Why Industrial Revolution there and then? The question is really twofold. First, why and how did any country break through the crust of habit and conventional knowledge to this new mode of production? After all, history shows other examples of mechanization and use of inanimate power without producing an industrial revolution…
Second, why did Britain do it and not some other nation?
“Turning to the first, I would stress buildup – then accumulation of knowledge and knowhow; and breakthrough – reaching and passing thresholds…
1) The growing autonomy of intellectual inquiry
The fight for intellectual autonomy went back to medieval conflicts over the validity and authority of tradition. Europe’s dominant view was that of the Roman Church – a conception of nature defined by Holy Scripture, as reconciled with, rather than modified by, the wisdom of the ancients. Much of this found definition in Scholasticism…
Into this closed world , new ideas necessarily came as an insolence and a potential subversion – as they did in Islam. In Europe, however, acceptance was eased by practical usefulness and protected by rulers who sought to gain by novelty an advantage over rivals. It was not an accident, then, that Europe came to cultivate a vogue for the new and a sense of progress – a belief that, contrary to the nostalgia of antiquity for an earlier grace (Paradise Lost), the Golden Age (utopia) actually lay ahead; and that people were now better off, smarter, more capable than before…
2) The development of unity in disunity in the form of a common, implicitly adversarial method, that is the creation of a language of proof recognized, used, and understood across national and cultural boundaries.
Thus Roger Bacon at Oxford in the thirteenth century: “All categories depend on a knowledge of quantity, concerning which mathematics treats, and therefore the whole power of logic depends on mathematics.” This marriage of observation and precise description, in turn, made possible replication and verification. Nothing so effectively undermined authority. It mattered little who said what, but what was said not perception but reality. Do I see what you say you saw? …
It was not until Galileo Galilei, that experiment became a system. This entailed not only repeated and repeatable observation, but deliberate simplification as a window on the complex. Want to find the relations between time, speed, and distance-covered by falling objects? Slow them by rolling them down an inclined plane.
3) The invention of invention, that is, the routinization of research and its diffusion…Scientific method and knowledge paid off in applications – most importantly in power technology. During these centuries, the older power devices – the windmill and water wheel – got continuing attention, with some gain in efficiency; but the great invention would be the conversion of heat energy into work by means of steam. No technique drew so closely on experiment – a long inquiry into vacuums and air pressure that began in the sixteenth century and reached fruition in the late seventeenth in the world opf Otto von Guericke (1602-1686), Evangelista Torricelli (1608-1647), Robert Boyle (1627-1691), and Denys Papin (1647-1712), German, Italian, English, French. To be sure, the scientists of the eighteenth century could not have explained why and how a steam engine worked. That had to wait for Sadi Carnot (1796-1832) and the laws of thermodynamics. But to say that the engine anticipated knowledge is not to say that the engine builder did not draw on earlier scientific acquisitions, both substantive and methodological.
James Watt made the point. His master and mentor Joseph Black (1728-1799) did not give him the idea for the separate condenser, but working with Black gave him the practice and method to probe and resolve the issue. Even at that, the heroic inventor did not give full credit. Watt was a friend of professors in Edinburgh and Glasgow, of eminent natural philosophers in England, of scientists abroad. He knew his mathematics, did systematic experiments, calculated the thermal efficiency of steam engines; in short, built on accumulated knowledge and ideas to advance technique.
All of this took time, and that is why, in the long, the Industrial Revolution had to wait. It could not have happened in Renaissance Florence. Even less in ancient Greece. The technological basis had not yet been laid; the streams of progress had to come together.
David S. Landes: The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, , 1999, chapter 14.