Science and the Rise of Modern Capitalism

The relationship between the Scientific Revolution and the rise of modern capitalism is one of the most contested questions in the economic history of early modern Europe. The standard nineteenth-century account, following Karl Marx’s remarks on the role of science in the growth of capitalist production, treated the new science as a precondition for the Industrial Revolution and, by extension, for the modern capitalist economy. The more nuanced twentieth-century scholarship has stressed the complex, indirect, and contested character of the relationship, and has rejected the simple causal story. This page looks at the main lines of the modern debate, drawing on the work of Joel Mokyr (The Lever of Riches, 1990; The Enlightened Economy, 2009), Robert C. Allen (The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective, 2009), Kenneth Pomeranz (The Great Divergence, 2000), and the revisionist literature on the social and economic history of early modern Europe.

The Mokyr Thesis

The most influential modern account of the relationship between the Scientific Revolution and the rise of modern capitalism is Joel Mokyr’s The Lever of Riches: Technological Creativity and Economic Progress (Oxford University Press, 1990) and The Enlightened Economy: An Economic History of Britain 1700–1850 (Yale University Press, 2009). Mokyr’s argument is that the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century established a culture of useful knowledge that was a necessary, though not a sufficient, condition for the Industrial Revolution of the late eighteenth century. The new science produced a body of knowledge about the natural world that was, in principle, applicable to the practical problems of industry; and the new culture of useful knowledge produced a community of natural philosophers who were willing to engage with the practical problems of industry.

Mokyr’s argument is, in essence, an updated version of the standard nineteenth-century account, but with several important qualifications. The new science was not, on Mokyr’s view, the direct cause of the Industrial Revolution: most of the key technologies of the late eighteenth century were developed by practical craftsmen, not by natural philosophers, and the direct application of the new science to industrial technology was a slow and contested process. But the new science was, on Mokyr’s view, a necessary background condition: the Industrial Revolution could not have happened without the conceptual, instrumental, and cultural resources that the Scientific Revolution had made available.

The key conceptual resource was the program of the mechanical philosophy — the doctrine that the natural world is a system of matter in motion under mathematical laws, and that the phenomena of nature can in principle be explained and predicted. The mechanical philosophy, articulated by Descartes, Boyle, and Newton, provided the conceptual framework within which the new industrial technology could be developed: the steam engine, the textile machinery, the chemical industries, the precision-instrument workshops, all rested, ultimately, on the conviction that natural phenomena could be understood and manipulated by human reason.

The key instrumental resource was the set of new instruments developed in the seventeenth century: the telescope, the microscope, the barometer, the air pump, the pendulum clock, the thermoscope, the calculating machine. These instruments required, for their production, levels of precision that had not previously been attainable, and the workshops that produced them — the lens-grinders of Middelburg, the clockmakers of London, the instrument makers of Nuremberg and Augsburg — were the training grounds of the precision-engineering industry of the nineteenth century. The case of James Watt, the instrument maker at the University of Glasgow whose separate-condenser steam engine of 1769 was the decisive innovation of the early Industrial Revolution, is the standard example: Watt’s training in the precision-instrument workshops, and his subsequent engagement with the natural philosophers of Glasgow and Birmingham, was the immediate source of his capacity to develop the new engine.

The key cultural resource was the value attached to useful knowledge. The Scientific Revolution, and the Baconian program in particular, made the project of useful knowledge a central cultural value, and the cultural change made possible the long engagement of natural philosophers with the practical problems of industry. The Royal Society, the Académie des Sciences, the German mining academies, the Italian scientific societies all played the role of brokers between the natural philosophers and the practical craftsmen, and the brokering proved a major part of the cultural change that made the Industrial Revolution possible.

The Allen and Pomeranz Counter-Theses

The Mokyr thesis is, however, contested. The most important counter-theses are the work of Robert C. Allen and Kenneth Pomeranz, who argue that the relationship between science and capitalism has been substantially overstated.

