Breakthrough—The Industrial Revolution.......................................

LECTURE

Now, something also happens to the nature of land ownership.

Increasingly, the land vacated by peasants was taken over by large

landowners who farmed it for pro¿ t. In Britain, this transfer of land

from small pockets of peasant farming to much larger areas, farmed

more commercially, was dominated by the idea of enclosures.

B

y 1700 many elements of modernity seemed to be in place, yet
global rates of innovation remained slow. This lecture describes the
breakthrough to modernity after 1700. It focuses on one country,
Britain, where the transformation has been studied most intensively. To
understand these changes we need statistics. First, we discuss estimates of
changes in total global production from 1500–1998. What do these estimates
show? First, they show an astonishing increase in total production: Between
1500 and 2000, global production increased by 135 times. Second, the
increases really became evident in the 19th century and were most striking
in the 20th century. Increasing production allowed population to multiply
by almost 14 times in the same period. Once again, this is an accelerating
process. Particularly striking is the fact that production rose faster than
population. In other words, more goods and services were being produced
per person. Production per person increased by about 10 times between
1500 and 1998. Once more, this is an accelerating trend. These ¿ gures show
that in the Modern era, rates of innovation have begun to outstrip rates of
population growth, promising to make Malthusian crises a thing of the past.

A second set of ¿ gures illustrates how these changes transformed the global
geography of wealth and power. Here we compare the combined production
of Britain and the U.S. (two major powers of the emerging Atlantic hub zone)
with the combined production of India and China (the ancient economic
heartlands of the pre-modern world). In 1750, India and China accounted
for almost 60% of global production, while Britain and the U.S. accounted
for just 2% of global production (Christian, Maps of Time, p. 366). In
1830, India and China still accounted for just under 50%, while the U.S.
and Britain accounted for 13%. The relationship changes drastically in the