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Great Divergence

Wrigley (1988) — Continuity, Chance and Change

Citation. Wrigley, E. A. Continuity, Chance and Change: The Character of the Industrial Revolution in England. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Summary

Section titled “Summary”

The book in which Wrigley first articulated the framework that he would later develop in Energy and the English Industrial Revolution (2010). Continuity, Chance and Change introduces the distinction between the advanced organic economy (the most economically developed pre-industrial economies, running on solar-flow energy through agriculture, animal traction, water, wind, and woodfuel) and the mineral-based energy economy (one able to draw on fossil energy stocks, escaping the land-based ceiling on per-capita output). Wrigley argues the Industrial Revolution is best understood as the transition between these two regimes, and that this transition is the load-bearing structural feature of the IR.

The book combines historical-demographic and energy-accounting approaches characteristic of the Cambridge Group’s broader work. The framework Wrigley introduced here — that pre-industrial economies face a hard land-based ceiling that only fossil-energy substitution can break — became standard vocabulary in subsequent IR debates, particularly in dialogue with Pomeranz’s coal-and-resource-geography arguments.

Key claims

Section titled “Key claims”
  • All pre-industrial economies were organic: their energy inputs (food, fodder, firewood, charcoal, water and wind power) competed with food production for finite cultivable land.
  • The most advanced organic economies (Dutch Republic, late-17th-century England) approached the upper bound of what organic economies can achieve.
  • The Industrial Revolution is best characterized as the transition from organic to mineral (fossil-coal) energy supply.
  • Britain’s coal endowment — accessible, near navigable water — was the load-bearing geographic precondition for this transition.
  • The IR is therefore an energy revolution first, with technological and institutional changes flowing from the energy transition rather than the reverse.