Question

Which of the following best describes why the Industrial Revolution started in England?

Answer 1

The best option from the list in terms of why the Industrial Revolution started in England would be that "a. It had a growing population and large deposits of coal and iron," since this large population was used to great advantage in the factories. 

Answer 2

The correct answer is A, as the Industrial Revolution started in England because it had a growing population and large deposits of coal and iron.

The Industrial Revolution originated in England because of several factors, whose elucidation is one of the most transcendental historiographical themes. As technical factors, it was one of the countries with the greatest availability of essential raw materials, especially coal, an indispensable mineral for feeding the steam engine that was the great engine of the early Industrial Revolution, as well as the blast furnaces of the iron and steel industry , main sector since the mid-19th century. Its advantage over wood, the traditional fuel, was not so much its calorific value as the mere possibility in the continuity of supply (wood, despite being a renewable source, was limited by deforestation, while coal, fossil fuel and therefore not renewable, it was only due to the exhaustion of reserves, whose extension was extended with the price and technical extraction possibilities).

As ideological, political and social factors, English society had gone through the so-called crisis of the 17th century in a particular way: while Southern and Eastern Europe was refeudalized and established absolute monarchies, the English Civil War (1642-1651) and the subsequent Glorious Revolution (1688) determined the establishment of a parliamentary monarchy (defined ideologically by the liberalism of John Locke) based on the division of powers, individual freedom and a level of legal security that provided sufficient guarantees for the private entrepreneur; many of them emerged from among active minorities of religious dissidents who in other nations would not have consented (Max Weber's thesis explicitly links the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism). Important symptom was the spectacular development of the industrial patent system.

As a geostrategic factor, during the 18th century England achieved union with Scotland and Ireland, forming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Despite the loss of the Thirteen Colonies, emancipated in the American War of Independence (1776-1781), it controlled, among others, the territories of the Indian subcontinent, important source of raw materials for its industry, notably the cotton that fed the textile industry, as well as a captive market for the products of the metropolis.