Why Britain First

Materials, and then everything else

• Britain's ready supplies of coal, iron ore, and other essential raw materials promoted industrial growth.
• Great Britain established its industrial dominance through the mechanisation of textile production, iron and steel production, and new transportation systems in conjunction with uniquely favourable political and social climates.
• In conjunction with is the load-bearing phrase: the materials matter together with the climates, not instead of them.

Institutions and human capital

• Economic institutions and human capital such as engineers, inventors, and capitalists helped Britain lead the process of industrialisation, largely through private initiative.
• Human capital is the CED's term: skill embodied in people is an economic resource like coal.
• And largely through private initiative is the contrast the whole unit turns on.

Both halves of the question: what Britain had, and what held others back

A spinning mule- one machine replacing the work of many hand spinners

A parliament that represented the interest

• Britain's parliamentary government promoted commercial and industrial interests because those interests were represented in Parliament.
• The CED gives a mechanism, not a coincidence: representation produces favourable policy.
• 3.2's constitutional settlement therefore has an economic consequence a century later.

France, and the east and south

• France moved toward industrialisation at a more gradual pace than Great Britain, with government support and with less dislocation of traditional methods of production.
• A combination of factors, including geography, lack of resources, the dominance of traditional landed elites, the persistence of serfdom in some areas, and inadequate government sponsorship, accounted for eastern and southern Europe's lag.
• Because of the continued existence of more primitive agricultural practices and land-owning patterns, some areas of Europe lagged in industrialisation while facing famine, debt, and land shortages.

Factors, not a single cause

• The objective asks for the factors that influenced the development of industrialisation, plural.
• The CED's own answer for the lagging regions is explicitly a combination of factors, and it lists five.
• So a strong answer gives at least a material factor, an institutional one, and a political one.