What are the explanations for Britain becoming the first industrial nation?

Answer 1

Answer-Agriculture, enclosures 1630's onwards (removal of common land)

-Natural Resources, coal, metals, the sea

-Urbanization gathering pace in the 18th century

-Communications, roads, canals, railway (late)

-Population growth ( fast, but not unique)

-Shift in the nature of economy

-Slave trade, this is contentious but viable for financial reasons

-Tecnological advances

-Stable political system, no threat of revolution.

-Non interventional government. By not doing anything they allowed the 'Industrial Revolution' to happen. No legislation until 1833.

Answer

Although many aspects of the British Industrial Revolution are still matters for scholarly debate, it is generally agreed that the industrial changes that did occur grew out of a long process of development. First, the expanding Atlantic economy of the eighteenth century served mercantilist Britain remarkably well. The colonial empire that Britain built augmented by a strong position in Latin America and in the African slave trade, provided a growing maker for British manufactured goods. Britain also had many water ways; a canal-building boom greatly enhanced this natural advantage. England and Wales has enormous deposits of iron and coal, resources that would be critical raw materials in Europe's early industrial age. Agriculture played a central role in bringing about the Industrial Revolution in Britain. English farmers were second to the Dutch in productivity in 1700, and they were continually adopting new methods of farming as the century went on. The result, a period of bountiful crops and low food prices. Britain has other assets that helped give rise to industrial leadership. Britain had an effective central bank and well-developed credit markets. Britain had long had a large class of hired agricultural laborers, rural proletarians whose numbers were further increased by the second great round of enclosures in the late eighteenth century.