The Industrial Revolution is the inflection point of economic history. During all the millennia before that revolution, incomes were static and humans were poor—often hungry, inadequately clothed, ill-housed. But somehow, in the two-and-a-half centuries since humanity learned to mass produce, a large number of ordinary people have acquired more material comfort than even the wealthiest magnates of the pre-industrial era. A modern Wal-Mart would have been a place of incalculable riches to Charlemagne.
The industrial revolution’s importance as the key economic watershed makes it big game among economic historians. Some of the biggest names in the field—Arnold Toynbee, T. S. Ashton, Hobsbawm, Landes—have tried to explain its mysteries. Now Joel Mokyr, a distinguished economic historian, has published a sprawling exploration of England’s early industrial age. Mokyr is best known for The Lever of Riches, a magisterial history of technological progress, and his erudition, earned over more than three decades of studying the Industrial Revolution, is everywhere evident in his important new book. As befits a scholar of human knowledge, Mokyr’s overarching thesis is about the power of ideas. His grand idea is that the practical, avaricious inventors of the industrial revolution owed much to the academic, but worldly, philosophers of the Enlightenment.
