Did the Industrial begin in the US or England?

Answer 1

The industrial revolution began in England. It started, quietly, in the fourteenth century. Columbus discovered America at the end of the fifteenth century, and colonisation of North America didn't really start until late in the sixteenth century.

The early colonists took almost no part in the industrial revolution; they couldn't. They had their hands more than full with clearing land and planting crops, building houses, barns and stables, and setting up the basic cottage industries of dairies, blacksmith shops and farriers, wheelwrights and wainwrights, spinners and weavers, tanners and cobblers, and with luck a doctor and a schoolmaster.

Even when the industrial revolution was well under way, it could not be quickly and easily transported to the colonies. Certainly colonists were getting pretty well organised, as King George found out in 1776, but the industrial revolution required more than just brains, hard work, and organisation. It needed an infrastructure.

The industrial revolution needed steam; steam needed fuel (preferably coal) and iron. Iron needed iron ore with lots of coal to smelt it. Coal and iron ore needed to be found and a transportation system set up to bring iron ore and coal together. This tangle of interdependent necessities had been solved in England over several centuries, almost by accident.

The USA had to lift itself up by its own bootstraps; by the early nineteenth century the US economy had reached critical mass, and in the early twentieth century the USA became the leading economy in the world. Almost the whole of the industrial revolution cake was baked in England, a land full of great inventors, but the cherry on top was put there by Henry Ford.