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Britain profited greatly from France’s defeat in 1815, gaining the Cape of Good Hope and the strategic islands of Malta, Mauritius and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), among other territories. The blockade on trading with Britain that Napoleon had imposed on his European allies ironically served to give Britain a monopoly on overseas trade that helped it to grow even further. The new territories Britain gained after 1815 also expanded the number of markets for British goods and provided raw materials to feed its growth. By 1850, Britain dominated world trade in manufactured goods, supplying two-thirds of the globe with cotton from the industrial centres of northern England. It also dominated in related services such as shipping, finance and insurance, with the result that London became the largest city in the world. By the turn of the century, Great Britain under Queen Victoria ruled about 20% of the world’s land-mass.
From about 1830, the Industrial Revolution gradually spread from Britain throughout Europe and to the United States. There were numerous reasons why it took other countries so long to industrialise.
France was no longer a real competitor; any nascent industrial development had been interrupted by the French Revolution in 1789. The Napoleonic wars continued to hold France’s attention until its defeat in 1815, which saw the country stripped of much of its empire. Even after 1815 the country had limited coal supplies, a poor transportation structure, and a focus on agriculture, not to mention immature financial markets.
Germany, despite an abundance of coal, was still not unified, consisting of a mish-mash of 38 separate states of the former Holy Roman Empire, of which Austria and Prussia were the largest. A failure to co-operate with each other did not lend itself to national progress.
From a position of maritime supremacy and technological leadership in the 17th century, the Netherlands had begun a period of slow decline from the 18th century onwards, partly due to having bet the house on spices and slaves as opposed to the growing textile industry. The Netherlands lost its colonies in the Americas and its colonies in Asia ended up costing more to run than they produced. The Dutch were also dragged into a number of wars relating both to trade and to the succession of royal families in Europe in the 18th century. In 1795, the French overran the country under Napoleon, forcing the Dutch to pay significant sums for the garrisoning of French armies. Finally, traders to the end, Dutch investors preferred to lend to financial markets rather than to invest in industry, just when investment in industry would become the difference between a strong and a weak state.
Russia lacked a middle class, which was vital for successful industrialisation, and despite its advantage in sheer numbers, ‘remained technologically backward and economically underdeveloped. Extremes of climate and the enormous distances and poor communications partly accounted for this, but so also did severe social defects: the military absolutism of the tsars, the monopoly of education in the hands of the Orthodox Church, the venality and unpredictability of the bureaucracy, and the institution of serfdom, which made agriculture feudal and static’.92
In North America, farming and trading took precedence over industrial production until the 1820s and 1830s, and even then industry only took off in the north. For a long time the richest people in the US were those who farmed cotton in the south, and they had no incentive to reinvest their profits into machinery when they had a ready slave-labour force. Asia had the same issue: labour was so cheap that there was not the same incentive to invest in machines.
The turning point for mainland Europe in its efforts to catch up with industrialised Britain was an increase in population, which resulted in a larger market and a growing labour supply.