Introduction: The Long Road to he Industrial Revolution and the Dutch Republic and Britain: The First Modern Economy, The Making of a World Economy, and the British Industrial Revolution,
ca. 1550-1850

Gerard M Koot
Professor of History Emeritus
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

This web site grew out of seventeen National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminars for Teachers that I directed from 1993 to 2016 at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, the University of Nottingham, the Institute of Historical Research in London, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in Wassenaar, and Webster University in Leiden. The site includes primary and secondary scholarly resources, and maps and illustrations for both teachers and students on the creation of the world’s first modern economy, the first industrial revolution, and a European led world-economy.

The origin of industrial society has long been associated with the Industrial Revolution in Britain between about the 1760s to the 1840s. Historians have been uncomfortable in labeling such a long period as a ‘revolution’ since that term was coined for such political upheavals as the French Revolution. Moreover, it was not until the building of the railroads in the 1830s and 1840s, and the triumph of steam power over waterpower in factories in the 1850s, that industrialization fundamentally changed a few regions of the world into what have been labeled as modern societies. During the late twentieth century economic historians demonstrated that economic growth during the industrial revolution was much slower than earlier calculations. At the same time early modern European historians suggested that the world’s first modern economic growth, defined as long-term and self-sustained growth, can be traced to a region of northwestern Europe around the North Sea, and particularly to the leading economy of the seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic. Britain acquired economic preeminence in the eighteenth century and became the first industrial nation by the early nineteenth century. Between 1600 and 1800 both the Dutch Republic and Britain played the leading roles in constructing an international capitalist and imperial trade network that constituted the first great wave of globalization.

The discussion of the making of the first commercial and industrial world-economies lies at the center of contemporary meta-historical narratives in world history. The most contentious of these narratives is the question of why Europe was so successful in organizing the first modern and industrial world-economies. The rise of the Asian economies after World War II, and especially the recent spectacular industrialization of China, have resulted in the questioning of earlier economic, cultural and imperial explanations of the origin of Europe’s economic success. While Asia, and especially China, developed large scale industry a half millennium before the West, and a widespread Asian trade system operated in Asian waters, it was the Europeans who first knit the Asian, African, European and New World economies into an integrated world-economy and created the world’s first market and industrial societies. The Portuguese and the Spanish were the pioneers in this endeavor, but it was the Dutch and the British who reaped its greatest profits. Whether one interprets Northwestern Europe’s leadership as a tribute to the genius of free human beings, or as the enslavement of the human spirit by Western materialism and imperialism, or as something in between, it remains one of the crucial contributions of the West to the world’s historical development. Further, the commerce and industry that propelled European goods and guns around the globe also brought in its wake the values of a ‘bourgeois’ civilization, such as constitutional government, religious toleration, and economic and social individualism that challenged cultural, social and political values around the world. Although current curriculum guidelines and textbooks in the United States commonly feature the building of a British empire and Britain’s industrial revolution as important topics to be studied in schools and colleges, they pay little attention to the regional context that was essential to Britain’s worldwide success, or to the earlier primacy of the Dutch Republic.

This web site provides scholarly resources for students and teachers to investigate important questions on European aspects of this discussion. Why did the societies and economies of the Dutch Republic and Britain allow Northwest Europe to become the organizer of an integrated European and then a world- economy? How did this region develop a commercial and industrial society? Was it essential that they did so within a relatively religiously tolerant, politically free and ‘bourgeois’ society, as most liberal Anglo-American economic historians have argued? Or was their success primarily achieved by the state’s pursuit of power, mercantilist regulations, war, and expropriation, as those sympathetic to the arguments of many socialist historians and historical economists have suggested? Should we agree with a common interpretation that the Dutch Republic attained its leadership primarily through the pursuit of commercial profit, while Britain reached its pre- eminence through state power? What should we think of the view, which Friedrich List argued so powerfully in The National System of Political Economy (1844), that, once Britain had vanquished its rivals in the Napoleonic Wars, and had become not only the world’s financial center but also the ‘workshop of the world,’ it sought to perpetuate its dominance through an ‘empire of free trade’? Historians of early modern Europe have long challenged the view that the decisive break between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ society came with the French and industrial revolutions. Instead they have argued that the process of modernization was much more gradual and rooted in the earlier creation of a market society and world-economy. Taking their cue from the impact of globalization on the economic structure and prosperity of today’s regional and national economies, as well as from new interpretations of the British Industrial Revolution and the economy of the Dutch Republic, some have argued that the “first modern economy” was not Britain’s but that of the United Provinces. In the process, they have challenged the long held view that an economy cannot be modern without going through an industrial revolution akin to what Britain experienced. This web site will not provide set answers to these questions, but offers resources so that readers can seek answers to these questions rooted in specific historical knowledge rather than those based on abstract theories.

The role of Northwestern Europeans in the building of a world-economy and industrial society is not only intrinsically interesting, but also is relevant to contemporary arguments about globalization. Debates about the role of the state in the economy and the benefits to be derived, and the costs to be borne, by different groups, regions and nations from economic growth are often rooted in cultural values and economic arguments that can be traced directly to those first voiced during the world’s first industrial revolution. Economic ideas and theories first articulated in Northwestern Europe in the mercantilist and early industrial period continue to be used in contemporary debates and form the classical core of modern orthodox economics. Contemporary debates about the impact of globalization on national wealth, power and income distribution echo those first heard between mercantilists and proponents of free trade during the early modern period. Historical interpretations of Britain’s experience of industrialization, in particular, have long been used to define what it means to be a ‘modern’ society and continue to be used in current debates about the social and economic value of the welfare state or a robust individualism. Contemporary discussions about gender roles also often cite historical examples drawn from ‘traditional’ European society to support ‘traditional’ gender roles. All these debates can benefit from more knowledge about the history of these societies cited as evidence to justify contemporary public policy choices.