In 1750, virtually all of the world's 750 million people lived and died under the biological old regime, regardless of where they resided or what political or economic system they were under.

• Food, clothes, shelter, and fuel for heating and cooking came mostly from the land, from what could be gathered from yearly energy fluxes from the sun to Earth.

• Textiles, leather, and building were also industries that relied on agricultural or forest resources.

• During the biological old regime, even iron and steel production relied on wood-charcoal.

• The biological old regime therefore imposed constraints not only on the number of the human population but also on economic production.

Over the century from 1750 to 1850, some individuals began to use coal to generate heat and then trap that heat to power repetitive motion with steampowered machines, completing labor that had traditionally been done with muscle.

• The use of coalfired steam to power machines was a significant advance, ushering human civilization out of the biological old regime and into a new one that was no longer constrained by yearly solar energy flows.

• Coal is a form of stored solar energy that was set down hundreds of millions of years ago.

• Its usage in steam engines liberated human civilization from the biological old regime's constraints, allowing human productive capacities and numbers to rise rapidly.

• The substitute is steam produced by burning.

How and why this huge transition occurred, as well as the repercussions, are thus crucial issues in global history, and will be the subject of this and the following two chapters.

• To comprehend the Industrial Revolution, we shall once again employ the instrument of conjuncture, that is, the convergence of otherwise disparate historical developments and processes at a certain point in time.

In the case of the Industrial Revolution, the confluence involves the globalization of growth potential in the biological old regime, the globalization of European state conflicts, the peculiar nature of New World colonies, and the accidental location of, and challenges in operating, coal mines in England.

The automation of the process of spinning and weaving cotton thread and cloth is widely regarded to have started the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century England.

• The spinning jenny, the water frame, and the "mule" have all been cited as examples of English ingenuity, and so contribute to a Eurocentric narrative of the West's ascendancy.

• While it is true that England was the first to use steam-powered technology to revolutionize cotton manufacturing, how and why this occurred can only be understood in a global context.

The English developed a great thirst for Indian cotton textiles known as calicoes in the late seventeenth century.

• As one man put it, "all our women, wealthy and poor, cloath'd in Callico, printed and painted; the gayer the better."

• "It crept into our dwellings, closets, and bedchambers; curtains, pillows, chairs, and finally beds themselves were nothing but Callicoes or Indian stuffs."

• In sum, the Indian trade supplied nearly anything made of wool or silk, whether it was for women's clothing or household furnishings.

• These observations by contemporaries around the year 1700 suggest a number of intriguing questions:

  • What was the reason for the English importing so much Indian cotton?

  • What happened?

Indeed, where England had little in the way of an overseas empire in 1650, it quickly began to build one, preying on Portuguese and Spanish possessions in the East and West Indies (i.e., India and the Caribbean), competing with the Dutch in both regions of the world, and fighting France in the eighteenth century.

Surprisingly, the agents for this globalization of European interstate conflict were private trade organizations, the earliest of which were the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, East India Company), the English East India Company (EIC), and the Compagnie francaise des Indes occidentales (French West India Company).

• Although created at various eras and with slightly varying organizational structures, all were private firms chartered by their governments and given monopoly rights to trade with Asia, all in accordance with mercantilist beliefs.

They also distinguished themselves from mere trading expeditions in that they were formed with a permanent capital and stock that could be tradedto that extent, the East India companies are the forerunners of the modern corporation, and their success in organizing trade and raising profits meant that the corporation would play an increasingly important role in European industrialization

However, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their aim was to benefit from commerce with Asia.

The use of markets, particularly for agricultural goods, was another method the Chinese economy enhanced both total output levels and productivity.

• It was often assumed that Europe had the first and most developed marketplaces (reading backward from the Industrial Revolution to discover reasons why this happened there initially).

• However, historians of China have demonstrated how fully developed and efficient markets were in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century China during the last thirty years.

• Peasant farmers in the Pearl and Yangzi River deltas, for example, began to specialize in sericulture (the entire process of manufacturing silk), breeding silkworms and planting mulberry trees to feed the silkworms, boiling the cocoons to retrieve the silk threads, then spinning, weaving, and dyeing.