The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [94]
British exceptionalism
It was Britain’s fate to escape the quasi-Malthusian trap into which Japan, Ireland and Denmark fell. The reasons are many and debatable, but here it is worth noting a surprising demographic factor. Britain, more than any other country, had unintentionally prepared itself for industrial life in an elemental, human way. For centuries – leaving out the aristocrats (who left fewer heirs because they died from falling off horses) – the relatively rich had more children than the relatively poor. On average a merchant in Britain who left £1,000 in his will had four surviving children, while a labourer who left £10 had only two – this was in around 1600, but the differential was similar at other dates. Such differential reproduction happened in China, too, but to a much lesser extent. Because there was little or no increase in the standard of living between 1200 and 1700, this overbreeding by the rich meant there was constant downward mobility. Gregory Clark has shown from legal records that rare surnames of the poor survived much less well than rare surnames of the rich.
By 1700, therefore, in Britain most of the poor were actually the descendants of the rich. They had perhaps carried down with them into the working classes many of the habits and customs of the rich: literacy, for example, numeracy and perhaps industriousness or financial prudence. This theory accounts especially well for the otherwise puzzling rise in literacy during the early modern period. It may also account for the steady decline in violence. Your chances of being a victim of homicide in England fell from 0.3 per thousand in 1250 to 0.02 per thousand in 1800: you were ten times more likely to be killed in the earlier period.
Fascinating as this demographic discovery is, it cannot fully explain the industrial revolution. The same was not nearly as true of Holland in its golden age; and it would, for example, struggle to explain China’s rapid and successful industrialisation after 1980 – in the wake of a policy of deliberate murder and humiliation of the literate and the bourgeois in the Cultural Revolution.
What Europe achieved after 1750 – uniquely, precariously, unexpectedly – was an increasing division of labour that meant that each person could produce more each year and therefore could consume more each year, which created the demand for still more production. Two things, says the historian Kenneth Pomeranz, were vital to Europe’s achievement: coal and America. The ultimate reason that the British economic take-off kept on going where the Chinese – or for that matter, the Dutch, Italian, Arab, Roman, Mauryan, Phoenician or Mesopotamian – did not was because the British escaped the Malthusian fate. The acres they needed to provide themselves with corn, cotton, sugar, tea and fuel just kept on materialising elsewhere. Here are Pomeranz’s numbers: in around 1830, Britain had seventeen million acres of arable land, twenty-five million acres of pastureland and less than two million acres of forest. But she consumed sugar from the West Indies equivalent (in calories) to the produce of at least another two million acres of wheat; timber from Canada equivalent to another one million acres of woodland, cotton from the Americas equivalent to the wool produced on an astonishing twenty-three million acres of pastureland, and coal from underground equivalent to fifteen million acres of forest. Without these vast ‘ghost acres’ Britain’s industrial revolution, which was only just starting to raise living standards in 1830, would have already shuddered to a halt for lack of calories, cotton or coal.
Not only did the Americas ship back their produce; they also allowed a safety valve for emigration to relieve the Malthusian pressure of the population boom induced by industrialisation. Germany, in particular, as it industrialised rapidly in the nineteenth century, saw a huge increase in the birth rate, but a flood