Sam Littlefair

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Climate and the Industrial Revolution

What caused the Industrial Revolution? Cotton? Steam engines? Science?

How about the sun?

We now know that, starting in the late 1200s, a "little ice age" a cooling climate caused famine, plague, and civil unrest, ushering in a prolonged period of warfare and labor shortage, precipitating the Protestant Reformation, the Age of Exploration, and the Enlightenment. (If you lived in Africa, Australia, Asia, or the Americas at the time, this was roundly experienced as a negative period.) This cold era was caused by reduced solar output and increased volcanic pollution.

But then, in the 1700s, the world reheated. If the cooling period caused a global geopolitical reallignment, then we would expect the warming period to have an correspondingly massive impact, right? Surprisingly, there has been very little research into the impact of this period of warming.

Brunt, Michaelowa, and Ljungqvist have all found correlations between weather and agricultural productivity. Brunt argues that climate was the largest contributing factor to England's Agricultural Revolution (which was the first stage of the Industrial Revolution). As the Agricultural Revolution increased the food supply per person, industrialists could afford more workers to staff their factories, while the wealth from the agricultural boom furnished the capital to build said factories. Agriculture remained the largest sector of the English economy until the 1840s, well into the Industrial Revolution --- so increases in agricultural productivity buoyed the entire economy.

Brunt dispells some myths about England's economic history. For one, the idea that England went through an agricultural revolution is largely an artefact of climate change, he says, as the climate swung from an unusually cold period in the 1690s to an unusually warm period in the 1850s, creating the impression of enormous improvements in agriculture technology. Those improvements were mostly a reflection of warmer weather.

Ignoring climate, most historians tend to attribute increased yields to technological improvements: mixed farming, clover, intensive ploughing, seed drilling, and turnips. Brunt argues that the first three of these innovations had no impact. Seed drilling and turnips had some impact, but by far the biggest change was the weather.

That same warming also took place on the far side of the Atlantic, where records show that growing seasons lengthened through the 1800s.

It's widely known that there was actually relatively little innovation at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The first half of the 1700s saw some innovations in weaving and mechanics, but those mainly laid the groundwork for larger innovations later in the century (the spinning ginny and the steam engine). The revolution which was defined by technological advancement was not initiated by it. Rather, an upwelling of wealth initiated an era of innovation. That wealth came from the land and the colonies (AKA other peoples' land).

In 1760, the British empire control about 5% of the Earth's surface. By 1800, 10%. By 1850, 15%. By 1900, 20% (now the largest empire in history). And by 1920, 25%.

So, it bears asking the question: was the rise of the industrial era a product of British ingenuity? Or was it the windfall of a massive empire profiting off of booming agricultural yields at the right moment in time?

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© Sam Littlefair 2025