Allen’s argument, in The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2009), is that the Industrial Revolution was a specifically British phenomenon, and that the British exceptionality was, in large part, a consequence of the British wage structure and the British price structure, not of the new science. The new science, on Allen’s view, was a necessary but not a sufficient condition: the new science was present in many European countries in the eighteenth century, but the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain first, and the Britishness of the revolution has to be explained by British-specific factors — the high price of labour, the availability of coal, the political stability of the post-1688 regime — that had little to do with the new learning.

Pomeranz’s argument, in The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton University Press, 2000), is that the economic divergence between western Europe and the rest of Eurasia was, in the early modern period, surprisingly small, and that the divergence did not become substantial until the late eighteenth century. The new science of the seventeenth century, on Pomeranz’s view, was one of many possible sources of economic change, and the actual economic divergence was produced, in large part, by the accident of British access to coal and to the natural resources of the Americas, not by the seventeenth-century science.

The two counter-theses are not, in fact, mutually exclusive. It is consistent with the Allen and Pomeranz arguments to hold that the new natural knowledge was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the Industrial Revolution, and that the British-specific and Atlantic-specific factors of the eighteenth century were the immediate causes of the divergence. This is, in broad terms, the consensus view of the more recent scholarship, including the work of R. J. Gordon (The Rise and Fall of American Growth, 2016), Branko Milanović (Global Inequality, 2016), and the late Walter Scheidel (Escape from Rome, 2019).

The Path from Galileo to the Boulton & Watt Works

The actual path from the Scientific Revolution to the modern capitalist economy was long, indirect, and mediated by a wide range of intermediate figures. The conceptual and instrumental resources of this new approach were necessary for the Industrial Revolution, but they were not sufficient, and the practical engagement of natural philosophers with the problems of industry was a slow and contested process. The Boulton & Watt works at Soho, near Birmingham, established in 1775, are the standard example: the firm was a partnership between Matthew Boulton, a Birmingham manufacturer with a sophisticated understanding of the new manufacturing, and James Watt, the instrument maker who had developed the separate-condenser steam engine. The firm depended, on the one hand, on the precision-instrument skills that Watt had brought from the Glasgow instrument shop, and, on the other hand, on the new business organisation that Boulton had developed in his Birmingham manufactory. The firm proved the prototype of the research-based industrial firm of the nineteenth century, and the firm depended, in turn, on the broader culture of useful knowledge that the Scientific Revolution had established.

The standard account of the Boulton & Watt works is in Jenny Uglow, The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World (Faber and Faber, 2002), and the standard account of the long path from the reformed natural philosophy to the Industrial Revolution is in Joel Mokyr, The Enlightened Economy (Yale University Press, 2009). The standard counter-view is in Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2009), and in Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence (Princeton University Press, 2000).

The Bigger Picture

The relationship between the Scientific Revolution and the rise of modern capitalism is, on balance, real but indirect. The new science produced a body of knowledge, a set of instruments, a culture of useful inquiry, and a programme of the mechanical philosophy that were all, ultimately, important parts of the conditions under which the modern capitalist economy developed. The new science was not, however, the direct cause of the Industrial Revolution, and the relationship was mediated by a long chain of intermediate figures — the natural philosophers, the instrument makers, the practical engineers, the industrial chemists, the research-based firms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — through whom the conceptual and instrumental resources of the experimental science were eventually translated into the technologies of the modern industrial economy. The history of the relationship, in short, is a long and complicated one, and the simple story in which the new philosophy of nature caused the modern capitalist economy is, on the historical record, too simple.

For the broader question of where the new learning came from, see Why Did the Scientific Revolution Start in Europe? and The Scientific Revolution: Origins, Causes, and Timeline. For the technological application of the seventeenth-century science, see How Did Science Drive the Industrial Revolution? and What Inventions Came From the Scientific Revolution?.

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• Why Did the Scientific Revolution Start in Europe?
• The Scientific Revolution: Origins, Causes, and Timeline
• The Protestant Reformation and the Scientific Revolution
• How Did Science Drive the Industrial Revolution?
• What Inventions Came From the Scientific Revolution?
• The Enlightened Economy, the Industrial Revolution, and the Modern World