Alex Mercer: Jordan, quick question before we start — did you know British wages in the 1700s were genuinely higher than almost anywhere else in Europe? I only landed on that recently and it reframed something for me.
Jordan Hale: Wait — like, significantly higher, or marginally?
Alex Mercer: Significantly. And that's actually the crux of where we're going today — the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain, around 1760, and the genuinely unresolved fight over what caused it.
Jordan Hale: Right, and so — this is the thing I find so wild. Britain had *both* at once: abundant cheap coal *and* all this Enlightenment intellectual ferment. And the question that historians, like, cannot stop arguing about is which one of those actually drove industrialization. Was it the price math, or was it the ideas?
Alex Mercer: And the two camps have names?
Jordan Hale: Sort of. Robert Allen is the materialist — he argues that high wages plus cheap coal made labor-saving machinery a rational investment in Britain before anywhere else. Pure arithmetic. Joel Mokyr pushes back and says that coal alone couldn't produce industrialization, you needed a culture of useful knowledge tying science to actual invention. It's almost like — one guy is saying the kindling caused the fire, and the other is saying no, someone had to decide to light it.
Alex Mercer: Both have evidence. So why is this still an open question?
Jordan Hale: That's exactly what I want to dig into — because I don't think it's just historians being indecisive. I think something real is unresolved about how big historical changes actually happen.
Alex Mercer: The part that breaks the clean version, though — Marx and Engels called this decades before anyone ran the numbers. Historical materialism: economic structures move first, ideas follow. They'd say Allen just proved what they already assumed. The price signal is the cause; the Enlightenment enthusiasm is the justification that gets written after.
Jordan Hale: Okay but — and this is where Mokyr genuinely complicates it — France. France had Enlightenment ideas, arguably more radical ones after 1789, and France had *some* coal. So if Marx is just right and material conditions dominate, why did France industrialize a full generation later than Britain?
Alex Mercer: That's a real problem for the pure materialist case.
Jordan Hale: It is! And Allen's answer is actually — wait, it's almost uncomfortably simple — France's coal was geographically distant from its manufacturing centers, and French wages were lower, so the arithmetic never flipped the same way. The price signal never fired. Which is, like, genuinely predictive. His framework actually calls the timeline.
Alex Mercer: So Mokyr's counter has to be more than just 'ideas matter.' What does he actually pin it to?
Jordan Hale: His Industrial Enlightenment — the idea that Britain built this specific culture of useful knowledge where scientific inquiry was connected to practical invention. Not philosophy for philosophy's sake. You know, people who were reading natural philosophy were also talking to instrument makers, engine builders. That pipeline didn't exist the same way elsewhere.
Alex Mercer: I think that's where James Watt becomes the test case. Because Watt isn't just some lone genius — he's working inside a Glasgow scientific community, he has access to workshops, he has Mokyr's intellectual infrastructure. But he's also responding to a very real cost equation: coal near the mines is basically free, and the miners need pumps. Both conditions have to be true simultaneously.
Jordan Hale: Right — and neither one alone gets you there. Like, cheap coal without Watt's engineering knowledge is just... a hole in the ground. And Watt's knowledge without the price incentive is, I don't know, a clever demonstration that nobody funds.
Alex Mercer: Which means, to some extent, Engels and Marx got the direction right — material conditions set the stage — but Mokyr's pointing at something they underweighted. The steam engine needed both the arithmetic and the culture. That's not a comfortable synthesis. That's just what the evidence shows.
Jordan Hale: But here's what actually breaks the clean version of Allen's thesis — by 1840, you've got industrialization spreading into parts of Europe and the United States that didn't have Britain's wage structure or coal proximity. Like, that's the thing that kept nagging at me. If the price arithmetic is the whole story, those regions shouldn't have gotten there on anything close to the same timeline. But they did.
Alex Mercer: Hold on. By 1840 — that's only eighty years.
Jordan Hale: Eighty years, yeah. And the conditions weren't replicated. So either Allen's framework is incomplete, or — I mean, wait, actually — the thing spreading wasn't the original conditions, it was the knowledge. The technique. The steam engine blueprint doesn't care where the coal seam is once you already know how to build it.
