The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention Book

This may be the single greatest socio-political-economic history ever written. The only comparable book is "A Splendid Exchange," which has a far broader scope yet, as my review indicates, is marred by an annoying trope of academia. A history of the Industrial Revolution, this book explains why the changes took place when and where they did, and the (forgive me) locomotive force that drove exponential growth rates, ending Malthusian nightmares. "The miracle of sustainable invention [is] the most powerful idea in the world."

At bottom, William Rosen's answer is that the revolution was not Industrial, but Inventiveness. Or, as Alfred North Whitehead wrote, "the most important invention of the Industrial Revolution was invention itself." At the end of the book, the author even provides the Price Law formula: the number of individuals responsible for half of all inventions is equal to the square root of the number of total contributors. Thus, it takes a village to make a baker, and a town to make a flower mill, a point Adam Smith states less poetically in his 1776 "Wealth of Nations."

More controversially, the book takes a swipe at explaining why "invention" (still) is dominated overwhelmingly by the Anglosphere. The author is neither a Whig (great man theory) nor a Marxist (scientific determinism) historian. Instead, he's a small "d" democrat, convinced that the ability to invent is latent in everyone, but it took the Anglophone Rule of Law to democratize the nature of invention. And that change was simple: 17th Century Britain's insistence that ideas were a kind of property, i.e., patents.

Much of the book is a satisfying refresher of the great names: Newcomen, Watt, Smeaton, Arkwright and Stephenson--the Industrial Revolution runs essentially contemporaneous with the reign of George III. But the theoretical underpinnings are even more interesting. The United Provinces of the Netherlands was richer than England before 1700, but one reason for its fade in the global league tables was that patent laws protect ideas only within a country's own borders. Inventors in smaller nations "would have been silly" to patent any easily reverse-engineered product (such as steam engines); the lack of legal protection tended to shift investment into industries like dyes and chemicals, where trade secrets (properly managed) might work. But that allowed Britain literally to race ahead of Holland (the Third Anglo-Dutch War helped).

China, by contrast, resembled Tudor England in granting legal monopolies ("letters patent") to court favorites, for a share of the booty. But to preserve the secrecy of specialized knowledge funding the country, the Qing Dynasty destroyed nearly every copy of China's relatively Westernized encyclopedia. France had neither disadvantage--but the Revolution, then Napoleon, set its inventors a generation behind Britain's. (Jacobins, remember, guillotined the chemist Antoine Lavoisier.) Compare all this with the trade-off inherent in an Anglosphere patent: in return for a limited-time monopoly, the inventor has to publicize fully his work, available to all--and for anyone to try inventing an improvement.

A few other points struck me. Because Britain's ill-conceived Mercantile system lasted until the Corn Laws were repealed, colonies were NOT a source of raw materials for the mother-ship; instead, they were a stash of captive consumers. And there's a splendid chapter on those who historian E.J. Hobsbawm described as "engaging in collective bargaining by riot":

"Luddites were on one side of a newly violent debate about…labor and property. Opposing them was the newfangled notion that IDEAS were property; the Luddites argued (with crowbars and torches) that their SKILLS were property.…[Their] thesis, which might be abbreviated as 'property equals labor plus skill' was less attractive than the idea that 'property equals labor plus ideas.' The victory of the latter was decided not by argument, but by economics: it produced more wealth, not just for individuals, but for an entire nation.…One lesson of the Luddite rebellion specifically, and the Industrial Revolution generally, is that maintaining the prosperity of those closed communities--their pride in workmanship as well as their economic well-being--can only be paid for by those outside the communities: by society at large."

Great stuff!