Industrialization without Revolution: the French Case

This chapter begins a series of individual country studies of the macroeconomic aspects of the industrial revolution. The broad proposition is that each of the major European economies actually faced roughly similar economic pressures during the period 1700 to 1910, but that economic endowments, population growth and the political style of the individual countries sometimes produced distinctively different responses to the economic pressures unleashed by the industrial revolution. Even so, the parallels are obvious, since not only did Western Europe lead the way toward industrialization, but the nations of the group considered here did so in ways that are actually strikingly similar on the whole. This, in itself, is sufficient to suggest that broad models — macroeconomic models in this case — might produce broadly similar results across countries. After all, the countries considered are almost the complete set of advanced countries at the time of the first industrial revolution and hence were not subject to domination economically, except among themselves.