Alex Mercer: That's basically Mokyr winning the second round even if Allen won the first.
Jordan Hale: Right — and that's where E.P. Thompson comes in for me, because Thompson's point is that workers' consciousness co-evolved with economic change. Not after it. So you can't separate the material moment from the ideological one even at the level of the individual person living through it. Picture a textile mill owner in Lancashire in 1765 — her spinners want higher wages, there's cheap coal a few miles off, and she's absorbed enough natural philosophy to think systematizing production is just rational. She's not choosing between Allen and Mokyr on a Tuesday. She's feeling both at once.
Alex Mercer: That's exactly where the two camps blur into each other — same person, same moment, living both explanations.
Jordan Hale: And that's what makes the monocausal explanation collapse. You know, it's not that one cause is wrong — it's that the person on the ground couldn't have disentangled them either.
Alex Mercer: Which means, to some extent, Mokyr's Industrial Enlightenment is what made the spread possible — the knowledge becomes portable even when the coal isn't.
Jordan Hale: And what that sets up — the part we haven't touched yet — is how the factory system then started generating its own ideological feedback. Free-enterprise arguments, labor movements pushing back. The technology didn't just use the ideas; it started producing new ones. That loop is where this gets genuinely strange.
Alex Mercer: That loop matters — because the factory didn't just *use* free-enterprise arguments. It generated them. The rhetoric around free enterprise intensified *after* factory production existed, not before. Which means ideology isn't a precondition here. It's an output.
Jordan Hale: Okay, but is that just rationalization? Like — factory owners needed to defend what they were already doing, so they grabbed whatever Enlightenment language was sitting around. That's not ideology being generated, that's ideology being *borrowed.*
Alex Mercer: I'd buy that — except E.P. Thompson complicates it. Workers' consciousness was co-evolving simultaneously. The same factory system that produced free-enterprise arguments also produced organized labor. That's not rationalization. That's the technology generating ideological *conflict*, both sides at once.
Jordan Hale: Both sides — from the same machine. That's genuinely strange.
Alex Mercer: Think about a mill owner in Manchester, 1790, testifying before Parliament against wage regulations — he's reaching for Adam Smith, property rights, rational markets. And on the street outside, his own workers are forming combinations, reaching for a completely different set of ideas about labor and dignity. Same steam engine, two incompatible ideologies, neither of which fully existed before the factory.
Jordan Hale: And then those ideologies — both of them — turn around and shape what happens *next*. Free-enterprise arguments legitimate another wave of expansion. Labor critiques force legal changes that reshape working conditions. So the technology isn't just responding to material conditions anymore, it's now operating inside an ideological environment it helped create.
Alex Mercer: Which is mutual reinforcement. Mokyr's Industrial Enlightenment, Allen's price signals — they're both inputs into a loop that then runs forward on its own logic.
Jordan Hale: Right — but, I mean, wait, does the loop tell us which *moved first*? Because contemporary growth economists basically land on complementary explanations and then... stop. There's no mechanism for actually weighing one against the other at any specific moment. That hierarchy stays unresolved.
Alex Mercer: I think that's the productive part, not the frustrating part. The causal hierarchy is unresolved because the system genuinely doesn't have a clean first mover — and pretending it does is what makes monocausal explanations keep failing.
Jordan Hale: And that's — I mean, that's the part that actually lands for me. Monocausal explanation doesn't just fail because historians are picky. It fails structurally. Like, if you come out of this saying 'coal caused the Industrial Revolution' or 'the Enlightenment caused it,' the policy implication goes completely different directions. One says invest in infrastructure and resource access, the other says invest in education and intellectual culture. Those aren't the same bet.
Alex Mercer: Which is why it matters what we get right — or wrong — about the past. AI adoption, climate inaction, the digital economy. Same question running underneath all of it: is the technology driving the ideology, or is the ideology driving what we do with the technology? We're living inside the same feedback loop Watt was.
Jordan Hale: You started this whole thing asking whether British wages were significantly higher — and the answer turned out to be yes, but also: that only explains so much. The wages set the stage. They didn't write the play. I think that's where I've landed.
