced by the University of Warwick’s CAGE Research Centre in collaboration with the On Humans Podcast.In this opening episode, we meet Kenneth Pomeranz, the historian of China who coined the term "great divergence" in a field-defining book of the same name. We begin by discussing Pomeranz’s groundbreaking approach and the surprising answers that he arrived at. In the second half of the episode, we zoom out and place the rise of the West into the broader story about the history of humanity – a story Pomeranz divides into four parts, with the fifth one beginning right now.LINKS AND REFERENCESDo you prefer reading to listening? You can find summary essays, bibliographies, and much more at our series page: ⁠https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/research/centres/cage/news/podcasts/⁠GREAT DIVERGENCEThe making of the modern worldThis episode is part of a series, produced by Warwick University’s ⁠CAGE Research Centre⁠ in collaboration with ⁠On Humans⁠. The series searches for explanations to why Western Europe and North America overtook China and India as the richest regions of the modern world. Guided by six expert guests, including a winner of the 2025 Nobel Prize in economics, we approach this topic with balance and breadth, exploring everything from colonialism and fossil fuels to science and technology. 1 | Why the West? Colonies, fossil fuels, and lessons from China (with Kenneth Pomeranz)2 | Did science and the Enlightenment give Europe the edge? (Joel Mokyr)  3 | Why did the Industrial Revolution happen in Britain? (Robert Allen)  4 | What happened in the East? China, Japan, and the power of the state (Debin Ma)5 | What about the rest of the world? Measuring the origins of the modern economy (Bishnupriya Gupta and Stephen Broadberry)NAMES MENTIONEDJoel Mokyr | Brad DeLong | Arthur Wigley | Jan De Vries | Robert Allen | Simon Schama | Isaac Newton | Vasco da Gama | Jonathan Spence| Anthony Wrigley | Thomas Malthus | Nate Hagens | Charles Lockyer | Marshall Hodgson | Aristotle | Plato | Jared Diamond | Adam Smith | KEYWORDS Economics | History | Global Economic History | Malthusian Economics | Fossil Fuel Economics | Economics of Colonialism | Rise of the West | European Miracle | California School of Economics | Atlantic Trade | Industrial Revolution | Second Industrial Revolution | Historic living standards INFOGuest: Kenneth Pomeranz (⁠University of Chicago⁠)Host: Ilari Mäkelä (⁠On Humans Podcast⁠)Contact: ⁠[email protected]