375,000 employed in the industry nearly 90 per cent were in formal factory-
based production. The industry was extensively mechanized with 21 million
spindles and 250,000 power looms being driven by 71,000 horsepower of
steam (Inikori, 1989). This explanation begs the question of why Britain was
so innovative in the decades after the 1760s.
Traditional ‘internal’ arguments hold that ‘much of the dynamism of the
West rests on what was done in the Middle Ages to prepare its material, insti-
tutional, cultural and psychological foundations’ (Roberts, 1985:73). David
Landes (1998) traces the achievements of the ‘heroic entrepreneur’ to a long
tradition of intellectual freedom going back to medieval Europe where the
authority of the church was limited by competing secular authorities (kings
and free cities) and religious dissent from below. This facilitated the rise of
rational investigation, learning and experiment within Europe. The first
European university was established in Bologna in 1080 and by 1500 there
were 70 such centres of secular learning in Western Europe, largely free from
church control. Gutenberg produced his first book in Mainz in 1455 and by
1500 there were 220 printing presses and Western Europe had produced 8
million books. By the mid-seventeenth century the ‘scientific revolution’ had
been firmly established in North-western Europe, culminating in the 1687
publication of Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica, which put forward
theories of motion and gravitational attraction that were consistent with the
motions of the known universe. The new techniques of Descartes, von Leibniz
and Newton were valuable for expressing theories in mathematical form. New
instruments were developed,including telescopes, microscopes, thermome-
ters,barometers, and clocks. New bodies, such as the British Royal Society, the
French Académie des Sciences, the Paris Observatoire and the Royal
Greenwich Observatory provided fora for the dissemination and discussion of
scientific results (Landes, 1998; Maddison, 2007).
A second internal explanation for the origin of the Western lead revolves
around good institutions promoting investment and innovation. North and
Thomas (1973) argue that the establishment of property rights accounted for
‘the rise of the West’. The English monarchy was defeated in the Civil War of
the 1640s and again in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the exercise of
arbitrary and confiscatory power by the Crown was subsequently curtailed
through greater judicial independence, and ultimately the supremacy of
Parliament. The long-term consequences were the increased security of prop-
erty rights, greater incentives to undertake long-term investments and ulti-
mately the onset of the Industrial Revolution. France and Spain had absolutist
monarchies that took longer to create a legal system and property rights exist-
ing independently of the Crown.
The alternative ‘external’ view is that the East enabled the rise of the West
through the two processes of diffusion and assimilation/appropriation. In this
view, first,Easterners created a global economy and global communications
network between 500 and 1500, and second, the more advanced Eastern
‘resource portfolios’ (ideas, institutions and technologies) spread to the West
160 Patterns and Determinants of Economic Growth