In order to determine whether the unprecidented economic developments of the Industrial Revolution brought advances or catastophe to the huddled masses, it is important for us to look at the conditions preceding industrialization.

For example, it would do us little good to compare wage rates between the average worker of 2009 and the average worker of 1769, to tell us whether or not conditions for the worker in 1769 were improving.

What would be more meaningful in this determination would be to compare the wage-rates between workers living in 1769 and those lviing in 1719, and possibly also those in 1669.  Such a comparison would tell us a great deal more.

There is an additional even more fundamental question that should be asked, that is relevant to this investigation.

It seems clear and there appears to be no meaningful challenge to the assertion that the Industrial Revolution began in Great Britain, roughly during the period beginning with 1760.

Why there?  And at that time?  Why didn't industrialization begin for example in France, or in Germany, or in the Ruhr Valley, where so much coal and iron ore were located?

Why didn't industrialization begin instead in Italy, which had already provided the social and economic matrix that led to the Renaissance?

Why not in Holland, Belgium, Spain, Portugal, or even in the American colonies?

The fact is that the enormous economic shift in productive procedures which began to close the door on the agrarian age and to open the door for the age of industry and mechanization, began in the British Isles.  There must be a reason.

We might ask - were the British smarter (or perhaps less smart, if we suppose that industrialization produced an injury)?  Did they have more natural resources or a better and more available labor force?  Were they hungrier?

There are certainly differences both in climates and between races or groups of human beings which might influence some particular development. 

However, when we ask questions of this sort, we can usually stipulate that whatever dissimilarities there might be between say, a British subject and and one under the king of France or Spain, the similarities are far more noteworthy than the differences.

The one factor however that appears to have made the most profound difference is the relative amount of freedom which individuals experienced in Britain, as contrasted to the amount of personal liberty available to individuals in any other country in Europe or elsewhere.

This freedom in Britain was not an instantaneous development, and owed itself to a long series of historic events and developments.  Which we shall now undertake to examine.

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