You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation. This edition went out to over 15,600 subscribers. To support my work, you can upgrade your subscription here: One of the weird things about Britain, despite its being the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution, is that its financial infrastructure was for a long time remarkably backward. Its “Financial Revolution”, by which both people and the state began to borrow at ever lower interest rates, only really took off in the early eighteenth century long after London’s extraordinary growth in 1550-1650, when it had suddenly expanded eightfold to become one of Europe’s most important commercial hubs. Indeed, even for much of the late seventeenth century, England lacked many of the most basic financial institutions that had been used for decades and decades by their most important rival and trading partner, the Dutch Republic.
There is a strong ethical case to be made for reparations to descendants of American slaves. MIT economic historian Peter Temin’s recent book “Never Together” (2022, Cambridge University Press) and William Darity and A. Kirsten Mullin’s “From Here to.
Welcome to the Rise of Steel part II. We previously looked at the early stages of industrialization of iron and steelmaking, between roughly 1200 and 1850. To briefly recap, making steel was an involved, multistep process. Iron would first be smelted from iron ore in a blast furnace, resulting in high-carbon pig iron. This pig iron was then placed in a special furnace (initially a finery furnace, later a puddling furnace) to remove the carbon and other impurities, resulting in wrought iron. Wrought iron bars would then be placed into clay chests next to sources of carbon and heated for a period of several days, allowing the iron to gradually reabsorb carbon, producing “blister steel.” The methods varied in their specifics across time and place, but this was the general process in western Europe.
One of the defining characteristics of the modern world is the ubiquity of steel. Nearly every product of industrial civilization relies on steel, either as a component or as part of the equipment used to produce it. Without it, Vaclav Smil notes in “Still the Iron Age”, modern life would largely be impossible:
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