Pursuit of Albion
W
hen I was a student I learned that homo sapiens is an animal
species of single origin: all humans today, of whatever color or
size, are descended from a common ancestor, split off from a larger ho-
minid genus some millions of years ago. The same is true of the species
industrial society. All examples, however different, are descended from
the common British predecessor.
The Industrial Revolution in England changed the world and the re
lations of nations and states to one another. For reasons of power, if not
of wealth, the goals and tasks of political economy were transformed.
The world was now divided between one front-runner and a highly di
verse array of pursuers. It took the quickest of the European "follower
countries" something more than a century to catch up (see Table
16.1).
Some practitioners of the "New Economic History," beguiled by
measurement and impressed by puffish numbers of French commercial
and industrial growth during the eighteenth century, have argued that
British priority in industrialization was something of an accident and
that the Industrial Revolution might as easily have occurred across the
Channel. France, after all, was a bigger, more populous country, with
a greater product in the aggregate, and it was overall equal to Britain